Subjects: There's More Than One Way to Skin A Cat...

Graphic collections are complex, intricate creatures. Some might refer to them as "high maintenance" in a number of realms: preservation, collection development, access, description, organization. Subject headings are no exception. Multiple factors come into play when considering what and how many subject headings to assign a record so that it can be accessed by those who need it. When the target audience itself presents special challenges, that's when the fun begins.

Library of Congress Subject Headings
These are not intuitive to our target audience (or many others, for that matter), but we will likely be requested to keep these in for consistency's sake. Using these plus any we may manufacture (see section below) will result in several subject headings showing up on each record. I don't think that will be a problem as long as the more intuitive ones are first in line.

Here are several books that could be grouped simply or separated completely depending on the subject headings - And a list of subject headings that have appeared with these books:
Tigers -- Fiction.
Drooling -- Comic books, strips, etc.
Hobbes (Fictitious character) -- Comic books, strips, etc.
Wit and humor, Pictorial.
Cats -- Comic books, strips, etc.
Pets -- Comic books, strips, etc.
American wit and humor, Pictorial.
Cats -- Fiction.
Cartoons and comics.
Cats -- Caricatures and cartoons.
some have no subjects at all

Lexicon
Offering search terms beyond the LCSH allows further exploration of the library's collections. By meeting teens where they are, we can offer easier use of and, therefore, greater access to the collections. This can occur by using different terms for already established LCSH ("growing up" instead of "coming of age" or "memoir") or adding subject headings up front that might appear far down the line or not at all ("learning to drive", "braces", "report cards", "being grounded", "ninjas", "cats").

Tagging:
Sticking solely to LCSH focuses subject headings on lengthy phrases referring to art or drawing or comics with time period and country of origin. Adding intuitive subject headings allows teens to find what they need. Another way we can do this is by subject tagging these items. We could add it to the teen page of the website for a targeted effect; the catalog itself allows tagging, too. A tag cloud could be posted on the teen page. Teens would have an additional means of sparking their imagination with regard to reading choices.

Name Authority & Secret Identities

Superhero comic books bring extra complications with their layers of secret identities that make it difficult to choose the right names and titles to organize records by series records or name subjects. But even if you can only afford to use the simplest form of the names in your catalog records, that doesn't mean the information can't be provided somewhere else.

Wikipedia has very helpful and interesting tidbits about superhero comics characters (and manga, too); why not incorporate it? Linking to outside sources from the catalog can be time-consuming and inconvenient for both staff and patrons when the links break and there is limited time to fix the problem. Perhaps we could create a sidebar or links spot on our webpage for teens? It could be a bonus service addressing the multiple aliases/nomenclature issue as well as offering the nifty character insights (history, powers, etc.) from the Wikipedia pages.

With the Green Lantern "SuperAlias" box on Wikipedia, you can see that one hero has been "played" by many different characters over the past 67 years. Unlike Bruce Wayne, who lives forever, other superheroes do retire or relinquish their positions. Fans following the story of one character may want to sort out the previous stories and figure out allusions. Pointing them directly to Wikipedia would allow you to provide that information without having to have resident experts in your staff or update name authority records when the plots evolve further and characters continue to change.

Description: Shonen, Shōjo, and More

by Beth Snow

Bilingual and cross-cultural collections can represent an added challenge when it comes to genre names and search terms. Japanese comics and animation are good examples. Stopping the search terms with the words "manga" or "anime" can have the same effect as not going past the word "fiction" to describe the entire spectrum of novels. In addition, a good portion of our target audience is tuned into the Japanese terms for genres of manga.

To that end, I recommend we incorporate these terms into the cataloging/search descriptors for our collection. The Wikipedia article on manga offers excellent background about the form, but it's definitions are a bit messy. This link on a website devoted to explaining manga and anime to librarians does a more concise job of introducing the terms.

Describing Multi-Format Titles

by Beth Snow

Many teens search intuitively by format, so including format descriptions in the subject headings may make the collections more accessible than relying only on publication data in the descriptions.

Manga, comic strip collections, subscription/serial comics, and graphic novels each have distinguishable features. Teens easily recognize this and often search based upon these characteristics--why not "meet them where they are"? If they are looking for a title or character, let's be up front and indicate the format using a teen's lexicon: manga (for both traditional and Americanized front-to-back versions), comic strips (collections of comic strips appearing originally in paper or electronic format), graphic novels (fiction or non-fiction subject matter bound in book form--could put superhero compilations here perhaps--definitely includes illustrated classics).

But don't forget that a title can appear in more than one format and a person who's interested in one version will probably be interested in another. For example, here's a volume of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comics and the movie American Splendor, both based on his life:

In this case the title is exactly the same - what role should description information and subject headings play in connecting both of these when you're searching?