Minnie Earl Sears (1873–1933)

Here is the popular Sears List of Subject Headings in Spanish. So what? Two ideas for the use of this list. First, because of the growth of Spanish speakers subject headings in both English and Spanish could be supplied in the OPAC no matter what the language of the text is. That would require knowledge of Spanish on the part of the cataloger. However, the second idea might be more important. For students learning Spanish and/or for native speakers/readers of Spanish, use the free Web 2.0 program: Librarything.com. Ask the kids to catalog the Spanish language collection because this program is so simple. The best part about having the kids catalog items is that they can supply as many Spanish Language tags as they wish to a particular title. Sears might be quite useful in doing this, but they could also supply natural language tags. So much of the learning commons programs should be designed as collaborative rather that uni-dimensional and the students would enjoy adding materials to “their” collection. Include the foreign language teachers in this project and they might even allow their classroom collections to be entered. Would they do itn “correctly?” Probably not. Would that really matter? Not really. The important thing here is ownership of the collection and the desire to build it an manage it by the users of that sub collection. Worth a try.… (más)