Subject Areas (General)
Subject Areas (General)
To analyze the subjects and disciplines covered in Woodstock’s Special Collections, we examined data from two different parts of the catalog record:
Library of Congress Subject Headings: Controlled subject terms that are assigned to books during cataloging to describe what the resource is about. Subject headings can represent topics, people, groups, places, and even other works (for example, the Bible, or St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises) that are discussed by a resource.
Library of Congress Classification Numbers: A code assigned to each book during cataloging that represents the overall discipline of the work. The classification number is also used to designate a place for the book on the shelf, allowing works on similar subjects to be shelved together.
Using data from these two parts of the catalog record, we found (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the collection’s greatest strengths lie in religious studies and theology, but there are also significant holdings in humanistic fields such as language and literature, history, and philosophy. The following charts provide additional views of this subject data.
The pie chart below shows a high-level breakdown of the collection by subject, using the broadest subject categories. These top-level categories are derived from the main classes of the Library of Congress Classification and provide a snapshot of disciplines that are most commonly found in the collection.
The packed bubble chart below shows the distribution of subjects in greater detail by breaking down the broader categories shown in chart 5.1 into narrower, more specific subjects. The size of each bubble is based on the number of records in each subject category: the bigger the bubble, the more books in the collection on that topic. Works on individual Christian denominations (such as the Catholic Church, the Church of England, etc.) form the most populous category, with significant holdings in related subjects such as practical and doctrinal theology and Biblical studies.
The following chart provides a detailed and drilled down view of the part of the collection focused on Christian denominations (derived from Library of Congress subclass BX). Forming the largest category of materials within the collection, works in this class are focused on the history, governance, and liturgy of individual Christian denominations; works in this class may also include biographies of figures connected to a specific Christian denomination (for example, biographies of saints or founders of religious orders). We found that the preponderance of books in this part of the collection are related to the Catholic Church (4,799 of the 5,196 items in this category), with significantly lesser coverage of other Christian denominations.
The class devoted to Bibles and Biblical scholarship (Library of Congress subclass BS) is the second most populous part of the collection, following the Christian Denominations class. Books in this section include commentaries, criticism, and translations of both the Bible as a whole and individual parts of the Bible. Chart 5.2.2 shows how this section is split up between works related to the New Testament, the Old Testament, and the Bible as a whole. Coverage of the Old and New Testaments (treated separately) is roughly even, with slightly more works devoted to the Bible as a whole.
Zooming in further on the part of the collection devoted to Bibles and Biblical scholarship, we can see how much content the collection contains on individual parts and books of the Bible. In the treemap below, books of the New Testament are represented in orange, while books of the Old Testament are represented in gray. The size of the rectangles in the diagram indicates the number of Woodstock items related to each Biblical book. We can see from the relative size of the boxes that the distribution of content between different books of the Bible is not even: the Gospels are by far the category from the New Testament with the most coverage, while the Psalms are the section of the Old Testament with the most coverage.
Following Christian Denominations and the Bible, the theology classes (Library of Congress subclasses BT and BV) form the third and fourth most populous subject areas in the collection. The chart below shows the results of zooming in on the Practical Theology and Doctrinal Theology bubbles from Chart 5.2, providing a more detailed view of the collection’s most prevalent theological topics.
The bubble chart below shows the geographic subject areas represented in this collection grouped by region as determined by the team for the purposes of this analysis. Based on how the team decided to break down geographic regions, the largest group of geographic subjects are related to the United States (20.39% or 389 items) followed by the Mediterranean Region (15.41% or 294 items). However, if the European geographic subject areas are combined, they represent a larger proportion of the collection (44.91% or 857 items), compared to the United States.
This chart further breaks down the geographic areas that are represented by materials in this collection by country, state, province, etc. There are 1,908 items in this collection that contain information about a specific geographic area - approximately 14% of the entire collection. A significant portion of these materials are about the United States (155 items or 8.12%), France (129 items or 6.76%), Great Britain (109 items or 5.71%), and Rome, Italy (106 items or 5.56%).
Finally the team decided to analyze the top 15 Personal Name Subjects - the following table shows the number of items in the collection that are about specific people, usually biographies, memoirs, or commentaries on that person’s works. The team chose to narrow this visualization down to the top 15 personal names as there are 3,373 items in the collection that are about 1,448 different people. The majority of materials about specific people are items with reference to Jesus Christ (231 items or 6.8%), Saint Ignatius of Loyola (214 items or 6.3%), Saint Mary the Blessed Virgin (155 items or 4.6%), and Saint Thomas Aquinas (109 items or 3.2%).