How to Collect a Productive Bibliography from the Library of Congress Subject Headings

Begin with a Question

Organizing a productive list of works to compare with "Oriental Cairo" from the thousands of works out there requires that you come up with the appropriate criteria for differentiating the works. This depends entirely on your research needs. However, often the course of your research will change as you encounter new information about your topic. This is an excellent point in the project to open your research up to several different possibilities and take the road that seems most productive to you in terms of what you find. The "right" questions are only truly "right" in the sense that they yield productive results. The most productive questions ever asked by historians probably started out as part of a list of potentially productive directions.

How does "Oriental Cairo" compare with other works published around the same time by other people from Great Britain?

How does it compare with works published around the same time from another region, say Egypt or the United States?

How do the perspectives of women and men writing about Cairo in the first quarter of the twentieth century differ from one another?

How has writing about Cairo changed over time?

With these questions in mind, we will demonstrate the process of building a list of works with which to compare your central text.

Collecting the Titles that Share a Common Subject Heading

We will build our list by using the Library of Congress by Subject Heading. Since the Library of Congress catalog lists only its own holdings, we will use WorldCat to do our research. WorldCat also uses the Library of Congress Subject Headings, but it searches the holdings of libraries all over the world. For a brief tutorial on WorldCat, visit our WorldCat module. Here, we will be taking the information we gathered at the Library of Congress and performing an Advanced Search to produce lists that meet our research needs. You can use either the full version of WorldCat, which many libraries subscribe to, or WorldCat.org, which is free but has more limited features. Below we demonstrate the full version.

Once you have arrived at the WorldCat homepage, select the Advanced Search option. Enter the Subject Heading information into the text box exactly as it appeared in the Library of Congress result. Then use the pulldown menu and select the word Subject. It should then appear in the box instead of Keyword.

Select Search and you will be provided with everything WorldCat has categorized under the Subject Heading: "Cairo (Egypt)--Description and travel." "Oriental Cairo" appears as the fifteenth result out of one hundred and fifty-six books. Now we will narrow this list down based on how we wish to compare them to "Oriental Cairo". The following sections are headed by some of the research questions listed above. We will use WorldCat's Advanced Search features to explore related resources according to criteria such as publication place and date.

How does "Oriental Cairo" compare with similar works published around the same time by other people from Great Britain?

For this list we will need to locate works published from England within five years of "Oriental Cairo." Return to the WorldCat Advanced Search page and re-enter the Subject Heading information in to the first text box as we did above.

Next, in the second text box type the word London, a major publishing hub in Britain. Then use the pulldown menu to select Publisher Location.

In the box labeled Year, type the year that fell five years before the publication of "Oriental Cairo" in 1911 and that year that fell five years after it with a dash in between them. Your entry should look like this:

Select Search and you will find three titles that seem to fit our criteria for comparing "Oriental Cairo" to the works of Douglas Sladen's British contemporaries: Walter Tyndale's Below the cataracts (1907), A.O. Lamplough and R. Francis's Cairo and its environs (1909), and John Patrick Barry's At the gates of the East (1906). If your library does not have these works and you would like to examine them, you can request that the library borrow them through Interlibrary Loan. Note that the WorldCat record typically provides a link to Interlibrary Loan for your library to make it easy to borrow works you've found.

How does "Oriental Cairo" compare with works published from another region, say the United States for example?

For this list we will return to the Advanced Search page and reenter our Subject Heading information. Since we can only search the publication place by city, we should now enter a few publishing hubs from the United States, namely Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Make sure you separate the names of the cities with the word "or" so that the search engine will not offer you entries that include all three instead of one or the others. Your entry should look like this:

Notice that in the third entry from the top both London and Philadelphia are listed as cities of publication. Some books, particularly popular ones, were published both in the United States and Great Britain. In order to determine where the author is from, we may need to do some additional research.

You now have two lists of works published in different regions all having to do with traveling and describing the city of Cairo.

How has writing about Cairo changed over time?

For this list we shall not limit our search by date so that we might get the widest range of publication dates possible. In order to keep our list manageable we will limit our search by region once again, continuing with the publications coming out of London. Return to the Advanced Search screen and re-enter the subject headings and publisher location information into the text boxes. Do not, however, enter anything into the date text box. Your entry should look like this:

Your search should produce around thirty or so results from the first half of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first.

To put them in order by date select the Sort option at the upper left hand of the screen.

You will have several sorting options. Use the arrow next to the text box to scroll down to the Date option and then select the Ascending option to the right of that box to move from earliest to latest dates. When you return to your results, the entries should be arranged in order from the earliest publication to the latest. From this list you may select the works that seem most appropriate, in relatively even increments of years from the beginning of your designated period to the end.