It is POSSIBLE but we don’t have it now. And LC seems to be moving swiftly (relative to normal library speed anyway) to make subject analysis cheaper, easier, etc without a better solution in place. Which is what scares me.

What I’ve read is not “Let’s do away with subject headings and come up with an advanced ontology based thing that would make headings more human compatible, without losing the structure and relationships.” It is more “all these structures and relationships are archaic and too complicated and expensive. Besides, we can just keyword search and relevance rank and have tags and everything will be sufficient.” No no no no no.

Or maybe I just have a skewed and paranoid view of the discussion?

I don’t think Mann ever said that LCSH was Truly Good the way it is, or that the headings shouldn’t be changed. Anyone who works with the headings is beat over the head with inconsistency and problems. But having them with all their warts is better than getting rid of them if there is nothing better to replace them.

I think that’s the crux of it. By all means, develop better ways to meet the demands of scholarship, but don’t stop meeting those needs because you are conflating scholarly research with the quick queries people are doing with Google. Yeah. anyway…

For example, I’m not convinced that pre-coordination can only be thought of in terms of strings; it’s the encoded relationships that are really important. It’s possible to make headings more human compatible, without losing that structure.

The subject heading he ultimately identifies is “Finance, public–Greece–Athens”, which is about as unfriendly a heading as you can get; distinguish “Finance, public–Athens (Greece)”.

The chronological relationships aren’t explicit (Greece–Athens puts some limits, since the empire expired, but the war itself covered a much smaller timeframe.

my strategy for this question would have been to do a keyword search on “Peloponnesian War” (expecting and finding Thucydides and Kagan). From there, I’d look for subdivisions of that books main heading (“Greece — History — Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C. — Finance.”), and indeed discover several works classified under

“Greece — History — Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C. — Finance.”

All of which supports his main point as to the importance of subject analysis, but which doesn’t necessarily support keeping the subject headings unchanged.