The BISAC Subject Headings are a
method to classify books that is geared towards bookstores. It is mainly used by the Northern American booktrade, and online sellers like
Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. The company operates approximately 600 retail stores across the United States.
Barnes & Noble operates mainly through its B ...
,
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
and
Baker & Taylor. The
Book Industry Study Group
The Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG) is an American trade association for policy, technical standards and research related to books and similar products. The mission of BISG is to simplify logistics for publishers, manufacturers, suppliers ...
maintains the BISAC system.
BISAC, an acronym for Book Industry Standards and Communications, classifies all works by topics. All topics and sub-topics are ordered alphabetically, which also encompasses works of fiction. The BISAC's numbering scheme allows for a later introduction of new topics between already established ones.
Books can fall into several categories. In this case, BISG recommends that no more than three categories should be chosen for a single book, and the main category should be the one that best describes the book's contents.
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Examples
In the BISAC system, ''Biography and Autobiographies'' (BIO) comes before works of ''Fiction'' (FIC) and ''Religion'' (REL). Within ''Fiction'', FIC009020 (Fiction: Fantasy: Epic) is followed by Gaslamp fantasy novels (FIC009130, Fiction: Fantasy: Gaslamp) due to the alphabetic sorting.
As a drawback, it does not keep fictional works together if they were written by the same author. For example, Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig ( ; ; 28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942) was an Austrian writer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world.
Zweig was raised in V ...
's novel that re-tells the Magellan expedition
The Magellan expedition, sometimes termed the MagellanElcano expedition, was a 16th-century Spanish Empire, Spanish expedition planned and led by Portuguese Empire, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. One of the most important voyages in th ...
would be filed under FIC014030 (Fiction: History: Historical: Renaissance). His ''Fear'', however, could be classified as FIC025000 (Fiction: Psychological). Some libraries, though, have decided to group one novelist's works under the same topic if the author has shown a clear preference for one.
Adoption by libraries
In order to address the shortcomings of the Dewey Decimal Classification, some libraries have changed to the BISAC classification. Some reasons given were BISAC being more intuitive, it was more usable by non-experts, and the books of similar topics being grouped together has allowed for better seating arrangements in libraries.
References
{{Reflist
External links
Complete BISAC Headings List
Library cataloging and classification