The Program for Cooperative Cataloging held its semi-annual meeting last week. It would normally be held in conjunction with ALA Midwinter or Annual but was virtual again this time around. Judith Cannan, the head of the Policy, Training and Cooperative Programs Division at the Library of Congress, gave a very interesting thought piece called "Emerging thoughts on LCSH" (the link is to my notes on the meeting) which she cautioned was purposefully unpublished (not even lecture slides) but was to encourage thinking about the future of LCSH.
The Library of Congress Subject Headings originated in 1898 though I'm sure LC did subject access in their catalogs before that. It was maintained for LC and by LC. In the century and more since then, it has expanded far beyond LC and many other libraries contribute subject headings, most through the Subject Authority Coooperative Program or SACO.
Cannan's thoughts focused on four areas: the support of LCSH as an international standard is not sustainable with LC resources; the current model is built on literary warrant in published resources and a possible expansion to newspapers, TV, magazines as terminology sources; deprecation of terms which are outdated or offensive; and pre- or post-coordination of terms. How to handle deprecated terms has generally been handled by making a reference from the old term to the new term. There is significant effort going on with revision of headings as the U.S. and the whole world are dealing with systemic racism, social injustice, and other issues. The old terminology is important for some research and may appear in transcribed and descriptive portions of the bibliographic record. Much to think about and the chat box in the iCohere software was very busy.
I was listening to Weekend Edition as I drove to Wegmans for my Sunday morning fix: the Sunday New York Times and the week's groceries. One of the stories was "Newsrooms revisit past coverage as editors offer a fresh start" by David Folkenflik. One phrase he said really stood out in light of thinking about literary warrant from newspapers. He called news reporting "the first draft of history." This so lined up with Judith Cannan's thoughts on the role of history in how we catalog. One of our intentions is that our cataloging can be as objective as possible and therefore last, if not forever, a long time. But words cannot be objective. They are loaded with cultural significance and that changes over time.
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