Harmful Language in Library Resource Descriptions

What is a library catalog?

A library catalog is a database that serves as an inventory of materials owned and locally managed by a library. The catalog is distinct from vendor-provided databases of articles, journals, e-books, and media which a library may subscribe to. In those interfaces, a private company aggregates and indexes the content, and controls the way the resources are described. The library subscribing to the database has limited say in language choices, display, and functionality.

By contrast, a library’s local catalog contains records for the physical materials owned and organized by the library: books, journals, maps, posters, DVDs, CDs, kits, devices, etc. It can also include digitized or born-digital materials hosted on library servers, like PDFs, streaming media files, or scanned materials (1). For these locally-owned and managed materials, the MSU Libraries play a more active role in how resources are described, indexed, and displayed to the public.

The term “metadata” is often used to refer to descriptions of information resources. Metadata includes information which is fairly objective: title of a work, names of creators and contributors, publication date, format, language, edition information. But metadata also includes more subjective elements, such as subject terms and a call number for shelf location. (The call number system is known as classification.) These systems for assigning subject terms and call numbers are attempts to organize knowledge. These systems make it possible to find the book you need among millions in our collection.

What is cataloging and how does it work?

Cataloging is the process of:

• Recording objective information (title, pub date, etc.) about a work
• Interpreting a work's content to assign subject headings and call number
• Encoding all of this information correctly so a record will be retrieved when it matches a user's search parameters

Historically, maintaining a complete and updated list of an entire local collection was a challenge for every library. This work was complicated by the fact that cataloging practices were not shared or standardized for a long time. If a book was owned by 500 libraries, that meant 500 different librarians had to create a catalog record for it.

In the 1960s, British and American libraries implemented a community standard called the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, ensuring that a book could be described consistently across institutions. Soon after, technology made it possible for libraries to share catalog records with each other. Only one library needed to create a catalog record. Other libraries could download that and print a catalog card.

Bu the 1990s, the libraries' card catalogs were being turned into databases. Although users can search these databases online, they still contain legacy data -- information compiled 50 or even 100 years ago. 

Now, when a resource is acquired -- say, a DVD of the documentary film 13th -- a cataloger checks the WorldCat database of shared catalog records and downloads a matching record to the library’s local database. That record then appears in the library’s online catalog for users to find. In some cases, a record is not available in WorldCat yet. The cataloger creates one, following the community standards used by all WorldCat member libraries. Then the new record is uploaded to WorldCat for other institutions to use. 

Why can't you just change the harmful language?

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (also called LC Subject Headings or LCSH) are the main tool we have for describing what each item in the library collection is about. Many problematic LCSH headings have been changed over the years, but many remain. There are both political and technical reasons for this.

• LCSH dates from a period when every card in a library catalog was typed by hand, and updating a heading was laborious and time-consuming. It was considered important for headings to remain stable. Technology makes it much easier to update headings but the Library of Congress has maintained a preference for stable headings over headings being updated to reflect changing usage. 
• As noted on our Introduction page, Library of Congress Subject Headings are "an institutionalized expression of societal customs and beliefs." LC staff hold a range of opinions, as do members of Congress who oversee their work. Not all may agree that updating language in LC Subject Headings is a high priority. One example is the controversy over the term "Illegal aliens".
• A database can be updated two ways, just like editing a Word document. You could do a search-and-replace in a long document, changing all instances of Term A to Term B in a few seconds. But if some instances of Term A need to be changed to Term B, some to Term C, and some to Term D, your edits will take much longer. You'll have to examine every instance of Term A to decide whether it should change to B, C, or D. Many improvements to the LC Subject Headings are like the latter situation. It would be an improvement to replace Indians of North America with a term like Indigenous peoples of North America. But it would be an even greater improvement to replace Indians of North America with the many different names that individual groups of Indigenous people prefer for themselves. That cannot be done as a global change to a database; tens of thousands of records with the old term would need to be edited one at a time, to determine which of the new terms was most appropriate.

Are there alternatives to the Library of Congress Subject Headings?

Yes and no.

The LC Subject Headings cover the full range of knowledge: arts and humanities, social sciences, science and mathematics, and applied fields. The LC Subject Headings are also the most widely-used thesaurus of subject terms in the English-speaking world, which means that nearly all the records we download from WorldCat contain LCSH headings, and the records we upload to WorldCat need to have LCSH headings to be useful to other libraries.

However, the Library of Congress Subject Headings are not the only set of subject headings available; there are many specialized vocabularies. The National Library of Medicine maintains Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH. The Getty Research Institute maintains an Art & Architecture Thesaurus. The Homosaurus International Thesaurus has in-depth coverage of LGBTQ+ vocabulary. We use all of these vocabularies and more to describe our collection. The Library of Congress Subject Headings are notable for their breadth, but specialized vocabularies are often more precise.

What are name authority records?

Imagine that the first book you wrote was in your professional field of chemical engineering. You used Elizabeth G. Rodriguez on the title page. Later you wrote a children's book about science, using a shorter form of your name on the title page: Liz Rodriguez.

The name authority record established for you in the library world typically uses the form of your name in your earliest published work: in this case, Elizabeth G. Rodriguez. But if the author biography in your children's book mentions your earlier book, then librarians know that Liz Rodriguez, children's science book author, is the same person as Elizabeth G. Rodriguez, chemical engineering author. And, we can reflect that in the catalog record. That's the purpose of name authority work: to bring together all the publications by one person, where possible, even if their name changes or different publications use longer or shorter forms of their name.

Creating name authority records is a little like creating Wikipedia entries about people from underrepresented groups, such as scientists who are women and/or people of color. Both efforts are part of the infrastructure that makes it easier to recognize their contributions.