LGBTQIA+ Issues Discussion #2: Subject Headings and Cultural Change
10 July 2024
Olson (2000) makes the argument that because of the way in which the LCSH have been ascribed authority, they can be an agent of cultural change. Do you think she’s correct that there is significant cultural authority ascribed to the LCSH? If so, how can we as practitioners leverage that authority to make cultural change?
So. In Difference, Culture and Change: The Untapped Potential of LCSH, Olson (2000) proposes that the Library of Congress’s subject headings (LCSH), as the nigh-universal, authoritative controlled vocabulary of the English-speaking world and beyond, and also a manifestation of how information is identified in its home country, can be utilized as a medium for cultural change. Olson discusses how the conventions embedded in the LCSH reflects and reinforces the marginalization of certain identities writ society at large—but by bringing in the concept of “Third Space” coined by postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha, Olson reminds us that the LCSH is not a “simple tool of domination [but] an ambivalent tool [that] seeks to be a universally applicable vocabulary treating topics with the neutrality of equality” (p. 66). By broadening the scope of the LCSH, taking risks to explicitly represent marginalized cultures while actively eliminating exclusions and either/or categorization, we as information professionals will be able to encompass the full breadth of cultures in a truly universal language.
While it took some time for me to wrap my head around things, I find Olsen’s theory compelling—at least at the prospect of modifying and broadening the LCSH’s vocabulary. If how “the public” uses and associates certain topics is how said topics are reflected in the organization of the LCSH accordingly, then there’s almost certainly a laundry list of terms that can be added for the specifics of queerness alone. How, exactly this change is supposed to play out is beyond me. My not-so-scholarly theory is that this would be a reversal of the reflection—if the LCSH defines the de facto vocabulary of scholars and professionals, then changing that vocabulary will change the content of research and statements deemed authoritative, which filters down to the statements of government figures and policymakers who actually care about authoritative data, which filters down to the public culture.
Ultimately, though, my hopes about the projected result do outweigh my doubts; doubts that hinge around a single question: who is this “public” we’re talking about here?
I don’t want to downplay our influence here. We all know that the majority of Americans trust the information that they get from libraries (Geiger, 2017), to say nothing of the fact that information that researchers and journalists retrieve from higher institutions have to be of the highest quality. But in an era where the most popular news sources are social media platforms that are increasingly hands off with moderation (Koebler, 2024), incentivizing sensational audiovisual content that disincentivize deeper understanding of things, and the most convenient methods of finding information are search engines actively corroding the already dubious information they provide to boot (Bevendorff et al., 2024) how much of the public is willing to actually sit and sift through multiple sources on the same topic? How much of the public is willing to get to know the search modifiers and subject headings and the like to find information on their own if information that goes down easier can be rung up with a couple taps? Queer people, singularly curious as they tend to be, generally find themselves in the former camp because they have little choice if they want to find the information they need—but as queerness became (past tense is intentional here) more mainstream over the past couple decades, I wonder how many would-be inquisitors drifted into latter as well.
I dunno. Perhaps we ought to be satisfied with providing clarity for the people who care about it, but it’s hard to wholeheartedly believe the potential of Olsen’s proposal when all the algorithms have been coded against us.
References
Bevendorff, J., Wiegmann, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B. (2024). Is Google getting worse? A longitudinal investigation of SEO spam in search engines. In Goharian, N., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14610. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56063-7_4
Geiger, A. W. (2017, August 30). Most Americans – especially Millennials – say libraries can help them find reliable, trustworthy information. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/08/30/most-americans-especially-millennials-say-libraries-can-help-them-find-reliable-trustworthy-information/
Koebler, J. (2024, June 24). Has Facebook stopped trying? 404 Media. https://www.404media.co/has-facebook-stopped-trying/
Olson, H. A. (2000). Difference, culture and change: The untapped potential of LCSH. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 29(1–2), 53–71. https://doi.org/10.1300/J104v29n01_04
Watson, A. (2024, June 28). Topic: News consumption in the United States. Statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/1640/news/