weine & subject headings

[Lieberman Bernice]

Greetings,
I need some assistance in establishing subject headings in our small
Temple library. We are in the process of starting an on-line
catalog. We are using librarything.com as the catalog. (That fact
is not significant, unless any of you also use it, and would have
additional suggestions for me)
For any new books that have c.i.p. (cataloging in publication) we
will use those subject headings.
Books without subject headings, would you recommend using the Weine
Subject Heading List? and adding terms from LC, if the Weine is not
specific enough?
What do you think?

Also in the process of converting from card catalog to on-line , do
you suppose we need to look at all of the subject headings currently
in the card catalog, and add them to our Weine Subject Heading list?

Do those of you who use LC headings indicate on a master list an
authority file for your own libraries?

Thanks for any answers. I feel quite rusty on all of this - I am a
retired librarian, but wasn't responsible for cataloging.
Bernice

[Helene or Murray Tuchman]

We too used CIP when appropriate for our automated catalog, but did not use
all of their headings when they were redundant or silly for our synagogue
library. I found the best supplementary list of subject headings that melded
quite nicely with LC headings and made sense in our library was the
extensive list prepared by Joel Tuchman at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. I
believe it is still available for a nominal fee. You may reach him at
jtuc...@sinaitemple.org. (He is my son and the child of 2 Judaica
librarians)

If you are using zmarc39. for obtaining your records, then you are getting
the excellent notes and summary of the the book automatically downloaded. In
your new catalog you'll find that searching by key word will usually give
you the best selection and that you'll use the subject search less often.
The thing to be watchful of is when you type subject heading into the
catalog yourself, that you observe the spelling and spacing carefully so
that the subject headings really stay together and don't sort differently
because you added an extra space etc.

Helene Tuchman
Librarian, retired
Rabbi Marshall R. Lifson Library
Temple Emanuel of Newton MA