Sorting Subject Headings and Subheadings

Horizon lets you decide how subject headings are alphabetized in your indexes, which affects how subject headings display in PAC alphabetical subject heading lists. You can use one of two methods for alphabetizing your subject headings:

Library of Congress order
American Library Association filing rules

With Library of Congress (LC) order, the main subject headings are first alphabetized and then the subheadings are alphabetized under the main heading. These are some examples:

Business
Business–Communications
Business–Dictionaries
Business–Management
Business Cycles
Business Cycles–Forecasting
Business Cycles–Mathematical Models
Business Ethics
Business Ethics–Case Studies
Business Ethics–Philosophy

In the MARC record, main subject headings are stored in subfield “a,” and subheadings are stored in other subfields. In the above example, Horizon first alphabetizes the main subject headings listed in subfield a, and then alphabetizes the subheadings in the other subfields.

However, if your library wants to follow the American Library Association (ALA) filing rules, you can choose to ignore the “spacer” between subfields and alphabetize subject headings based on all subfields at once instead of first looking at just subfield a and then the other subfields. For example, when the spacer is ignored, the above subject list displays with ALA filing rules like this:

Business
Business–Communications
Business Cycles
Business Cycles–Forecasting
Business Cycles–Mathematical Models
Business–Dictionaries
Business Ethics
Business Ethics–Case Studies
Business Ethics–Philosophy
Business–Management

 


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