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?
Photo credit: Violet Fox