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 October 2024:
- New survey: Tiffany Henry, Discovery Cataloger at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, has created a new survey relating to critical cataloging and EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) metadata projects. The research project seeks to understand the types of metadata projects undertaken by LIS professionals specializing in metadata or cataloging in academic libraries around the United States within the past five years.
- New survey: the LAIPA (Latin American and Indigenous Peoples of the Americas) SACO Funnel is reviewing how people of Latin American descent and Spanish speakers are represented in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and their new “Hispanic Americans” LCSH survey asks questions about what terminology is most commonly used for resources about Latin Americans/Hispanic Americans
- New petition: All nine librarians at Western Illinois University are scheduled to be laid off in May 2025, including their Cataloging Librarian. All you need to do to support these librarians is sign the petition that will be sent to the WIU Board of Trustees; find more info at the Save WIU Librarians website
- New zine: Connecting with Our Radical History in Cataloging by Violet Fox, Elissah Becknell, Tina Gross, Amy Gabbert-Montag, Jaylene Telford, and Charlotte Kadifa. Created as part of a presentation for the Minnesota Library Association Annual Conference, the zine discusses the history of radical cataloging efforts and more recent updates; includes excerpts and illustrations from the Hennepin County Library (Minnesota) HCL Cataloging Bulletin, mostly from the 1970s
- New toolkit: Inclusive Metadata Toolkit, published by the DLF Cultural Assessment Working Group (CAWG). The toolkit consists of two components: the Inclusive Metadata Toolkit guide document, which provides context for the listed tools and resources in order to make them easier to use and navigate, and the Inclusive Metadata Toolkit resource directory, which serves as a sortable and filterable directory of inclusive metadata tools and resources to help you wherever your institution is at
- New news story: about the reclassification of the book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story by Linda Coombs
- Texas Condemned for Placing Book on Colonization in Library’s Fiction Section in The Guardian
- Texas County Sidelines Librarians, Reclassifies Book on Abuse of Native Americans as “Fiction” by Judd Legum
- Decision in Texas Reclassifying Celebrated Native Book Diminishes Indigenous History in America press release from PEN America
- Attacks on People’s Stories Are Attacks on People. Just Ask a Librarian. in The Washington Informer
- Montgomery County Library Will Reclassify Book About Native Americans Amid Pressure in Chron
- Texas County Reverses Classification of Indigenous History Book as Fiction in The Guardian
- New assignment: Thinking Critically about Knowledge Organization created by Carolyn Caffrey. “This is part of an introductory first-year class to the university where students are introduced to the library and asked to think critically about how information is organized using the framework of critical cataloging. After watching a short video [“Queering Classification”] on the idea of classification and its problems with fixing identity categories, students analyze and categorize selected book from the collection, and then reflect on how knowledge is organized and their choices as authors.”
- New article: Learning Takes More Than One Way of Knowing: Embedding Indigenous and Queer of Color Theory within Knowledge Organization Resources by Lydia Curliss, Travis L. Wagner, and Diana E. Marsh, published in The Library Quarterly. Focuses on how how archival professionals and students are taught about cultural knowledges in archival description and how interventions could be applied to promote reparative justice
- New article: How Did We Get Here? Race and Ethnicity in Dewey Decimal Classification by Lisa Thornton, published in Knowledge Organization
- New article: Analysis of Two Thesauri Specializing in Women’s and Gender Studies by Luciane Paula Vital and Fabio Assis Pinho, published in Knowledge Organization. Reviews two Brazilian thesauri, the Tesauro para estudos de gênero e sobre mulheres (Thesaurus for Studies on Gender and Women) and the Tesauro de género: lenguaje con equidad (Gender Thesaurus: Language with Equity)
- New article: Representing Gender in Library Catalogue: Developing Multilingual Homosaurus for Automated Subject Indexing by Roshni Mitra and Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay in the Journal of Information and Knowledge
- New article: When Catalogers and Archivists Come Together: The Creation of the Metadata Justice in Oklahoma Libraries & Archives Symposium by Shay Beezley and Heather Scheele-Clark, published in Collaborative Librarianship
- New issue: Volume 68, number 4 of Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS) is dedicated to inclusion, diversity, equity and access. Critcat-related articles include:
- Inclusive Collecting, Inclusive Cataloging: Acquiring and Describing Award-winning Books Honoring Diverse Experiences by Karen Kohn, Emily Crawford, Noa Kaumeheiwa, Jenny Pierce
- Keepin’ it Inclusive: Inclusive Cataloging Scholarship of the 1990s by Tiffany Henry, Alyssa Nance
- Rules, Privacy, and Ethics: Challenges in Creating Author Name Change Guidelines by Angela Yon, Emily Baldoni, Eric Willey
- Increasing the Discoverability of LGBTQ+ Materials: A Case Study of the Homosaurus and Vendor Automation by Kyle Tanaka, Brinna Michael, Sofia Slutskaya
- Text Mining Bibliographic Metadata for Inclusivity: Analyzing Most Frequent Words in Titles, Summaries, and Subjects by Janelle Bitter
- Where Do I Belong? Creating an Inclusive Metadata Policy by Nicole Lewis, Karen Glenn, Jeremy Myntti, Sharolyn Swenson, Katie Yeo
- New-ish article: Homosaurus, Queer Vocabularies, and Impossible Metadata by B.M. Watson in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
- New-to-me blog post: Women, Disability, and Reparative Description in IWA by Iowa Women’s Archives student specialist Abbie Steuhm (from 2023)
- New presentation: Queering Archival Metadata? The Discoverability of Queer Collections in GLAM Institutions and Universities in Aotearoa/New Zealand by Alison Day. Look for the full paper in the upcoming DCMI 2024 proceedings
- New presentation recording: How and Why Critical Cataloging and Reparative Description Support DEI Goals at CMU and Globally by Central Michigan University archivist Marian Matyn
- New presentation recording: Reparative Redescription and Metadata Migration at the University of Virginia by Katie Rojas, describing their strategy for updating descriptive metadata and migrating it from various legacy systems and formats into ArchiveSpace
- New webinar recording: Approaches to Reparative Archival Description in Yale Special Collections by Jennifer Coggins, Monika Lehman, and Michelle Peralta of Yale University Library’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group
- New webinar recording: What We’re Learning: Implementing a Harmful Language Audit, describing the project Entitled Excavating Bias: A Reparative Audit of Philadelphia Area Finding Aids. Speakers are John Anderies of the William Way LGBT Community Center, Betts Coup of Harvard University, Faith Charlton of Princeton University, and Sam Sfirri of the University of Pennsylvania
- New webinar recording: A Diversity Audit of Juvenile Picture Books: What We Did, What Went Well, What We Would Never Do Again!! by Stephanie Anderson of Albany Public Library, includes significant discussion of description challenges in ensuring diversity in children’s books
- New award announcement: the 2024 Nancy DeLaurier Award of the Visual Resources Association was awarded to members of the Trans Metadata Collective in recognition of their role in the research and development of “Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources”
- New checklists available: a volunteer group of catalogers known as the SACO Volunteer Trainers Group has created multiple new checklists to ensure anyone submitting new LCSH are consulting the correct instructions sheets. All checklists can be found at the SACO Resources page. The new checklists are:
- Geographic names
- Parks, reserves, national monuments, etc.
- Buildings
Upcoming:
- Wednesday Nov 13: Metadata, Metadata, Metadata hosted by the Ohio Digitization Interest Group. Online; register by Monday, November 11, 5pm. Presentations include:
- Best Practices for Queer Metadata by Chloe Misorski
- Edward B. Taylor Collection (containing more than 700 images of Dayton’s African-American community) by Rachael Bussert & Karen Brame
- Friday Nov 15: Creating Maawn Doobiigeng: Developing A New Classification System for a Tribal Library presented by Kehli Henry and Anne Heidemann, hosted by the Network of the National Library of Medicine. Find more information about Maawn Doobiigeng, the new classification system of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Libraries, at their website.
- Tuesday Nov 19: AI and the Ethical Librarian presented by the Oklahoma Library Association Technical Services Roundtable
Please let me know if there’s anything else coming up or I’ve missed anything!