HIST 194AH: Senior Seminar (Henderson, Fall 2024): Subject Headings & Keywords

• Think of keywords as the essential words that describe your topic.  These can be people, places, themes, characters, time periods. 
• Use keywords that best describe your topic alone. Avoid adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and any other terms that are not considered essential to your topic.
• Unlike Subject Headings which use a precise, controlled vocabulary, keywords are your own search terms that you feel best describe your topic. 
• Keyword searches will retrieve items that might not have been discoverable by using only Subject Headings. 
• Using keywords allows you to combine different concepts. Each concept is separated by AND (migration AND climate change). 
• You can add synonyms and like terms to increase your search results (migration OR displacement) AND (climate change OR global warming).
• You can use the asterisk* symbol to include alternate endings to your root word:  environment* will retrieve all records with the word environment, environments, environmental, environmentalist, and so forth.
• NOTE: using keywords will likely also bring up results that are completely off topic, so you will have to evaluate your results carefully.

Subject headings are the  specific, predefined terms that the Library of Congress assigns to printed material. The indexers who assign subject headings may use only those terms that are listed in a "controlled vocabulary,"  which typically do not include  multi-disciplinary or complex topics. Below are examples of subject headings: