Controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary

Last week I composed an “Aboutness Statement” for Solitaire by Alice Oseman, which concerns a series of increasingly malicious and destructive pranks committed by a group called Solitaire. I used the word “pranks” to refer to this group’s activities but when I looked up an appropriate subject heading within a variety of authorities, I discovered that “Practical jokes” was the controlled-vocabulary term that should be used instead of “pranks.”

From the Sears List of Subject Headings: “If the word the cataloger chose is a synonym or alternate form of an established heading in the List, then the cataloger forgoes the word that first came to mind in favor of the term from the List” (Fox, n.d., “Determining the Subject of the Work,” para. 4).

This is an interesting contrast to uncontrolled vocabulary, in which people use “their own natural language” to perform a search (Hoffman, 2019, p. 123). If “pranks” came to my mind more naturally when originally composing the statement, who is to say that other searchers of the database might gravitate more toward “pranks” than toward “practical jokes”?

References:
Fox, V. (Ed.). (n.d.) “Principles.” Sears list of subject headings (23rd ed.). Grey House Publishing. https://searslistofsubjectheadings-com.cyrano.ucmo.edu/page/principles

Hoffman, G. L. (2019). Organizing library collections: Theory and practice. Rowman & Littlefield.