Library of Congress recognises Steampunk

[kaffles]

Steamy book-geeks may realise that the L of C, who create the standard subject headings used in most library catalogues in English speaking countries, are generally very slow to update their terminology. (They only got rid of their references to 'videos' on various topics, meaning film recordings, a few weeks ago.) So I was jolly chuffed to see

Comments

[doctorcaligari]

Sweetness. In a world where labels are legitimacy, official recognition certainly does help. :-)

[mlleviolet]

That is so cool - and surprising! I would never have expected it to be adopted so quickly. "Quickly" being relative as you pointed out. Thanks for sharing the news with us. Any word on when the OED will add it as an entry? Will we have to wait another century, LOL!

[greymanticore]

I'm not a librarian, but THIS. :D
As a lover of Steamy books, I will be likely be making use of this classification when it filters through to my city's public library. If ever. XD

[trip_tych]

I'm new to library school and haven't taken a cataloging class yet, but I'm curious as to how this will effect Dewey-based or bookstore-style libraries..?
In my experience so far, public libraries hardly break out speculative fiction, let alone sub-genres within. Or do you think it'll just end up showing up on the books record? I guess that would make it possible to search the catalog by the term "steampunk", wouldn't it?
Nifty-keen for LoC, though!

[kaffles]

It'll mainly just appear as a subject heading in both Dewey and Library of Congress Classification libraries, so yes, it should help keyword searches. (A lot of public libraries' fiction records are very light on for subjects, though, and it'll depend on the cataloguer recognising it.)

LCC files fiction by their author's country of origin and period of publication (eg. 19th century, post 2001, etc.), so most steamy books won't be shelved any differently. Libraries will have the option of shelving books about steampunk as a literary genre in PN3448.S73 rather than one of the other numbers for spec. fic., and there's also the new number for collections of steampunk fiction by multiple authors PN6120.95.S69.

LCC is much more flexible for creating new numbers than DDC - Dewey has to stick to a strict decimal format, and all changes go through a committee. LCC is set up to allow new topics to be shoe-horned into the middle of another topic as new concepts come into existance.

Hope that helps! :-)