On Searching for Library Standards that Align with Library Values
On March 14, 2025, the Library of Congress changed the subject headings for the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America and Mount Denali to Mount McKinley. Despite outrage amongst catalogers about the flagrant violation of their own standards, LC cited a change from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (itself responding to Executive Order 14172) as an overriding concern. While LC, OCLC, and other major organizations promulgate standards that are used near-universally, librarians sometimes overlook the ideological commitments underlying these bodies. They serve more severe tyrants than the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles.
This session examines a small library’s crisis of conscience in building a repository subject vocabulary off of Library of Congress vocabularies. It surveys the most promising alternatives, ones with values that more closely align to those of librarianship. Specifically, we will review Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Homosaurus, and Wikidata. The nuances and difficulties of using these vocabularies for subject, genre, and name authorities will be discussed.