The Language of the Public
The Language of the Public "The thing is I decided that the classes of the John Cotton Dana classification just could not serve an artist public, or a general public... so the thing is that I became convinced that an A-to-Z file would not serve the public. That a simple alphabetic arrangement, such as Newark had, did not group the material logically from its visual contents. I decided then that the only thing to do would be to begin recording the language of the public in asking for the pictures, and that was begun as soon as I took over. Since there was no catalog of subject headings available, there was no catalog of subject headings at all by the way, since there was no catalog when the borrower came in he used his own language, and that language could be analyzed and those (became) headings. At first it was used to show the trends and needs to guide the buying. Then it became obvious to me that unless we set up a subject heading scheme based on the lan guage used by the p