There wasn’t necessarily any logic to what I went through on Day 4 other than they were mostly things in print sitting on my table. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this one before but one of my readings actually began with a joke: 

How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb? LC doesn’t change light bulbs. They have INCANDESCENT LAMPS, not light bulbs.

Heh. I think I might modify that punch line for my topic to say LCSH can’t change light bulbs because they already have incandescent lamps. It takes a lot for LC to make changes and I haven’t even read the Sanford Berman book that started the major call to update biased terminology about groups of people. (I have the book but I figured out that for research leave it was better to focus on shorter pieces to get through more. I think I’m a slow book reader too.) And LCSH has both light bulbs (http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh90003210) and incandescent lamps (http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85041761) so maybe the joke is now they don’t have to change anything at all.

From there I explored more about different thesauri. For instance, I’m pretty sure now that A Women’s Thesaurus from 1987 is not connected to the Women’s Thesaurus that is the basis for the online thesaurus at Atria: Institute on gender equality and women’s history in the Netherlands. That seems to have been an international effort within Europe and published in the Netherlands in the early 1990s where the one I have in print is from the late 1980s and talks about being very U.S.-focused for that first edition but wanting to expand to be international. The chronology might show there could be a connection and there is some overlap in the highest level categories but I don’t have enough info yet to say for sure.

I also reviewed more about the only Linked Data vocabulary I’ve encountered so far, Homosaurus.org. There are no connections to LCSH or any other controlled vocabulary. A Women’s Thesaurus also has no connections to LCSH but it did say in the front matter that when an LCSH term worked, that term was used. They talked about doing that to maintain compatibility with LCSH but there’s no indication in this print version where terms match with LCSH so I’m not sure if you’re just supposed to know that or do that work on your own. And there was also an indication that this thesaurus is set up for electronic use but there is no indication of the format or how to get it (and my guess is that in the late 1980s, it was still pretty local and probably involved floppy disks). Possibilities with both to consider, though, depending on what I want to try doing.

I also got into more details about the work of Hope A. Olson and Dennis B. Ward to link up A Women’s Thesaurus and DDC classification. That project happened in the 1990s and tells me there probably was an electronic version of the thesaurus available somehow. I have another article to review from them that goes into even more detail and I’m kind of thinking there’s going to be something cool there that they figured out.