Getting Started with Subject Headings
How to explore VHEC collections by topic
April 28, 2026
The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre stewards Western Canada’s largest collection of Holocaust-related artefacts, Holocaust testimonies and archival documents.
The VHEC online collections catalogue, which holds more than 11,000 records from the museum, archives, library and testimony collections, can be daunting at first glance. So, where to start your research? There are many research approaches that you could take. One approach is to use subject headings to search and filter, especially if you know the topic you want to research but don’t have a specific name or title in mind.
What are subject headings?
Subject headings are terms that describe topics, used as tags to connect archival item records to topics. If a collection is tagged with subject headings, then you can filter or search based on those tags to find items about a particular topic.
The important thing about subject headings is that they are controlled, meaning that there is a set list of headings to choose from. On the VHEC collections search interface, this shows up as a drop-down menu.
In a regular keyword search, spelling, word choice and even the language that you are searching in will affect results. For example, if you are looking for materials on Roma peoples, you can search the terms Roma, Romani or a specific identity term, like Calé. Each of those terms would return different results, depending on what words are used in each item title and item description.
When searching using subject headings, however, you can pick the Sinti & Roma subject heading, and all the items that are tagged with that heading will show up, regardless of what words are in the item’s title or description. This is particularly useful in collections that are as multilingual as the VHEC’s because the subject headings are in English, even if titles and text contents are in a different language.
What are the subject headings in the VHEC collections online catalogue?
VHEC collections subject headings were drafted in 2016 and have evolved a little over the years. The current list has 16 top-level headings and 231 subheadings.
Occasionally, terms are added, edited or combined to accommodate new materials or to adopt clearer or more contemporary language.
In 2019, for example, the headings brothers and sisters were combined into the heading siblings, and a new heading, Deaf, was added to the subjects list as a distinct heading from people with disabilities. Deciding what words to use for subject headings is a complicated and subjective process.
There are many factors to consider: what words are users most likely to recognize and use? What words are used in item titles and text? What words do item creators, authors and communities use to self-describe? What subject headings do other, related libraries and archives use, and should we try to be consistent with them?
Most of the subject headings in the VHEC collections online catalogue are “local” subject headings. That is, they were created by the VHEC collections team specifically for these collections. The VHEC local headings use the subject headings from Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies as a starting point, with modifications to suit the VHEC’s specific collections. Because they are also a specialized Holocaust archives, the Fortunoff Video Archives uses subject headings that are, for the most part, relevant to the VHEC—but this isn’t the case for all museums and archives.
You won’t find the same subject headings in other collections, and, in fact, the local headings are probably not useful or appropriate in most other libraries or archives. Consider our religion subheadings: at the VHEC, it makes sense to have the headings Judaism and Christianity, but not any other religions, because the VHEC’s collections and mandate focus on Jewish people and (Christian) antisemitism. In another collection, though, you may need subject headings for many more religions and spiritualities—or for none at all.
In addition to the local VHEC headings, some item pages have another category of headings: Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). LCSH are a standardized set of subject headings maintained by the Library of Congress and used in libraries throughout North America. Unlike local subject headings, the same LCSH can be used to search in any library that uses LCSH. LCSH headings are designed for published library materials, and so only items in our library collections (but not our archives or museum collections) are tagged with LCSH headings.
How can you use subject headings to search the VHEC collections?
There are three ways to use subject headings on the VHEC online collections catalogue: as an advanced search field, as a filter or as a bridge to related items.
1. Advanced search field:
If you select the advanced search option, you will have the option to fill out many different search fields (including title, language and genre). As you can see below, one of these fields is subject, which lets you choose from a drop-down menu of subject headings.
You can type additional search terms in the other fields if you want to narrow the search, or you can leave the rest blank and search just by the subject field to see every item with that subject heading.
You will also notice that there are two levels of hierarchy in the drop-down menu.
The top-level headings (antisemitism & discrimination, arts, culture & sports, etc.) are very broad and each have more specific headings below them. Items aren’t tagged with the top-level headings, but if you select a top-level subject heading then your search will return every item with any of the subject headings nested below that one.
For example, if you select the subject term business & economics, then your search results will include all the items tagged with armaments production, bartering, currency exchange and every other subheading in the business & economics category.
2. Filter:
Once you have made an initial search, a list of filter choices appears beside the list of search results, including subject.
No matter what your original search was, you can narrow your results by choosing a subject from the filter list.
3. Related Items:
Finally, you can use subject headings in reverse, by navigating from an item to its subject category. Items have subject headings listed as clickable links on their catalogue pages. In the screenshot below, the LCSH and local headings are listed in the grey box on the bottom left.
Magnification of Grey Box – Bottom Left
If you click on any of those subject headings, you’ll be taken to a list of all the items in the collection that have that heading. For example, clicking the diaspora VHEC subject heading will return the 20 results shown here:
This can be useful just to browse and explore, or if you find an item that is highly relevant to your research and want to see similar items.
Subject headings are a simple but powerful search tool within and beyond the VHEC catalogue. If you’re not sure where to start your research or if keyword searches aren’t returning the results you want, try using subject headings in the online catalogue.
About the Author:
Pippin Rogak is a digital archivist at the VHEC. They hold a bachelor of arts in religious studies and German studies, and are a recent graduate of the DUAL masters of archival studies and masters of library and information science program at the University of British Columbia.
