Critcatenate: #critcat in August 2022

Critcatenate is an effort to keep folks up to date on critcat efforts with a monthly roundup of news. Critcat is short for critical cataloging, focusing on the ethical implications of library metadata, cataloging, and classification standards, practice, and infrastructure.

#critcat in August 2022:

• • New survey on libraries’ local changes to “Illegal immigration” & related subject headings. Please complete the survey whether you’ve made local changes or not!
  • New series of video recordings now available: from the ARLIS (Art Libraries Society) Cataloguing and Classification Committee’s ethics series, recorded in May-June 2022:
    • Cataloguing Code of Ethics 2021: Conception, Community, and Continuation with Jane Daniels and Diane Rasmussen Pennington
    • Decolonization, Distance and Ethics: Cataloging & Classification of North American Indigenous Knowledge in UK Libraries with Nicole Brandon
    • British Library’s Race Equality Action Plan with Alan Danskin
    • Cataloging North American Indigenous Languages at the British Library with Rebecca Slatcher
    • Inclusive Terminology for the Heritage Sector with Carissa Chew
    • Towards Conscientious Bilingual Description on the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership with Curstaidh Reid & David Woodbridge
    • Provisional Semantics, Projects and Positionality: Findings from the TaNC Provisional Semantics Project with Ananda Rutherford
    • The History and Challenges of Cataloguing Ethiopian Manuscripts with Eyob Derillo.
  • New report: Best Practices for Cataloging Comics and Graphic Novels Using RDA and MARC21 from the Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table (GNCRT) Metadata and Cataloging Committee.
  • Find tweets from the August 17th #ChatOpenS Twitter chat on the Open Rules for Cataloging Project.
  • New recording available: Cataloging Middle Eastern Video Recordings Using RDA and MARC21 with Cyrus F. Zargan, hosted by the Middle East Librarians Association’s Committee on Cataloging.
  • New recording available: National Library of Medicine Office Hour: Listening Session on the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), with a feisty discussion about the 2022 addition of “Blacks” and additional terms for ethnic groups, and an attempt to address concerns of librarians requesting more transparency in the creation & maintenance of MeSH. Highly recommended watching for critcat folks, even if you’re not a medical librarian.
  • New (preprint) article: “Temporal Concept Drift and Alignment: An Empirical Approach to Comparing Knowledge Organization Systems Over Time” by Sam Grabus, Peter Melville Logan, Jane Greenberg. Interesting!
  • Sign up for the email list to get updates from the Queer Metadata Collective.
  • New to me: A Guide to Conscious Editing at Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, an 168-page document published in June featuring thoughtful short articles on archival description and cataloging, including content warnings, providing context, bias in LCSH, and more.
  • New to me: On Critical Cataloging: Q&A with Treshani Perera, published in June in Library Journal. (A great read about how to get involved with these efforts!).

I’m doing a brief review of the new LCSH lists for headings that might be of interest to readers of Critcatenate. FYI, LCSH list numbers consist of a two-digit number for the year and a two-digit number for the month the headings were approved (so, for example, headings on list 2206 were approved in June 2022).

New LCSH of note on list 2206:

• new heading: Climate justice
• new heading: March Massacre, Azerbaijan, 1918
• revised heading: from Primitive societies to Prehistoric peoples [and multiple related changes; shoutout to Jamie Carlstone at Northwestern for making these happen!]
• new heading: Primitive man stereotype
• revised heading: from Primitive societies in literature to Primitive man stereotype in literature
• new heading: White privilege (Social structure) [Shoutout to Israel Yáñez for making this happen! Find more info about the history of this heading.]

Upcoming:

• Wednesday September 21: “Social Justice in Cataloging: A Roundtable Discussion,” hosted by the Middle East Librarians Association’s Committee on Cataloging, featuring Amber Billey, Basma Chebani, Michelle Cronquist, and Denise Soufi. Free registration.
• Tuesday September 27: an untitled webinar hosted by ALA’s Authority Control Interest Group, featuring a presentation on local authority records to address DEI issues & an introduction to the RVM thesaurus from Québec. Free registration.
• February 22-24, 2023:  Terms of Art: Design, Description, and Discovery in Cataloging, a virtual symposium on ethical description & vocabulary in GLAM institutions, hosted by the Hood Museum of Art and Dartmouth Research Computing

Please get in touch if I’ve missed anything relevant, I’d be happy to add it to next month’s report!