Judy Archer shares with us her insight on genre authorities and GSAFD.<\/p>\n
Ahhh genre terms \u2026 what a subject is, versus what a subject is about.\u00a0 The necessity for this distinction seems obvious, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 If I want to find poetry written by Robert Frost, I wouldn\u2019t necessarily want to weed through all the works written about<\/span> his poems, would I?\u00a0 The more logical option is to access only his actual poems.\u00a0 Yet for a long time I had no choice, for genres were considered part of the general subject access.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As time went by, the library community saw the need for a distinction and recommendations were developed for a national standard.\u00a0 This standard provided guidelines for developing genre access as well as subject access for fictional works, humorous works, drama, poetry and folklore.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n To accommodate this effort, the \u201cGuidelines on Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, etc.\u201d 2nd<\/sup> edition<\/em> was published in 2000, and this came to be known as the GSAFD.\u00a0 In chapter 1 of that Guideline was a list of 153 genre terms, and in 2001 the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS)<\/em> developed MARC21 authority records for these 153 terms.\u00a0 The source file is located at Northwestern University, but OCLC has a link to the terms and their full authority records, which can be accessed at the following link:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n http:\/\/alcme.oclc.org\/gsafd\/OAIHandler?verb=ListIdentifiers&metadataPrefix=z39_19<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n If you would like to know more, The ALCTS discusses their creation of the authorities here:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n