The Aphasia of Modern Subject Access

Why do catalogers use two systems, one notational like Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and the other terminological like Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), to reach the same goal: subject description and access? This article, divided into two parts, first surveys the library science literature to address the unsatisfying answers given to that question and, secondly, provides a new answer based on the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson. Jakobson’s theory that language is always twofold, the act of selecting words paired with the act of combining words, is proposed as a theory of subject access, with LCSH doing the work of selection and LCC the work of combination.