Genre terms in catalog records indicate the form, genre, style, technique or physical characteristics of the cataloged resource and are tagged 655 in MARC bibliographic records. The Genre authority record tags the authorized form of entry for the genre term as a 155; each cross-reference is tagged 455.

With the introduction of these records, a Genre index is available in OCLC Authorities. These authority records are also available via the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) index.

The Library of Congress has distributed a limited number of Genre authority records to date and at present is using only the Library of Congress Subject Headings list as a source of these terms. An example of a newly added Genre authority record is LCCN sh2007025004 (OCLC ARN 7519072), for Fiction films.

Although the Genre index labels are not present in the authority searching or browsing drop-down lists in Client 1.7x, the Genre indexes can be accessed via the command line in the 1.7x search and browse dialog boxes. The index label for the Genre index is ge. An example of a search from the command line is: ge: films and an example of a command line browse is sca ge: films.

Currently, headings tagged as 655, second indicator 0, are not candidates for the control headings functionality in Connexion. This will be enabled as part of a future Connexion enhancement.

Please contact Linda Gonzalez (lgonzale@bcr.org) or Bethany Levrault (blevraul@bcr.org) at BCR for additional information or assistance.