Library Staff Publications
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
8-19-2023
Abstract
Although the need to address problematic language in “Library of Congress Subject Authority Headings” (LCSH) has appeared in library literature for over 50 years, it has gained momentum in recent years due to significant language and societal changes. This presentation covers the diverse approaches that librarians and institutions have taken to tackle this problem and describes a large-scale remediation project to change the LCSH for "Slaves" to "Enslaved persons". The Cataloging Ethics Steering Committee’s “A Code of Ethics for Catalogers” emphasizes the need to keep the end-user in mind and to describe materials without bias or discrimination. I posit that ensuring that subject vocabularies are clear, up to date, and without apparent bias falls squarely under our responsibilities as catalogers. There have been countless efforts to identify, record, discuss, and protest existing problematic subject terms, but these efforts do not go far enough. We need to act by chipping away at the most egregious cases in our subject vocabularies. And I would argue that doing so on a national, or even international scale, rather than locally, is logically far more meaningful and impactful.
Recommended Citation
Griem, Rowena, "Approaches to Addressing Problematic Language in Controlled Vocabularies as seen In Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)" (2023). Library Staff Publications. 22.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yul_staff/22
This Article is Open Access
Comments
Presentation given at the 2023 IFLA WLIC (International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions World Library and Information Congress) satellite meeting "Universal Bibliographic Control at the Crossroads, the Challenges of Unifying IFLA Bibliographic Standards" sponsored by the IFLA Bibliography, Subject Analysis & Access, and Cataloguing Sections and The Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), Aug. 18-19, 2023. Given in Session 3: Ethics of cataloguing.