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On 4/7/2011 1:21 PM, Houghton,Andrew wrote: > That is probably correct. England may appear as both a 110 *and* a 151 because the 110 signifies the concept for the country entity while the 151 signifies the concept for the geographic place. A subtle distinction... This starts getting into categorization philosophy type issues, and reveal that LCSH isn't entirely consistent in it's modelling (as virtually no classification will be without being extraordinarily complex, the world is a messy place), along the lines Ross was talking about too, but I think it can be explicated a bit.... ....I'm not sure it's quite true to say that a 151 (corresponding to a 6xx $v subdivision) is a geographic place as entirely distinct from a 'country entity'. I might instead say the 151 is meant to be a sort of geo-historical place, that does take into account, well, either political entities or general contemporary conceptions of place distinctions at particular historical times. While the 110 is about a collective-body _actor_, a government.... All of these are $v's, which presumably are authorized by authority 151s: Soviet Union Russia Russia (Federation) Former Soviet Republics typically assigned for works about that area of the world at the time that area of the world was known as a particular thing, heh. Or: Italy / Roman Empire Byzantine Empire / Ottoman Empire / Turkey / Balkan Peninsula Now, all those things aren't the _exact_ same longitude and lattitude, but with significant overlap, different in different cases. At any rate, 151s aren't purely a name for a geographic boundary on the planet, they're some kind of, um, geo-political-historical concept. Compare to the terms you can put in an 048, which ARE meant to be history and political entity free. e-ur == "Russia. Russian Empire. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics". Yeah, all of em together. Nevermind they dont' have exactly the same boundaries. (And of course the boundaries of any one of em can and did change over time). At least 048's MOSTLY try to be purely geographical, free of historical/political context, but then sometimes they go ahead and add weird ones that can't possibly follow that principle, like d= "Developing Countries" or dd="Developed Countries". But yeah, then we've got the 110 England, which isn't a "geographical" concept AT ALL, it refers really to the Government/political _actor_ (as a collective body) known as "England". Which happens to have controlled or claimed certain geographic territory for itself at different times, but the 110 England isn't about the geographic territory, it's about the collective-body actor. (Does that even still exist? What is it's contemporary or historical relationship to the concepts "United Kingdom" and "Great Britain", are those political actors too?) Somewhere I read an article about the particular messiness of geographic vocabularies, as discussed above, I forget where. Wish I could find it again, it would be helpful here. But modelling the real world with a subject vocabulary is inherently messy, especially so with geographic classification like this that is meant to somehow cover all of recorded human history too. The map is not the territory.