Pushing the Boulder, Pushing the Envelope: Embracing the Iterative Nature of Improving Metadata
presented at the Metadata Justice in Oklahoma Libraries & Archives Symposium, July 14, 2022
Just to briefly introduce myself, I’m calling in today from Chicago, where I have a new job as a Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at Galter Library, which is the health sciences library for Northwestern University. I moved to Chicago three weeks ago from central Minnesota. This is me standing in front of the world’s largest turkey, indulging in one of my pastimes, which is visiting roadside attractions.
I was one of the editors of Dewey from 2018 to 2020, so I have a lot of ideas about classification and the way we organize concepts, and a lot of experience working within a very flawed system. I’ve been lucky enough to do metadata work in a variety of settings, from large state universities to a small private Catholic college. One thing that I’m particularly proud of is helping to create a community of people talking about critical librarianship on twitter, and specifically a subset of critlib called critcat, short for critical cataloging, and I’ll talk about that in just a bit.
But, the reason I have a photo of me and the world’s largest turkey is that I write a zine about traveling to visit roadside attractions. And an important part of my background is that my perspective has been shaped significantly by my work with zines.
Since the first Zine Librarians unConference in 2009, I’ve been a part of groups talking about the challenges in cataloging zines. The beauty of zines is that they’re easy and quick to make, so anyone can make one, but that ephemeral nature can be challenging for catalogers accustomed to more traditionally published resources. Zines can have no title, no listed creators (or creators who use pseudonyms), no date, or no words at all. Assigning subject headings is particularly tricky, as LC Subject Headings has many terms which zinesters would find awkward or offensive.
I was a part of the team that created the Zine Librarians Code of Ethics, which talks about the need to understand zinester ethics before bringing them into your libraries. This includes recognizing that zinesters are often part of marginalized populations, folks who have been traditionally underrepresented in published works. Of course this is why we want their work in our libraries, but this is also why it’s especially important to be cognizant of the power that we hold in doing this work. Zine librarianship has really heavily influenced how I approach my work in libraries.
But I mentioned critcat earlier, so what is critcat? It follows in the tradition of radical cataloging, critical cataloging discusses the ethical frameworks of library metadata, cataloging, and classification standards, practice, and infrastructure.
This work has been called a variety of things, especially in the past few years.
- critical cataloging
- radical cataloging
- reparative metadata
- mutual metadata
- ethical metadata
- conscious editing
- metadata justice
It’s really funny to me that we’re a part of the profession that traditionally embraces controlled vocabularies, because we recognize the value of collocating like material under one term. But the number of phrases has proliferated recently, as more people are doing this work. And we can quibble about the specific flavors of work that these represent–some of them are newer, some of them are more prevalent in archives or museums–but that’s not actually super interesting to me. More important to me is that we are sharing information about what we’re doing. I want to learn from the work that museums and archives have done. For example, archives have a lot of experience in recognizing the privacy needs of the creator of works, which, in library cataloging, we’re still just figuring that out now, and trying to walk back some of the decisions that have been made that encouraged catalogers to do detective work to dig up information about authors and creators.
Just as an aside, I cowrote two chapters in the book Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control, if that’s a topic of interest to you, or a topic you hadn’t considered before, I’d really recommend that book.
Anyway, the fact that we’re using different terminology makes sharing those ideas with each other a little harder. But who am I to say we should all use THIS term and not the others, so I can just hope that the terms used to describe these efforts will coalesce in the next few years.
We know that critiques of cataloging standards and structures have been around for a long time. In the 1930s, it was Frances Lydia Yocom & Dorothy Porter. in the 1970s it was Sandy Berman (and he continues his work on his typewriter at home!). In the 1980s it was Doris Hargrett Clack
& Dorothy Ann Washington. There’s a lot of folks who have been doing this work, some louder in their activism, and some behind the scenes.
I’ve been in the profession since 1995, starting out as a student worker, and moving into paraprofessional roles. I got my MLIS in 2013, so I’ve been more involved in the professional discussion for about a decade. And things have really changed in that decade! I first used the #critcat hashtag back in 2015, and it was really hard to get people to pay attention to cataloging issues. From my perspective, I think it was seen as old-fashioned, not that important, a very niche issue in libraries. The struggle to get the subject heading “Illegal aliens” revised really changed the way people think about this work. I’m not alone in being disappointed with the revisions LC implemented last December to replace this heading, and work is continuing to encourage libraries to make local revisions, even for the replacement term, “Illegal immigration.” I don’t want to downplay the very real harm that I think these headings have caused and continue to cause, and if you haven’t watched the 2019 documentary “Change the Subject” I would encourage you to do so, because it centers the voices of the undocumented students who pushed this conversation forward. But I think the one silver lining is that it made library workers recognize that we have a responsibility for the words we use in our catalogs. Patrons see these offensive terms in our catalogs, and saying to them, “oh, we didn’t choose that term, it’s not our fault,” doesn’t absolve us of being complicit.
More recently, I think things changed significantly with the uprising after the murder of George Floyd. In U.S. society, and in critical cataloging efforts. I think a lot of us had some pretty intense self-reckonings, thinking about what we were doing with our energy. We’re now two years out from that point, and from my perspective, we’re at an inflection point.
We can choose how we move forward. We can treat this work, this metadata justice work or whatever you want to call it, as a fad. We can finish the projects that we’ve started and check it off on our year-end review and think “well that’s done.” Unsurprisingly, obviously, I don’t want us to do that! Moving forward, I want us, as a profession, to think about how we want to implement this self-reflection into our work as part of a regular process. Where can we make changes, whether big or small, to improve these systems that we work within, to make them more equitable?
I’d like to take just a moment to talk about some recent wins, specifically within the Library of Congress Subject Headings. These have all been changed in the past year, and all of them were due to library workers just like you making proposals, individually or collectively as part of what we call a SACO Funnel, which Jay is going to talk about this afternoon.
- changing Blacks to Black people
- changing Noble savage to Noble savage stereotype
- changing Brothers and sisters to Siblings
- changing Problem youth to At-risk youth
- work to start by September on LC’s Indigenous headings project, replacing Indians of North America, Eskimos, and other headings
And let’s keep on going with the wins! Just as important as talking about how much work there is to do, is reflecting on how far we’ve come.
- more people have been aware of these discussions, their own responsibility for this work
- more people have been trained in how the LCSH approval process works and how they can get involved
- LC has started inviting attendees to the monthly meetings where they discuss controversial proposals
These are the things that are really exciting to me. The terminology changes are important, of course, but opening this process up, helping people understand how they can make a difference, that’s the thing that helps us move forward and make different choices. Letting people know they can complain about the system, and I totally encourage that, but then, then they can work to address those problems, and not stop at complaining.
One of the ways that I’ve helped that effort is the creation of a website called The Cataloging Lab. I created the Cataloging Lab in January 2018, based on a project that I worked on with catalogers Jess Schomberg, Catherine Oliver, and Netanel Ganin. The site is a simple wiki where people can collaborate on proposing additions or revisions to LCSH or LCC. It’s a way to open up the LCSH submission process to people who aren’t part of a SACO library. People can see the kind of research that is required to submit a proposal. They can see a successful proposal, and they can see the process behind a proposal that has been submitted, rejected, and reworked, and resubmitted. At the same time, it’s a way for catalogers to get advice from the larger library community as well as people with subject matter expertise. Non-catalogers and catalogers can work together to do the research required to submit proposals to LC. As an example, I’ve worked with multiple groups of library school students who wanted to learn more about LCSH. These usually aren’t people who are planning on being catalogers, but I work with them to propose new headings, and we’ve had a lot of wins, including new subject headings approved for the “Say Her Name movement,” “Rape in correctional institutions,” and “Cultural appropriation”.
I’ll be the first to admit the Cataloging Lab isn’t going to quote-unquote “fix” LCSH. Sometimes people think that they can submit an idea to the site and that I’ll do all the work involved, which I do not have time for. I really insist that people do the work *with* me to learn the process, in the hopes that they’ll be inspired to submit more proposals, or just that they learn the kind of questions that you have to grapple with when you’re considering changes to this very complex system.
I think we desperately need to broaden the group of people who give input into these systems. Fewer and fewer libraries have the staffing and administrative support to do this work, and the group of people doing this work become smaller, and less diverse, with every year that passes. We’re trying to equitably represent the diversity of human thought in LCSH, and we’re trying to responsibly represent people from diverse cultural backgrounds in name authority records, and that’s a really hard ask to do that work justice. We’re not doing ourselves any favors when it’s just the same 100 people who are having these conversations with ourselves.
I just started a new job, just a few weeks ago. Everyone has been welcoming and I’m really glad to be there. But I had an interesting interaction with some of the other catalogers that I’d like to share. In the Library of Congress Classification, many juvenile fiction works are classed in the PZ section. And in a particular range of numbers, all the U.S. authors get two Cutter numbers (one for the author, and another for the title of the book). And all the non-U.S. authors get just one Cutter number, because the assumption is that the library will have fewer non-U.S. books. So during my first meeting with this particular group of catalogers, they were discussing this section of call numbers, and I wrote in the chat, “It seems kind of racist or xenophobic that all the U.S. books get one treatment but all the non-U.S. books get another.” And three people chimed into the chat right away, to say “Yeah, totally,” or like, “Yeah, it’s LC, of course it’s like that,” with a little smiley face. So I typed in the chat, “So maybe we should do something different? Like providing two Cutters to all the books in this area? Not just the U.S. books?”
And there was silence. No one said anything. Which is a little funny to me! I get that there’s lots of reasons to not implement a local practice–it’s more work up front, there’s training issues, more documentation to be done. But from my perspective, there were two options in that scenario: one, which people were quick to recognize and call out as racist or xenophobic, and the other, which was ever so slightly less racist. Now don’t get me wrong, we’re still working within this very oppressive system, so I don’t think changing this small range of call numbers would’ve made a big difference.
But, I would just implore the people on this call: if you’re ever in a scenario like that, maybe think about taking the slightly less racist option.
I would argue that we, as a profession, got complacent about having offensive terminology in our catalog, for the sake of appearing neutral. We, as a profession, offloaded the work of caring about classification to the Library of Congress and to OCLC (in the case of the Dewey Decimal Classification). We, as a profession, have a lot of work to do now, because we let things get really bad. And now, we, as a profession, need to reinvest in that work. We need to share knowledge and strategies with each other. We need to put more resources into reflecting the terminology our patrons understand and use in our catalogs. If it seems overwhelming, that’s only because we let things get so bad, but if we work at it collaboratively, we can make it manageable. The iterative nature of metadata work means it will never be done. But we can be much more proactive about ensuring we’re keeping things up to date. And we can work together to imagine alternatives that are better than Dewey, better than LC Classification, and that work to supplement LCSH with culturally responsive vocabularies. Together we can build the knowledge we need to create systems that we’re not ashamed of, that we don’t have to apologize for. That’s the dream!
This is probably beyond the scope of this presentation, but I think it’s important to reflect on this: How will taking an activist approach to cataloging turn you into an activist in other areas of your life? There are people who will say, oh, this is just cataloging, you’re just changing words, none of this makes a difference. But one of the core tenets of activism is the power of small actions: examining your actions in all the parts of your life. Whatever you’re doing in your day to day life, it’s worth doing it with an eye to making things better.
So, for example, Are you going to buy this book on Amazon? Or are you going to support your local indie bookstore?
When someone makes an offensive comment or assumption in a meeting, are you going to laugh it off, or will you say “hey that’s not cool”? If this question scares you, consider taking a bystander intervention course, which can give you concrete strategies.
When you see a Black teen getting arrested, are you going to pull over your car, or stop on the sidewalk, and film? Or are you going to turn away and think “it’s none of my business”? If this question scares you, do a web search for “filming the police.” There’s lots of resources out there, and if you’re like me, having read about other peoples’ experiences helps me imagine myself in that scenario, and then move into actuating that in real life.
This work can mean building communities, finding your own voice, and taking small steps to bring more justice into the world.
I want to leave plenty of time for questions, but as we go through the day, I’d like you to keep a few questions in mind: how can you make slightly different decisions that move us closer to our goals of anti-oppression and justice. As we hear from the other presenters about their projects, consider our long-term strategy here. How do we move forward sustainably, without burning out in this work? How do we move forward, as we move through our overworked, overextended days, while trying to keep this justice work as an integral part of our day-to-day efforts. How do we encourage each other to keep questioning the boundaries that we’re working within?