Tags are reviewed regularly by the Chicago Collections Controlled Vocabulary Committee or when tags are flagged by members or the public. Other triggers for review include revisions to related terms in the Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms or Library of Congress Subject Headings by their respective editorial boards.
The most up to date lists of tags can be found in spreadsheets maintained by the Controlled Vocabulary Task Force. These spreadsheets are available for download and provide more information on tags as well as mappings to other controlled vocabularies.
Topics are analogous to general subject and keyword headings. There are seven top level topic categories with each having their own subcategories. Most tags are drawn from Library of Congress Subject Headings or FAST, unless otherwise noted. A general overview of each category can be found below. The list of the tags in these specific categories can be found in the spreadsheets linked at the top of the page.
This Chicago Collections current communities tag list is based primarily on the Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms with some customizations and reductions. The CC current tag list encompasses religious, social, ethnic, national, regional, and some age, medical, disability, and psychological facets of persons depicted or described in Chicago Collections. Related tags not found in this list may be in the Gender, Education, Work, and other categories.
Arts and ideas, covering aesthetic, philosophical, literary and intellectual pursuits.
This category includes topics on activities and identities related to everyday life. It also includes topics that relate to broader societal and cultural trends arising from these activities.
Historical events and notable efforts to attain specific ends.
Topics related to public and private organizations or approaches to social, philanthropic, legal or policy concerns.
Landscapes that make up the physical region, whether natural or built, and the materials that describe them.
Industries, business enterprises, employment and the innovations and systems that support them
Cities include cities, villages, towns and other places in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will counties in Illinois and Lake and Porter counties in Indiana. These tags were originally drawn from the 2010 US Census.
Neighborhoods contains only those neighborhoods within the city of Chicago and not those of surrounding cities. These tags were drawn from the Library of Congress Names and Authorities, FAST, GeoNames and the official City of Chicago list for community areas.