In library and information science documents (such as books, articles and pictures) are classified and searched by subject – as well as by other attributes such as author, genre and document type. This makes "subject" a fundamental term in this field. Library and information specialists assign subject labels to documents to make them findable. There are many ways to do this and in general there is not always consensus about which subject should be assigned to a given document. To optimize subject indexing and searching, we need to have a deeper understanding of what a subject is. The question: "what is to be understood by the statement 'document A belongs to subject category X'?" has been debated in the field for more than 100 years (see below)
Theoretical view
Charles Ammi Cutter (1837–1903) For Cutter the stability of subjects depends on a social process in which their meaning is stabilized in a name or a designation. A subject "referred [...] to those intellections [...] that had received a name that itself represented a distinct consensus in usage" (Miksa, 1983a, p. 60) and: the "systematic structure of established subjects" is "resident in the public realm" (Miksa, 1983a, p. 69); "[s]ubjects are by their very nature locations in a classificatory structure of publicly accumulated knowledge (Miksa, 1983a, p. 61). Bernd Frohmann adds: "The stability of the public realm in turn relies upon natural and objective mental structures which, with proper education, govern a natural progression from particular to general concepts. Since for Cutter, mind, society, and SKO [Systems of Knowledge Organization] stand one behind the other, each supporting each, all manifesting the same structure, his discursive construction of subjects invites connections with discourses of mind, education, and society. The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), by contrast, severs those connections. Melvil Dewey emphasized more than once that his system maps no structure beyond its own; there is neither a "transcendental deduction" of its categories nor any reference to Cutter's objective structure of social consensus. It is content-free: Dewey disdained any philosophical excogitation of the meaning of his class symbols, leaving the job of finding verbal equivalents to others. His innovation and the essence of the system lay in the notation. The DDC is a poorly semiotic system of expanding nests of ten digits, lacking any referent beyond itself. In it, a subject is wholly constituted in terms of its position in the system. The essential characteristic of a subject is a class symbol which refers only to other symbols. Its verbal equivalent is accidental, a merely pragmatic characteristic... .... The conflict of interpretations over "subjects" became explicit in the battles between "bibliography" (an approach to subjects having much in common with Cutter's) and Dewey's "close classification". William Fletcher spoke for the scholarly bibliographer.... Fletcher's "subjects", like Cutter's, referred to the categories of a fantasized, stable social order, whereas Dewey's subjects were elements of a semiological system of standardized, techno-bureaucratic administrative software for the library in its corporate, rather than high culture, incarnation". (Frohmann, 1994, 112–113). Cutter's early view on what a subject is, is probably wiser than most understandings that dominated the 20th century – and also the understanding reflected in the ISO-standard quoted below. The early statements quoted by Frohmann indicate that subjects are somehow shaped in social processes. When that is said, it should be added that they are not particularly detailed or clear. We only get a vague idea of the social nature of subjects.
S. R. Ranganathan (1892–1972) A classification system with an explicit theoretical foundation is Ranganathan's Colon Classification. Ranganathan provided an explicit definition of the concept of "subject":
Subject – an organized body of ideas, whose extension and intension are likely to fall coherently within the field of interests and comfortably within the intellectual competence and the field of inevitable specialization of a normal person.
A related definition is given by one of Ranganathan's students:
A subject is an organized and systematized body of ideas. It may consist of one idea or a combination of several...
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