Characteristics of Material Organization and Classification in the Kinsey Institute Library

Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s landmark research in the 1940s and 1950s made his name synonymous with the scientific study of sexuality. The extensive resources collected by Kinsey and his research team provided a foundation of library and special collections at the Kinsey Institute, located on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. A library of books, articles, periodicals, and other materials is valuable to scholars and users only if the materials are organized with a practical classification scheme and retrievable by unique subject headings. In the 1960s the Institute librarians applied the Dewey classification system to the realm of sexuality. In the 1970s the Kinsey Institute developed a monograph of controlled vocabulary, Sexual Nomenclature: A Thesaurus, for cataloging the diverse materials at the Institute. Now more than 95,000 items are available via KICAT, the online database, consisting of monographs, journals and reprints, manuscripts, and audiovisual materials that represent all disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences as well as literature, art, and folklore. The library also has significant holdings in such areas as erotic novels, popular sex magazines, nudist publications, pseudo-scientific works, comic books, and tabloids. This article will trace the history ofbibliographic control of the library collections over many decades, and describe the approaches and efforts in providing organization and access to these rich and unique collections. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: ©2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]