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.
N.B.: Your faithful Critcatenate editor was laid off from her cataloging job in July and is still out of work. đ© Send job offers & good vibes her way!
#critcat in November 2025:
- New interview: ALA at 150: An Interview with (and by) Sanford Berman, interview by Jenna Freedman at the Lower East Side Librarian blog
- New surveys: The ALA Subject Analysis Committee’s Working Group on Local Headings seeks to survey libraries, archives, museums and associated institutions about their involvement in the work of revising subjects, genres, and other authority data in their local catalogs. This work might include changing, augmenting, or masking terms from controlled vocabularies such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), creating local headings, etc. They’ve got two surveys to assess both (1) needs for implementing local subject headings and (2) existing methods utilized for implementing local subjects; you can take one or both surveys.
- Take the survey on local heading needs to share what support you think your institution would need to make changes to subjects, genres, and other authority data in the local catalog.
- Take the survey on methods used for local headings to share what methods your institution uses or has used to make changes to subjects, genres, and other authority data in the local catalog.
- New survey: Ramification of DEI shifts in higher education on reparative cataloging activity: a research project to explore how recent political legislation and policy shifts within the U.S. regarding DEI (equity, diversity, & inclusion) in higher education are impacting DEI reparative metadata/cataloging efforts in academic libraries and archives in the U.S., Canada, or Mexico. The survey is intended to illuminate how the current political climate in the U.S. in 2025 impacts the efforts of reparative cataloging and metadata work in academic libraries. Survey conducted by Soojeong Herring, the Metadata Manager at Northeastern University, and Tiffany Henry, the Metadata & Institutional Repository Librarian at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
- New blog post: The Most Dangerous AI Tool for Libraries Yet : How Class-Shelf Plus v3 quietly turns censorship into an automated workflow and why every librarian should be alarmed by Elissa Malespina. [Editor’s note: Unclear if this tool uses subject headings or classification to make decisions, but seems likely!]
- New post: a popular post on LinkedIn about the de-professionalisation of cataloging by Ann Spinney
- New conference poster: âI See Inclusive Description as the Practice That Slowly, Hopefully, Edges Out the Need for Reparative Descriptionâ : Exploring How Archival Practitioners Describe Queerness Within and Through Finding Aids by Travis Wagner and Evan Allgood, published in the ALISE 2025 proceedings
- New report: Reparative Description and Metadata Remediation Planning at the University of Michigan Deep Blue Institutional Repositories by Rachel Woodbrook and Alexandria Rayburn
- New video: Censorship and Reparative Description by MLIS student Sydney Hemp
Please let me know if thereâs anything I’ve missed!