Harmful Language in Library Resource Descriptions

Our catalog records and other resource descriptions may contain outdated, offensive, or inaccurate language. We call this, collectively, “harmful language.”

How did harmful language get into the catalog?

Many elements of description are neutral. What year was a resource published? Is it a map, a musical score, statistical data? 

Other elements, especially terms used to describe the subject of a work, can reflect racist, sexist, misogynist, or ableist worldviews. The Cataloging Ethics Steering Committee (part of the American Library Association) acknowledges that “Cataloguing standards and practices are currently and historically characterised by racism, white supremacy, colonialism, othering, and oppression.” These forms of discrimination have no place in the MSU library catalog.

The most widely used descriptive standard in U.S. academic libraries is the Library of Congress Subject Headings, or LCSH. Nearly all the records we obtain from other libraries contain LCSH headings, and the records we create and share must have headings from LCSH and other controlled vocabularies to be useful to other libraries.

Like cataloging standards generally, LCSH can manifest discrimination. And, while American society has become more aware of discriminatory language, the Library of Congress has maintained its preference for consistent headings even when common usage has changed.

LC has this prerogative, because the primary purpose of LCSH is to describe the collection at the Library of Congress, not research libraries generally. The reluctance to update language diminishes the usefulness of LCSH for libraries with different institutional goals. Academic libraries are increasingly using specialized vocabularies other than LCSH to support information retrieval. 

What are some examples?

Terms for groups of people often use outdated, offensive, or inaccurate language. These particular examples are from the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and represent common types of problem:

• Biased “see also” references. For many years the Library of Congress Subject Headings term homosexuality had a "see also" reference: Homosexuality - see also Sexual perversion. This biased generalization was also inaccurate: not all resources assigned the subject heading Homosexuality in fact characterized homosexuality as a sexual perversion, but the see also reference implied that they did.
• Headings that treat groups of people unequally. Headings for women's participation in professions were phrased Women as engineers (or lawyers, artists, etc.), revealing an assumption that it was abnormal for women to fill these roles. Although “as” has been dropped from these headings (Women engineers) there are no corresponding headings for men (Men engineers or Male engineers) and there were never headings in the form Men as engineers.
• Outdated headings; overly broad headings. Although the term “Native American” has been used in American public life since the 1960s, LCSH still uses Indians of North America (Indians of Mexico, Indians of South America, etc.) This term is outdated and too broad to permit effective information retrieval; an established term for each tribal nation is needed. Preferably this would be the term the tribal nation uses for itself, not the Anglicized term (such as Anishinaabe, not Ojibwa Indians.) LC is currently considering major revisions in this area.

Why is harmful language a concern?

MSU’s programs are open to all. The university prohibits discrimination. The MSU Libraries have a central role in supporting MSU’s educational purposes. Information resources are critical to successful teaching and research.

Therefore, all library users must be able to locate relevant items in the catalog, which means supplying a full and accurate description of each item. Descriptive language should conform to common usage and offer as much specificity as is possible with established vocabularies. High-quality resource description allows all users to find resources that meet their search parameters, and saves their time by excluding irrelevant resources from results lists. Resource descriptions containing outdated, offensive, or inaccurate language do not meet MSU’s standards of excellence.