Last time I left off by explaining the fraught process of subject assignment, which is basically how cataloguers figure out what to call stuff. Before I continue my foray into that process, I want to address a great question my friend Harrison texted me:
Do subject headings often use emotions in their descriptions and Beloved just doesn’t have that in your example, or is this a common detail that is lacking in a lot of subject headings/phrases?
It’s a bit of both! The most common materials I see subject headings of emotions are self-help books. Take The Subtle art of not giving a f*ck by Mark Manson, for example: here we see “happiness” and “success” as subordinate headings to “personal growth,” which itself modifies “self-help.” This string of phrases tells me that there are other kinds of self-help books that deal with other elements of life, and might be further characterized by feelings or goals.
Another example, for good measure. The five invitations: discovering what death can teach us about living fully by Frank Ostaseski features both “Self-Help / Death, Grief, Bereavement” and “Family & Relationships / Death, Grief, Bereavement,” indicating to me that Death, Grief, and Bereavement might be understood as a process in the self-help category, but a life event in the family & relationships category.
These headings tell us that pulling out emotions and processes as themes is definitely part of subject assignment. Just to double check myself, I searched “grief – Fiction” as a subject keyword in the MCPL database and got 1012 hits, indicating that emotions and processes can be assigned to fiction works as well as personal growth literature. So why doesn’t Beloved feature anything of the like? To me, those headings were clinical and suggested subject assignment rooted in academic analysis and extracted concepts, not user-intuition searches for the kinds of fiction they want to read.
I will note, however, that Storygraph, a Black-owned alternative to Amazon’s GoodReads for finding, reviewing, and tracking your reading list, aggregates user-inputted data on the tone, emotion, pace, which results in searchable tags.
So even if you wouldn’t be able to find Toni Morrison’s Beloved by searching emotive subject headings in a library database, you’d be able to find it on Storygraph, where users describe it as dark, emotional, and sad. Storygraph also provides an option for content notices of mild to graphic depiction, and here is where “slavery” and “child death” make an appearance, along with “sexual assault” and “sexual violence.” The division of keywords into moods, pace, and content warnings get into placing, but we’re not quite done with naming. The questions all of these subject assignments leave me with are: where do we find books, and what questions do we ask as we look for them?
Hold your hats, and we’ll come back to that.
Housekeeping & Birdseeking
If you ever have questions about what I write, you can always respond to these emails or comment on the issues directly on the website. If you have my number, you can text me, though I will never archive an email until I address is but I do recklessly open texts and forget about them. I am also, unfortunately, on Twitter, and I guess you can reach me there too.
For funsies, a Book CT Scan:
More later.