Finding a pattern for biographies
Your book
Make sure that your book is a “pure” biography or autobiography. That means
that the primary purpose of the book should be to recount the events of a person’s life,
not to emphasize one or more particular aspects of the person’s life or career. In other
words do not catalog books with titles like Franklin’s years in Paris, Lincoln as
President, Browning and religion, Jefferson the architect.
The pattern
Once you have determined that you have a “pure” biography, look in Voyager
and/or RLIN for examples of other “pure” biographies of the same person. Search for the
biographee as a subject, without subdivisions. Your goal is to find an AACR2 LC or
Princeton catalog record, the more recent the better. Again make sure that the catalog
record is for a “pure” biography—one strong clue is the presence of an “a” or “b” in the
Biography portion of the fixed field.
If you find such an LC or Princeton record, consider it a pattern for the call
number and subject headings on your biography.
Call number: You will encounter many types of call numbers for biographies, but the
most common is a double cutter number, where the first cutter represents the biographee
and the second cutter is for the main entry (for autobiographies, use “A3” in the second
cutter). If the call number does not fit that pattern, you may need to investigate how the
call number is structured, either by consulting the classification schedules or by doing a
call number search in Voyager, looking to see how other biographies in that call number
range are structured. Literary call numbers will be the most common variation from the
above pattern.
Subjects: The first subject heading for a biography is always the heading for the
biographee—unsubdivided. After that, there may be a combination of subject headings,
either one or more “class of persons” headings (e.g., Authors, English$y19th
century$vBiography; Architects$zItaly$vBiography) or regular topical subject headings
(e.g. Slavery$zKentucky; World War, 1939-1945$xUnderground movements$zFrance)
or both. Simply lift the full array of subject headings from the pattern record and add
them to the record for your biography. Delete any headings on your record that do not
match headings from the pattern.
Be sure to code your record correctly in the Biography portion of the fixed field.