Subjectsgeographic

Subjectsgeographic is a bibliographic and information-management concept describing the process of attaching geographic subject terms to documents and data records. Geographic subjects indicate places related to a work, such as where events occurred, where it is set, or where the subject originates. This facet of subject indexing complements topical or thematic terms to improve location-based discovery and spatial filtering in catalogs, repositories, and search interfaces.

Geographic subject terms are typically drawn from standardized vocabularies and authority files that provide consistent names, variants, and hierarchical relationships. Common vocabularies include the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and GeoNames. Entries are organized in broader-narrower relationships (for example, Asia > East Asia > Japan) and may be linked to unique identifiers to support disambiguation and machine processing. In many library and metadata formats, geographic access is encoded in dedicated fields, such as MARC 651 Geographic name access in MARC 21 records.

Applications include search facets, map-based discovery, and improved cross-linking of resources across collections. Geographic subjects can apply to historical events, cultural associations, or physical locations referenced in the work. Challenges include changes in place names, disputed territories, and false matches due to ambiguous names, requiring ongoing authority control and metadata maintenance. See also authority control, subject headings, and geographic-name authority files.