Retrieving Oregon Indians from Obscurity: A Project to Enhance Access to Resources on Tribal History and Culture

The paper reports on a project at Oregon State University to ensure that all Oregon Indian tribes are represented in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). After providing some general background about how Indian tribes are treated in LCSH, some of the problems with constructing subject headings for tribes is discussed. A list of all Oregon Indian tribes was created and compared with a list of subject headings for those tribes in order to determine which ones were missing. WorldCat was searched for information resources about the Indian tribes to ascertain if there was literary warrant to create subject heading proposals for them. Of the fifty-four Oregon Indian tribes, eleven (20%) should have subject headings established. Forty-one bibliographic records about these tribes were examined to see what subject headings had been applied and whether they had been applied correctly. Future work resulting from this project, including the creation of subject heading proposals and the correction of bibliographic records, is discussed, including the suggestion that these methods be applied to Indian tribes in other states.