Critcatenate is an effort to keep folks up to date on critcat efforts with a monthly-ish roundup of news. Critcat is short for critical cataloging, focusing on the ethical implications of library metadata, cataloging, and classification practice, standards, and infrastructure.
#critcat in June 2023:
- New recording from June 2023 OCLC Cataloging Community Meeting, featuring presentations on:
- The U.S. Board on Geographic Names – An Overview of the Processes for Approving Geographic Names for Federal Use, presented by Betsy Kanalley, Geospatial Products and Services Program Manager, USDA Forest Service
- Reparative Geographic Name Changes: Case Studies in Cataloging, presented by Kate James, Program Coordinator, Metadata Engagement, OCLC
- Queering the Catalog: SACO Gender and Sexuality Funnel, presented by Margaret Breidenbaugh, Library Specialist, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, and Maya Espersen, Cataloging Coordinator, Aurora Public Library (Colorado)
- Rapid Harm Reduction Through Locally Defined Subjects in WorldCat Discovery presented by Grace McGann, Associate Product Manager, Delivery Services, OCLC
- New blog post about changes in Dewey relating to drag, transvestism/cross dressing, and gender dysphoria (titled “How can people change their minds about us if they don’t know who we are?” – Harvey Milk) by Dewey editor-in-residence Kathryn Becker
- New news article: From Dewey to Deer: How NWSS is working to decolonize its library featuring the New Westminster Secondary School in British Columbia adopting the Brian Deer Classification [editorial note: for a non-Indigenous collection??]
- New-ish video of presentation: Controlled Vocabularies in Practice: Reparative Description, webinar hosted in April 2023 by the Society for American Archivists Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards and Description Section, featuring Michelle Cronquist talking about the African American SACO funnel, Rachel Aileen Searcy discussing the application of Homosaurus terms, and John DeSantis talking about the “Illegal immigration” headings
- New Homosaurus update: version 3.4 (June 2023) terms have been published, building on relationships with the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, Leather Archives and Museum, InterACT (an intersex rights organization), etc.
- New blog post: Changes to our Library: the Gender, Relationships and the Family section describing changes to an in-house classification system at the UK’s Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust
- New presentation slides: Changing the Representation of Disabilities in Description & Classification presented by Violet Fox, Mackenzie Johnson, Trina Soderquist, and Carlie Forsythe at ALA Annual conference
- New-ish blog post: Creating a Community-Centric Controlled Vocabulary from the Chicago Collections Consortium, written by Gretchen Neidhardt and Kate Flynn
- New-ish presentation slides: If You See Something, Submit Something: A Beginners Guide to Contributing to Controlled Vocabularies, slides from a presentation by Sherman Clarke, Sarah Osborne Bender, Alexandra Provo, Andrea Puccio at ARLIS/NA (Art Libraries Society of North America) conference in April 2023. Discusses contributing to LCSH, Getty Vocabularies, and Wikidata
- Also relevant, the Cataloging Problems Discussion Group from ARLIS/NA
- New-ish webinar recording: Critical Cataloging: What? Why? How? presented by Alyssa Nance, Tiffany Henry, and Anna Craft at the 2022 Southeast Collaborative Online Conference
- News article from April 2023: WJC urges libraries to reclassify Holocaust denial content, discussing a letter sent from the World Jewish Congress to the Library of Congress arguing that “placing books that deny the Holocaust alongside books about the Holocaust lends Holocaust denying content an undeserved credibility and does a disservice to the pursuit of academic research and intellectual honesty”
- Blog post from last year that I’d missed: Reparative Description and the Archiving of Slavery Documents by Charla Wilson, Archivist for the Black Experience at Northwestern Libraries
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 (for example, headings on list 2303 were approved in March 2023).
New LC headings of note on list 2303:
- New LCSH: Black lives matter movement in art
- Revised LCSH: Children of egg donors and Children of sperm donors have been cancelled in favor of Donor conceived people
- New LCSH: Female monsters in literature
- New LCSH: Gay men in comics
- New LCSH: Gender-nonconforming people–Identity (with a BT of Gender identity)
- New LCSH: Nostalgia in video games
- New LCSH: Pandemics in literature
- New LCSH: Pansexuality
- New LCSH: Working class Hispanic Americans
New LC headings of note on list 2305x:
- Revised LCDGT: Mormons has been revised to Latter Day Saints
Upcoming:
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- Monday July 10–Friday July 14: 2023 LD4 Conference on Linked Data. Free registration is now open. Sessions include:
- Ethics in Linked Data Book Panel, presented by Bri Watson, Alexandra Provo, and Kathleen Burlingame, the editors of the new Ethics in Linked Data book to be published this month by Library Juice Press
- Proactive Strategies to Improve Underrepresentation in Public Knowledge Graphs: A Wikidata Sprint in UNLV Special Collections Highlighting LGBTQ+ Las Vegas, presented by Darnelle Melvin
- How do you model my gender? Studying gender representation in the Wikidata knowledge base, presented by the Wikidata Gender Diversity (WiGeDi) project
- Developing Multilingual LGBTQ+ Linked Open Vocabularies, presented by Shuai Wang
- Tuesday July 11 (and repeated on Thursday July 20): Debiasing Dewey: Righting the past by rewriting the classification. “Hear from senior editor Alex Kyrios and editor-in-residence Kathryn Becker about some of the work in recent years, especially on topics related to LGBTQ people.”
- Thursday July 13: Reparative Description: Confronting Anti-Blackness in Archives presented by Melissa J Nelson from Archives of Ontario and hosted by the Amherstburg Freedom Museum
- Thursday July 20: 2023 Metadata Justice in Oklahoma Libraries & Archives Symposium, an online all-day event. Free registration is now open. Sessions include:
- Everyone Belongs Here: Creating an Inclusive Public Library Local History and Genealogy Collection, presentation by Michelle Skinner, Chickasha Public Library
- The Fus Fixico Classification System, a presentation about a new local classification for Oklahoma history and tribal resources, presented by Heather D. Hutto, Justice Sweger, Amanda Harding, M&ABJ Bristow Public Library
- Constructing a Values-Based Foundation for Metadata Justice Work, an interactive activity run by Bailey Hoffner, Oklahoma State University
- The Creation of the Tribal Nations of Oklahoma Metadata Database, presentation by Kaitlyn Palone, University of Central Oklahoma; Megan Macken, Oklahoma State University; Lulu Zilinskas, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum
- Beyond Exploitation: Metadata Justice and Prison Labor, presentation by Kristen C. Howard, McGill University
- Perspectives from SACO Funnel Coordinators, panel discussion with Michelle Cronquist, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and African American Subject Funnel Coordinator; Margaret Breidenbaugh, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College and Gender & Sexuality Studies Funnel Co-coordinator; Maya Espersen, Aurora Public Library and Gender & Sexuality Studies Funnel Co-coordinator; Sara Levinson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Latin American and Indigenous Peoples of the Americas (LAIPA) Funnel Coordinator; and Deborah Tomaras, Marist College and Comic and Fiction Funnel Co-coordinator
- Thursday July 25: “Doing Diversity” in Library Collections: Social Justice in Action, presented by Margaret Breidenbaugh, discussing actionable steps in three areas of diversifying collections: critical cataloging, diversity audits, and patron education
- Tuesday August 8 (and repeated Thursday August 17): Rapid Harm Reduction with Locally Preferred Subjects in WorldCat Discovery. “Grace McGann will present on locally preferred subjects in WorldCat Discovery. This feature enables libraries to rapidly reduce harm in item description by defining local, inclusive subjects for display.”
- Monday July 10–Friday July 14: 2023 LD4 Conference on Linked Data. Free registration is now open. Sessions include:
Please get in touch if I’ve missed anything relevant, I’d be happy to add it to next month’s report!