IGBIS

link to slides

Thank you so much to everyone who has helped make South Africa Library Week a success. I know it’s a lot of work to bring everyone together, but it’s so valuable. I’m thrilled to talk with you today, and especially excited to talk about Sears, which I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about before. 

Let me tell you what I’m going to cover in this presentation: First I’ll tell you my background so you have a better sense of who I am and what’s important to me. I’ll talk about critical cataloging, what that means and how it informs the work I do. I’ll briefly talk about my work as an editor of the Dewey Decimal Classification and how that also informs the work that I do as the Editor of Sears. Without getting into too much detail, I’ll talk about the background of the Sears List of Subject Headings and what has changed recently, which makes now a great time to make changes happen. Along the way, I’ll touch on some of the unique things about Sears and how it’s used, and how you can make it work better for your own users. Finally, I’ll talk about how you can suggest changes to Sears to include more South-African-specific terms. I’m going to leave plenty of time for questions, because I really, really want to hear from you about what might make Sears better for your users! 

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I started a new job working at Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago last year. My title is Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, so I catalog books and work on other projects, like improving the metadata in our institutional repository.

I graduated from the University of Washington iSchool with my library degree in 2013, but I worked as a paraprofessional copy cataloger for several years before I went to library school.  

And one last thing about me is that I’ve been a part of the zine librarian community since 2009. Zines are self-published works that can be about anything, but often come from a countercultural perspective. One of my more recent zines was called the “Disorientation Guide to Librarianship,” which is essentially an introduction for people new to libraries about some of the less positive aspects of librarianship, including some of the ways that libraries can reinforce oppressive structures like racism. In the introduction I try to explain that the Disorientation Guide to Librarianship isn’t negative for the sake of being negative—instead, as individuals and as a profession, we need to understand the problems in the structures we live within in order to make substantive change.

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So that brings me to critical librarianship, which we sometimes talk about as critlib. Critical librarianship is dedicated to the idea of bringing the principles of social justice into our work in libraries. This idea of critlib follows in a long tradition of radical librarianship, which is an idea that’s always in flux but looks to find ways to ensure we’re fighting the good fight in libraries. 

Along the same lines, critical cataloging, which we often abbreviate to critcat, looks at the ethics of library metadata, cataloging, and classification standards, practice, and infrastructure. Especially in the past few years you might hear this called a large variety of things, including radical cataloging, reparative metadata, conscious editing, metadata justice, and so on. I think the work being done under these labels is very similar, we’re all looking at the ways we in libraries and archives have described the material in our collections, and seeing some problems with the way we’ve done that in the past, and looking to do better in the future by using more respectful terminology, but also by not having this work be done just by white, middle-class, straight, able-bodied people with a very narrow idea about the world. I often do whole presentations about critical cataloging, so there’s lots to say, but I’ll stop there for now.

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I was a cataloger at academic libraries for the first few years of my professional career, but in 2018 I was hired as one of the Editors of the Dewey Decimal Classification. Some people don’t know that Dewey is constantly updated, and many people don’t know that there are editors who are paid to do this work. Dewey is owned by OCLC, so I was working for OCLC at this position.

While I was there, I made a lot of updates, including revisions to change the wording around disability, and to add new Dewey numbers and revise old ones to more appropriately describe books about witchcraft, books about sexuality, and books about transgender people. 

More importantly, I think, I opened the process of the editorial revisions. Before I started, proposals to change Dewey numbers were closed off, no one outside a dozen people could see them. But now, those proposals to change Dewey are now open to the public, and anyone can review proposals to revise the numbers, before the changes are implemented. I also set up a website to encourage library workers like you to propose their own revisions. 

Unfortunately, after I set this up, OCLC laid me off in 2020, and started a program for having this complex work done by temporary student interns. While a few years ago there was a staff of five editors doing this work, there’s now just one full time editor being paid to do this work.

But while I was editing I developed an orientation towards not just doing the classification work itself, but also talking about it, making it clear the structure of that system, and the assumptions that it’s based on, and who makes the decisions in changing a system. Those are things that are very important to me in my cataloging work and have continued with my work with Sears.

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After I was laid off, I was approached by the owners of Grey House Publishing to edit the 23rd edition of Sears. 2023 is actually the 100th anniversary of the Sears List of Subject Headings, which was created by an American librarian named Minnie Earl Sears. Our friend Minnie here was a cataloger who realized that the Library of Congress Subject Headings is great for academic libraries, but it’s too large and too detailed to be used by smaller libraries, like school and public libraries. And she realized this in the 1920s, when the number of LCSH was much, much smaller than it is now! Essentially she based her list of subject headings on LCSH, but simplified it in a few ways, including using fewer terms, using less technical terminology, and using direct language, for example using “French literature” instead of “Literature, French.”

Like I said, Sears has been published since 1923. For a while now, it’s been on a four-year editorial cycle, which means a new print edition is published every four years.

Sears has been in flux the last few editions, and things have changed quite a bit in the editorial work. For many decades, Sears had been published by the publisher H.W. Wilson. In 2011, the giant publisher EBSCO bought H.W. Wilson and it became one of the divisions of EBSCO. The 21st edition in 2014 was published by EBSCO. But in 2018, Grey House bought the rights to publish Sears from EBSCO. So the 22nd and 23rd editions have been published by Grey House. None of the particulars matter, really, but you should know that that has meant significant changes in the way Sears is edited. In the past, H.W. Wilson had a full time staff person, and part of their job was maintaining Sears. That meant that when a question came in about the classification, there was someone answering emails and taking suggestions, and gradually making changes, and the editor would be compiling changes over that four-year period as part of their regular work. 

But because of the changes in publishing companies, that’s no longer how it works. Grey House no longer pays a full-time Sears editor. Instead, they have decided to just hire someone on a part-time contract basis, to make changes every once in a while. That’s how I was hired on, on a contract basis, to edit the 23rd edition. Again, I know this might feel like details you might not need to know, but it does impact the subject headings quite a bit! If you email Sears with an editorial question right now, you might not get an answer, because, right now, there’s no one there being paid to do this work. I’m only getting paid for the months when they’ve contracted me to do this work. I’m sharing this info because I think it’s important to be transparent about who is doing this work and how it gets done—as you know, the resources that you have or don’t have make a huge difference in the quality of the work you can do.

At the same time, it means that now is a great time to shake things up with Sears, to do things in different ways, to deviate from LCSH more than has been done in the past, to reconsider the principles that Sears is based on.

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I just wanted to share just a few examples of some of the revisions I was able to make in the 23rd edition, with the goal of moving from euphemistic or outdated terms to more common terms. The full list of revised headings is available online even if you don’t have a subscription to the online version.

One of the things that I think is so interesting about Sears is that it’s very flexible. If there’s a term that is not in the Sears list, you are explicitly told in the instructions of Sears that you can add it! In some ways, that makes Sears harder to use than LCSH. Think of it this way: in LCSH, there is a list of all the subject headings you can use. That’s it, that’s the list, those are the headings, and if something isn’t on the list of LCSH, it’s not valid. But with Sears, catalogers have to make those decisions themselves. For example, “Leopards” isn’t currently in the Sears List. But if, you, in your library, have some books about leopards and think it would be useful to your users to add a local heading for “Leopards,” then you are not only allowed to do that by Sears, but encouraged to do it. (You can find more information about this in the “Maintaining a Catalog” section of the Principles of Sears List of Subject Headings.)

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I’ve talked about Sears and where it came from and a little about how it works, so now I’d like to talk with you about how to suggest improvements to Sears. 

One way to suggest improvements is emailing Grey House. There’s an email address to contact the editor, and the salespeople at Grey House compile comments and share them with the editor. Which, for now, is no one, but I have a new contract to provide some updates this summer, so this summer I’ll be the temporary editor again, and I’ll see any emails and I’ll be excited to add any terms or make revisions that people suggest. 

But, I want to suggest a slightly different approach, so I’m going to take a slight detour and talk a bit about Canada.

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In 1978, some school librarians in Canada published the Sears List of Subject Headings – Canadian Companion. It was 50 pages long, and was meant to be a supplement to the standard Sears List with Canadian-specific terms and historical periods. The example that I love here is that in the standard Sears List, the established term is “Ice hockey,” but in the Canadian Companion, they changed that to just “Hockey.” They also added terms like “Arctic sovereignty” and “Bush pilots,” and the ability to specify locations with their provinces, like, for example, adding the term “Vancouver (B.C.)”. There were six editions of the Canadian Companion published. The 21st edition of Sears, published in 2014, actually incorporated all the terms from that sixth edition into the main list. So now there’s no longer a separate Canadian Companion; those Canadian-specific terms are incorporated into the same version as the standard list. 

So one way South African librarians could consider approaching this work is by forming a working group to decide which headings would be most helpful for using in South African libraries. Think about this: if you could add, let’s just say, 200 headings to Sears that would reflect South African history and culture, what would you want to add? What if you brainstormed a list as a group? That might be a more effective way to have additions to Sears that reflect the unique aspects of South African history and culture. You could take the approach of the Canadian Companion and publish this supplementary list separately, or you could work with me (or whoever the next Sears editor is) to add those to the standard Sears list. 

I know that might sound like a lot of work, but I’m just putting that idea out there in case you think it’s worth considering. I could sit here and tell you that I can add more South African topics in Sears, but I’m just an American, and I don’t know your history and your cultures nearly as well as you do. If you were interested in doing a project like this, I’d be happy to help every step of the way.

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Of course, just adding South African terms to a system that has an American bias doesn’t make that system not biased, right? So, I want to be clear, that’s not a solution that fixes all the problems with Sears. A big part of my thoughts about critical cataloging in general is that library workers outside of the U.S. shouldn’t need to rely on these U.S.-biased systems at all. Honestly, if you can create a working group that agrees on 200 new headings, I would say you could do better than just relying on Sears or LCSH. You can create your own vocabulary. You can create multiple vocabularies! You can create vocabularies that reflect the language and worldviews of the people who use your libraries. 

But I know that probably feels like an unreasonable thing for me to ask of you. So, maybe, instead, let’s start small. Let’s start this work together. Let’s start by making small improvements to these systems for your patrons. I would be delighted to work with any of you to make things a little better tomorrow than they were yesterday.