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 January 2025:
- New call for chapter proposals: The Relationships of Description: Experiencing the Power & Politics of Language (book under contract with Routledge), edited by Jamie A. Lee, Gracen Brilmyer, Joyce Gabiola & Sandy Littletree. “We seek chapter proposals that offer deep reflections on description practices across libraries, archives, and museums. We especially seek submissions that draw on critical experiences, reflections, and interventions that draw on critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, trans theory, Indigenous studies, disability studies, and/or other critical perspectives. We encourage submissions from international perspectives—from within and beyond North America, including Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Asia.” Chapter proposals due February 1.
- New-ish 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 podcast episode: episode 277 of Circulating Ideas is titled Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches, featuring an interview with Billey Albina, Elizabeth Nelson, and Rebecca Uhl, editors of the 2024 book Inclusive Cataloging
- New blog post: Naming Women in the Johnson Publishing Company Archive by Jacob Wolf, on the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Descriptive Notes blog. The blog’s editorial team is currently soliciting posts for a Inclusive Description series on inclusive and reparative projects and processes (and more) in archives and libraries.
- New scholarly article: Engaging the Space Between Minimal Processing and Inclusive Description to Create More Sustainable and Ethical Workflows by Alexandra deGraffenreid, published in The American Archivist
- New scholarly article: Archival Authority Records and the Potential of Human-centered Archival Description by Maristella Feustle, published in The American Archivist
- New scholarly article: Defining harmful content statements: cultural humility work that leads to institutional change and accountability by Challen R. Wright and Irina Rogova, published in the Journal of Documentation
- New scholarly article: Iniciativas de listas de encabezamientos de materia y tesauros para la equidad y la justicia social (Subject Headings Lists and Thesauri Initiatives for Equity and Social Justice) by Fabiola Rubim Silva and Paula Regina Dal’Evedove, published in Anales de Documentación
- New conference paper: Computational Approaches for Addressing Problematic Terminology in Museum Catalogues: A Knowledge Graph of Museum Critical Cataloguing Guidelines by Erin Canning, published in The Semantic Web: ESWC 2024 Satellite Events
- New scholarly article: Identifying Metadata Quality Issues Across Cultures by Julie Shi, Mike Nason, Marco Tullney, and Juan Pablo Alperin, published in College & Research Libraries. “Reviewing a sample of records, we identified and classified issues stemming from how metadata and communities press up against each other to intentionally reflect (or not) cultural meanings.”
I’m doing a brief review of the new LCSH lists for headings that might be of interest to readers of Critcatenate. 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 2409 were approved in September 2024).
New LC headings of note on list 2409:
- new LCSH: Civilization–Israeli influences
- new LCSH: Covenant marriage
- new LCSH: Cultural rights
- revised LCSH: from Elgin marbles to Parthenon sculptures
- new LCSH: Erotic massage
- new LCSH: Israelization
- new LCSH: Political violence in popular culture
- new LCSH: Positionality (Sociology)
- new LCSH: Racial gerrymandering
- new LCSH: Right-wing extremists in popular culture
- new LCSH: Transgender prostitutes
Note: LC announced at their January 2025 quarterly editorial meeting that they would reject the proposal to revise the subject heading to Gender critical feminism. The LCSH will remain Trans-exclusionary radical feminism. LC received over 300 emails/comments about this proposal.
Upcoming:
- Tuesday February 4th: “This Work is Urgent, This Work will Take Time”: Integrating DEIA into Resource Description Workflows, webinar hosted by NASIG, presented by Jennifer Browning and Kevin Burke at Carleton University Library
- Thursday February 6th: Machine Learning Approaches to Gender Bias in Archival Curation, part of Inclusive Collections, Inclusive Libraries, a RLUK (Research Libraries UK) virtual program. “Lucy Havens will report on research combining Machine Learning (ML) and human-centered research methods to identify gender biased language in archival catalogue metadata descriptions.”
- Friday February 7th: Library Association of the City University of New York hosts a LACUNY Cataloging Roundtable focused on “Metadata and Inclusion.” “The prompt for this roundtable is that each participant will deliver an informal, 5-10 minute presentation on one way in which metadata practices could be more inclusive. If you would like to participate, just email mdineiro@ccny.cuny.edu and pmcgowan@bmcc.cuny.edu with your presentation topic.”
- Wednesday February 12th: virtual OCLC Cataloging Community Meeting, featuring Bri Watson and Chloe Misorski discussing the Best Practices for Queer Metadata
- Tuesday March 4th: Repairing and Restoring Cultural Memory: The Library of Congress’s Ancestral Voices Initiative a Decade Later, part of Inclusive Collections, Inclusive Libraries, a RLUK (Research Libraries UK) virtual program. “Guha Shankar surveys an initiative of the US national library to collaborate with a Native American community and developers of cutting-edge digital technology to address critical issues in cultural representation, co-curation, intellectual access, knowledge repatriation and preservation”
- Thursday April 10th: Jumpstart Inclusive Cataloging, a half-day online course hosted by Library Journal and School Library Journal
Please let me know if there’s anything else coming up or I’ve missed anything!