A New Face for an Old Library Catalog
JHU Libraries' "Statement Regarding Harmful Content"
Join us LIVE on Wednesday, February 21, 2024 at 12 noon eastern time for "Hard Histories Methods: Rethinking our Archives” featuring Liz Beckman, Processing and Research Archivist with the Sheridan Library’s Special Collections and University Archives, and Dr. Heather L. Cooper, Project Archivist for the Reexamining Hopkins History Initiative. We'll learn more about the two are reprocessing and rewriting catalog and collection descriptions at Johns Hopkins. Registration is quick and always free, here.
We were at work in the Johns Hopkins Libraries “ArchivesSpace,” reviewing materials in the "Hopkins Family Collection,” and came across this message: “We are committed to correcting and contextualizing these records as we identify them, and we invite you to contact us at specialcollections@lists.jhu.edu if you encounter harmful language in our finding aids or collections." A bit more searching and we landed here at the Johns Hopkins Libraries "Statement Regarding Harmful Content.”
The Libraries’ statement reflects what researchers into the history of slavery and racism have long known: "Language that is inaccurate, outdated, and even offensive or harmful” has been a feature of library catalogs including the indispensable finding aids that permit us to navigate all collections, especially those that are voluminous and dense. Today, the “reparative description project” reviews “finding aids and catalog records, remediate these collections, and update our descriptive policies with guidelines to reflect this praxis."
Writing for Library Journal, Andrea Schuba explains how the University of Maryland Libraries approached the challenge of harmful content, explaining how she began wanting "to find a way to explain why harmful words appear in catalog records, instead of censoring the word or censoring the entire resource by not cataloging it.” Troubling content, she discovered, had varied sources including direct transcription from original sources, catalog records and finding aids long-ago composed by library staff, and, perhaps more relevant for hard histories investigations, as a guide to researcher into harmful subject matter.1 You can see the result of the UMD deliberations here.2
Related work, as in this example from SUNY Potsdam, illustrates how rethinking the content of library and archive catalogs includes a forwarding-looking dimension that aims to "decolonize” the library: Making historically marginalized voices visible though revised cataloging approaches. College and university libraries are not alone in these efforts, and the team at Potsdam points to the influence and leadership of the Library of Congress and its "Demographic Group Terms” Project and the Society of American Archivists and its "Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.”
At Hard Histories, we've also benefitted from insights out of "Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL),” one part of the Life x Code: DH Against Enclosure community, led by Johns Hopkins Professor Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson. Explore here how K4BL has worked to “treat documents with individuals of African descent with an ethic of care” and has, "at times … moved away from academic and editorial verbiage when describing the materials under our charge and our editorial process.”
A first encounter with a catalog or finding aid tells researchers a lot about what they can expect to find, in a collection but also in the orientation of a library or archive to their subject matter. Many of us during earlier years of "hard histories” work can testify to having encountered repositories that said "we have nothing for you here.” Our results proved the value of persistence: Undiscouraged, we dove in and discovered unknown or unacknowledged evidence. Today, in first forays, we are more likely to meet up with librarians and archivists who are allies and partners, also committed to recovering new truths and rewriting the catalogs, finding aids, indexes, and ethical scripts that guide historical research.
Join us on February 21st for a live look into how an examination of "harmful content” is reshaping the libraries at Johns Hopkins and beyond. Registration is here.
— MSJ
Andrea Schuba, "Writing and Implementing a Statement to Remediate Harmful Language in the Library Catalog. Peer to Peer Review,” Library Journal, December 6, 2022.
The Cataloging Lab maintains a partial list of statements from libraries and archives on harmful and offensive language here.
I've recently been reading Nicholson Baker's essay "Discards" about the discarding of library card catalogs in the late 1980s into the 90s. There he describes portions of cataloging data which was likely lost in the digitization process and it makes me wonder what sorts of contemporaneous data would have been included in collections that might give us a view into Hard Histories based on the cataloger's perspectives of these materials. Does Hopkins still have their original paper card catalog cards for potential study?
From a historical methods perspective, it also makes me wonder what libraries and archives are doing to maintain some of this historical data in the digital era. Are librarians using version control programs (like git or sgv) to timestamp and log changes in records over time (to note changing perspectives or changes with respect to language or categorizations with respect to their archives?)
Baker, Nicholson. “Discards.” In The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. 1st ed. Vintage Contemporaries. 1994. Reprint, Vintage, 1997. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/7554/the-size-of-thoughts-by-nicholson-baker/. (Originally published in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/04/04/discards)