Category: Technical Services

Targeting Books for Removal at U.S. Military Libraries

screenshot of the header of the "Memorandum for senior pentagon leadership, Commanders of the Combatant Commands, Defense Agency and Department of Defense Field Activity Directors." The subject line reads "Reviewing the department's military educational institution library collections" and it is dated May 9, 2025.
The memorandum directing military college libraries to review books for “divisive concepts.”

In the course of looking for resources relating to critical cataloging, I stumbled on a new memorandum from the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, dated May 9th and titled “Reviewing the Department’s Military Educational Institution Library Collections.” The memorandum directs the military schools and academies under the Department of Defense to use a provided list of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to flag any books that are described with those subject headings, with the intent to identify, sequester, and potentially dispose of those books. The intention of this review is to remove educational materials at the schools “promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology [that] are incompatible with the Department’s core mission,” which is “providing the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”

This list of subject headings was created by a “temporary Academic Libraries Committee (ALC), comprised of knowledgeable leaders, educators, and library professionals drawn from across the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Military Departments” who will do the work of reviewing books and potentially removing them because they aren’t aligned with the viewpoint of the Trump presidential administration.

The subject headings listed are: 

  • Affirmative Action Programs — Law and Legislation — United States 
  • Affirmative Action Programs — United States
  • Affirmative Action
  • Allyship
  • Anti-Racism — United States
  • Critical Race Theory
  • Discrimination — Law and Legislation — United States
  • Diversity in the Workplace — United States
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  • Gender Affirming Care – United States
  • Gender Dysphoria
  • Gender Expression
  • Gender Identity — United States
  • Gender Nonconformity
  • Gender Transition
  • Transgender Military Personnel — United States
  • Transgender People — United States
  • Transsexualism — United States
  • Transsexuals — United States
  • White privilege (Social structure)

As a cataloger, it’s painful to see LCSH used to do this dirty work, to limit rather than expand access. As someone who has worked to increase access to materials relating to underrepresented populations, it’s particularly painful that some of the headings listed are newly established in the last few years. For example, the LCSH Allyship was established in 2023. I personally worked with a group of wonderful MLIS students to revise the subject headings for Gender transition (before 2020, this subject heading was established as Sex change). The subject heading White privilege (Social structure) has a notably long history of being proposed and rejected by the Library of Congress, with attempts being made to establish it in 2011 and 2016 before it was finally accepted in 2022.

Since the 2020 uprisings after the murder of George Floyd, a groundswell of catalogers has invested their time and energy into an often frustrating task—working to improve subject headings. This work is slow, exacting, and unglamorous (even by the standards of definitionally unglamorous cataloging work!), but the catalogers who do it find it worthwhile because we know the provision of accurate, up-to-date, respectful terminology will help library patrons find the information they need. We see it as our responsibility to bring together information about topics that are sensitive or frequently challenged. We take heart in the many stories of people finding books about their own identity on the library shelves, their discoveries facilitated by the careful work of catalogers. (For just one such story, see Alison Bechdel’s searching her college library’s card catalog for Homosexuality in Fun Home.)

Strikingly, the memorandum claims that the committee reviewing the books flagged with these subject headings “will take a viewpoint neutral approach and apply the definitions of ‘discriminatory equity ideology’ and ‘gender ideology’” from Trump’s executive order withdrawing federal recognition for transgender people. Of course, nothing could be less “viewpoint neutral” than investing in the Trump administration’s twisted philosophy of gender essentialism and targeting the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

The memorandum goes on to claim that the committee’s work “uphold[s] the principles of intellectual freedom necessary to educate military leaders ready to fight and win the Nation’s wars.” Librarians, is this your definition of intellectual freedom? 

Anticipatory Obedience at the Library of Congress

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Violet Fox to the ACRLog team. Violet is a Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University’s Galter Health Sciences Library. She is the creator of the Cataloging Lab, a wiki designed to encourage collaboration in library metadata. Violet is passionate about critical cataloging, zine librarianship, and promoting the mental health of library workers. 

On February 18, the Library of Congress (LC) sent an email announcement through its regular channels about a special list of revisions in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This list contained 45 proposed revisions to LCSH relating to Trump’s Executive Order 14172 “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” These revisions would change the LCSH for Gulf of Mexico to America, Gulf of, and would change the LCSH for Mount Denali back to McKinley, Mount (Alaska).

Geographic names in LCSH generally follow the form of name decided on by the US Board on Geographic Names, a body under the Secretary of the Interior. (This relationship is laid out in the LC Subject Heading Manual instruction sheet H 690 Formulating Geographic Headings.) The Board on Geographic Names takes its cues from the State Department, taking into account which countries the US has recognized.

It was not surprising that LC would follow the example of the US Board of Geographic Names, as that’s standard operating procedure. What wasn’t standard was the speed at which this revision was pushed through. Although the special list was backdated to February 13th, no one was notified of these revision proposals until the morning of February 18th, and the deadline for submitting comments was the same day, February 18th. This meant that catalogers had less than 24 hours to respond to these proposals, and our international colleagues in earlier time zones had no opportunity to respond to these proposals. The regular procedure for revisions to LCSH includes a three week comment period, which provides the chance to point out errors or potential conflicts. The proposed changes to the Gulf of Mexico and Mount McKinley headings were fully implemented in the authority file in mid-March.

Those of us who regularly propose revisions to subject headings know that the turnaround time for those proposals is usually a few months, and can take six months or longer for more complex revisions. For those of us who remember the more than five years of LC dragging its heels in making revisions to the Illegal aliens LCSH, the speed at which this change occurred was astonishing. 

We don’t know if LC was quietly given instructions to revise these headings by Congress members, or if LC leadership independently decided they wanted to show fealty to the Trump administration and avoid political pushback. Either way, the decision to not just implement these terms but to fast track the changes negates the principle that LCSH should represent the most commonly used terminology to ensure the discoverability of resources. By making these changes, LC has pushed the responsibility of reflecting common usage onto every single library using LCSH, which now must make the decision of what headings to use in their catalog (that is, if they have the capacity to locally revise headings in their catalogs—not all libraries have the technological or staffing capacity to do so).

Without any formal directives announced, I believe we can reasonably label LC’s actions as anticipatory obedience, the concept developed by historian Timothy Snyder describing actions aligning with perceived expectations before explicit directives are given. We can imagine why LC might have made that decision. In a February New York Times opinion piece, The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump, M. Gessen describes some of the arguments for compliance with authoritarian requests, including the idea that one must pick one’s battles, or that not complying is not worth risking people’s jobs. 

Still, the fact remains that these domineering name changes are now reflected not only in many US catalogs, but in library catalogs across the world. Power has been taught that even if they’re not looking very closely, the Library of Congress will change its vocabularies to reflect the capricious whims of the president, no matter how euphemistic or jingoistic. 

In the 1930s, future Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish wrote about the rise of anti-communism: “The real struggle of our time was not between communism and fascism but the much more fundamental struggle between democratic institutions on the one side and all forms of dictatorship, whatever the dictator’s label, on the other.” Does our current Librarian of Congress have as much strength of conviction?

The main building of the Library of Congress, a neoclassical building, as seen from several floors up on the building next door.
The Library of Congress Jefferson building, as seen from the Madison building.
Photo credit: Violet Fox

Relationship Priorities from the Forest to the Library

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I just returned from my annual family vacation in Colorado.  Amidst the forest bathing and a slower daily pace, I always experience a deep dive into relationship building on these trips.  Riding in a compact Fit for the eight hours it takes to get there, and living for a week in a different “home”,  does test and stretch patience.  The physicality of hiking and even adjusting to new altitudes requires a certain reckoning of oneself.  This year we were battling swimmers ear in high altitude and an overall slack in physical fitness. Both required accepting limitations in ways we weren’t used to and spending a greater amount of time in quiet inactivity.  With each year, however, I always discover new strengths and unique differences in myself, between fathering and mothering, wifery and husbandry, sibling to sibling, and among hikers who want to push on versus those who want to rest. 😉

This thinking on relationships helpfully segues my mind to the arrival of August and the start of a new school year. As the students return and faculty prepare course syllabi, my more isolated, internal, summertime work turns externally, patron-oriented.  As my library is also discussing its strategic priorities for the next two years, words like collaboration, partnership, engagement, and development abound.  In every practical discussion around seeing our own work in these priorities, the actionable path forward always points to relationship building.  Just me?  Perhaps.  As one of my favorite quotes suggests, I have come to believe relationships are key to how we accomplish real goals.

“If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to far GO TOGETHER.”
– African Proverb

I didn’t always think this way.  I usually preferred fast and alone.  Both personally and professionally, my default is still often internally-focused and analytical.  One of the stories I tell about my path to librarianship — besides it being the only result of my junior high career test — is that in my first job as an elementary school music teacher, I was much more interested in discussion music theory than singing songs.  Now, it’s true, I justifiably lacked the necessary accompanist skills.  Moreover, I know preference for the analytical side to just about everything was to blame.  “What a great match for librarianship!” I thought at the time, conceiving the profession as solely concerned with how things ought to be organized.    Working in libraries quickly taught me that the most efficient and organized ways involved learning from others.  My favorite analytical question soon became “Who?” rather than “How?” or “Why”.  Eventually learning to build relationships with vendors became the best way to get what was needed on both sides of a negotiation.  Understanding vendors’ relationships within their own organization helped alleviate undue aggravation and reduced miscommunication.   My first aha moment as a new leader (and still a magnificent daily challenge) is what comes from just listening to others.

Taking an analytical approach to building relationships made it easier for me in some ways.  But, like too much process thinking,  it has sometimes kept human connection at a safe distance.  I often got by using my analytical side to figure out how I respond to others and circumstances rather than in relationship together with them.  Let’s be fair. The relationship business is messy and time-consuming.  I’ve learned that can be OK, and how analysis is just one step of many to decluttering it.  Working through problems, successes, new ideas, and ultimately changing with others creates bonds.  As bonds suggest, I believe stronger relationships and work/life places result.

Thankfully, I can continue analyzing to my heart (or brain?)’s content with ACRLog and in my research.  My analytical passion now focuses on seeking ways in which technical services can get beyond mere transactions to richer, more interpersonal communication and sense-making.  It’s proven to be messy, challenging, and very worth it.

 

 

 

Confessions on Owning and Honing Your Weaknesses

The month of June marks the ramp up to fiscal close in my neck of the library wood.  In the otherwise quiet summer of academia there is this corner of buzzing frenzy. Staff work though last minute orders, pay invoices, troubleshoot problems, answer questions about the various statuses of the cash flow, and pull and prepare data to estimate a new year’s allocations.  In my role, I mostly coordinate various inter-dependencies of the workflows and people that must align for these numbers to be properly reconciled. Thankfully for all I’m not responsible for the number-crunching.

You see, I’ve never had the intuitive ease with numbers accountants, or it seems an acquisitions librarian, is expected to have.  I prefer to visualize and think around things rather than operate in the linear calculus that numbers require.  My analytical mind loves to think about cause and effect, and even the many complex inversions and formulas that produce usable data and its visualization. But producing those inversions on the spot, even in simple arithmetic, doesn’t come easy for me.  It explains why I was always terrible at timed math tests, but loved algebra and geometry.  I struggle with sewing patterns that instruct from the inside out, but love cooking, where I can follow strict instructions and play with them to my taste.

When I worked in serials, calculations took on linguistic obscurity when it came to publication frequencies and title changes.  “Is twice a month semi-monthly or bi-monthly?” Does continues mean what a title it used to be? Or what it will be going forward?”

And to this day, when gardening,  “Do annuals mean I plant them every year, or that they come back every year?!”

What gets me in trouble in all of this is my strong preference to operate intuitively and efficiently. This means I am often impatient with the extra time it takes me to slowly think through cost comparisons and reports. I know that extra time is necessary for me, though, to make sure it is done right.  Understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses in this way allows me to recognize the need to rely on other tools, systems, and people.  Relying on the strengths of others is not an excuse to avoid your weaknesses. In fact, identifying and using your particular strengths can be a tool to overcome weaknesses, and it can mean talking about those vulnerabilities in more empowering ways.

This important skill is perhaps most practically applied in job interviews, where some variation of “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” is no doubt asked. The best interviewers do this using behavioral questioning or appreciative inquiry techniques, which often ask for examples that demonstrate direct personal experience with particular skill or trait.  My first ever job interview was as a senior in high school, and I had no previous work experience.  So I had to answer questions about what I find difficult when working with others using only my school experience.  Thinking of various show choirs and musicals, where I had to practice and perform with my ex-boyfriend (among other  characters), I answered:

“Sometimes I have a hard time separating my personal life from my work.”

*crickets chirping*

Surprise! I did not get the job.  Not knowing a lot about myself at 17, I failed to realize my strength as a performer was precisely the fact that I actually can and do work with others, even those with whom ‘it’s complicated’, probably better than the average person.   Even though inside it was a hormonally-charged tornado of difficult emotion, I could summon my inner Olivia Newton John and nail Grease’s  “You’re the One That I Want” number with a smile on my face. With each interview I got a little stronger at framing my skills.  When interviewing for a waitress position, in which I did have some experience, I shared my thoughts about an unreasonably disgruntled customer, but described how I worked foremost to best meet that customer’s need.

As I’ve learned more about how my own strengths help my weaknesses, I know I thrive in project management roles because there is a framework to breakdown milestones, tasks, and timelines.  I thrive on learning to use new tools because they help me be more efficient and accurate.  Perhaps most importantly, I rely the strengths of the people with whom I work.  What is painstaking for one person is often the effortless strength of another who is happy to be asked to contribute what they do best.  When dealing with numbers, as I must inevitably do in the day-to-day work of acquisitions and resource sharing, I strategize (a strength of mine) to build in the extra time to sit with, play with, and picture data (my analytic strength).  I am constantly using my learning strength not just to find new tools that can help me, but to know more about myself and others.  I also have an individual relational strength that allows me to know and connect with other people and the unique strengths they offer.

In my seventeenth year experiencing and third year overseeing the fiscal close, I’m putting my anxiety around the numbers in better perspective. I’ve come to see that working through vulnerabilities and getting help where you need it is not abnormal at all. It’s what a responsible adult person would do.

Please tell me your favorite job interview story!  What would you do over, if you could, from a position of strength?

 

 

“Just…why?”: Coming to terms with ambiguity, resilience, and acceptance

As a former electronic resources librarian, along with what I’ll call my own unique set of life experiences, I’ve found the practice of radical acceptance has served me well.  Acceptance as an ongoing practice is not optimism or permissiveness, but healthily recognizing how and when to let go, and knowing that acceptance is not the same as approval.  This practice comes in handy, especially in life’s lemon-giving moments. I’ve mentioned a few  from the technical side of library work in previous posts.  Certainly the current sociopolitical climate is not at a loss for examples of this either.

When these “Seriously?” moments occur in my job, I am reminded of another idea, comfort with ambiguity, which frequently appears as a desirable skill in job advertisements, along with its companion resilience.  Both have been on my mind since attending a recent ACRL presentation,  Resilience, Grit, and Other Lies: Academic Libraries and the Myth of Resiliency.  As ubiquitous as both ambiguity and resilience are in my field, this presentation reminded me how poorly defined, misunderstood, and problematic they are when idealized professionally.  So I was thinking about how to unpack this concept related to my own academic librarianship and how a personal practice of acceptance (without approval) might play a helpful role.

It seems in the everyday ambiguity, as well as ambivalent with the same root, often describe something squishier.  For example, ambivalent is often misused to describe someone who is passively undecided or not invested in a particular outcome, rather than actually feeling multiple different ways about a thing. Similarly, ambiguity is often synonymous with an amorphous state of confusion than specific set of circumstances that make a solution unclear.

While inexactness and its synonyms might reflect this murky spirit, isn’t ambiguity really only inexact because it can’t be just one thing?  The fact that it can still be exactly many things is what I find interesting and overlooked in the experience of ambiguity.  Recognizing the possibility of multiple interpretations as specific, distinct avenues for action is especially important for efficiency and service in e-resources management.

Here’s a very basic example working with and a technical problem solving of e-resource access, which I repeatedly encountered when working with publishers’ technical support:

Me: Hi, My name is [me] from [my institution]. We have a current subscription to [your journal] but we’re not able access content online.

Tech Support:  What’s your institution’s [subscriber number, IP address, and other details]?

Me: *gives details*

Tech Support:  OK, it should be working now.

And that was it.  No explanation, no assurance it would not happen again, no way to plan workflow to prevent this very regular disruption.  Good problem solvers who thrive on the details of the problems and the solutions will no doubt feel frustrated and confused by this.  But the situation is no more a mystery than it is comfortable.  There likely is an exact cause for this problem. It’s just the cause is likely multiplicitous, complex, and in most cases less important than the fact that the problem is now fixed. So we move on.  In responding to the given ambiguous situation, we must accept the priorities of the current moment rather than the past or future.  This mindfulness of the present moment is a key part of the practice of acceptance.

Change may the new normal, but comfortable with ambiguity?

I think these tendencies show up in e-resources librarianship in particular because positions of this type developed from those which focused on the exacting and predictable realm of attention to detail.  Certainly the evolution of libraries content and services necessitates characterizing those details as now really messy and inexact.  But position descriptions mistakenly place this ambiguity in the context of a personal quality when it is really a quality of the environment.  To use such a problematic word, and to prefer people who are comfortable in that state, doesn’t say anything about how people should actually respond in these situations.  Expecting comfort in ambiguity falsely sets people up to stay in that state longer than may be necessary.

And this is where the problem of resilience comes in.  As the ACRL presentation I mentioned notes, research shows resilience often normalizes oppression of marginalized groups.  Systemically, I wonder how resilience hinders innovation, preventing us from answering the question “what can we stop doing?”.


So since, as a colleague once reminded me, the privileged have to be uncomfortable to recognize oppression, it is useful to discard a preference for comfort in the face of ambiguity.  Resilience or grit may help us more than comfort, as long as it is focused in the direction of action.  It should not be the normal or preferred quality of an individual professionally.

The idea of resilience as oppression also reminded me of another “What fresh h*!! is this?” experience working as an elementary music teacher.  At one of the two inner-city schools I was assigned, the music room was the stage in the gym’s auditorium. A burlap-like stage curtain was the only barrier between my music classes and the screaming, sneaker-squeaking, ball-bouncing, whistle-blowing activity of PE.  I often preface my sharing of this experience with disbelief that this was a reality to describe – it seemed so obviously nonsensical and in need of a solution.  So, I once spent a week’s planning periods reworking the entire school schedule so that all teachers still got their planning period during elective classes, but in a way that PE and music didn’t overlap.  Working out those complexities was frustrating and certainly not comfortable.  At the same time, I was driven to resist normalizing the resilience expected of the situation.  I knew this was more than a personal preference of the [should-be librarian] music teacher than the institution was leading me to believe.  Before leaving this job, I don’t think I ever gave these alternatives to my principal, but succeeded in getting a new curtain for the stage. When I noted to the principal that the change didn’t block sound as I’d hoped, I’ll never forget her response.

“Why do you care, since you won’t be here any longer?”

On one hand her response demonstrated everything that’s wrong with institutional resiliency.  At the same time I can also see it as an honest statement of my own realm of control.  When work and life inevitably boil down to “Just…what? Why is this normal?”, a practice of acceptance means neither normalizing nor pursuing crazy to find resolution.

The circus has left town

Image CC BY 2.0 with attribution:  matthew_pennell “The circus has left town”

If there is a proactive path through ambiguity or resilience, then I believe the skill we’re really after is how to recognize, reassess, and negotiate our power to influence and control.  This requires a constant give and take of our experience of that control as anxiety or relief.  It means exactly both action and letting go and not necessarily having to choose between the two.  When requiring choice, it means knowing how not to wrestle very long in the choosing.