After our last post — on the changing terms of catalogs and finding aids — a follower, Chris Aldrich, posed this question:
“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?”
I flashed back to my first visit, in 2017, to the Johns Hopkins Peabody Library, which today is part of Mount Vernon’s Peabody Conservatory campus. Even if you’ve never visited the place (and you should next time you’re in the neighborhood,) you’ve likely seen photos of the Peabody Library which is world-renowned. Opened in 1878, its stack room towers with “five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies, which rise dramatically to the skylight 61 feet above the floor.” Most days, you’ll find students and scholars studying there. But many nights, the Peabody Library is a site for weddings, university functions, and these days to the Peabody Ballroom Experience, coordinated by our friend, librarian Joseph Plaster.
I learned most of this only later. On that first walk through the Peabody Library, I was awed by the architecture and mostly curious about what this 19th century collection held in the way of historical materials. I knew, of course, that I could search for much if not all of its holdings via the University Libraries catalog, Catalyst, and you can have a peek at Catalyst here. But turning to leave, I spotted what I was really looking for, nestled in a nook, nearly out of sight. There were the old card catalogs: Hard wood, small, deep drawers, brass handles, still marked on the outside alphabetically, by title, author, and subject. They were, I knew, a snapshot of the library’s past.
As a Black Studies scholar I was immediately curious about how, when the catalog was in use, my field had been listed. I began to pull drawers, remembering immediately how awkwardly heavy they are. I fingered my way through where I thought I’d find entries: African American, Afro-American, Black. Nothing there. I had to then brainstorm like it was 1999, or was it 1989, 1979, or even earlier, to discover the right term. As far back as 1984, the Library of Congress, whose subject headings most research libraries in the United States utilize, admitted that it was “frustrating” to search for Black people in its catalog because two terms were simultaneously in use: “Afro-Americans” and “Blacks.”1 Neither term made it into the old Peabody Library catalog, so perhaps it and the terminology it reflected dated from an even earlier time.
“Negro” came to mind. I recognize that to many ears this is an offensive term, too close to the N-word for use in respectful conversation or in a library catalog, and I’ve written a bit about how in 2010, inclusion of the term Negro on the U.S. Census ignited controversy in this essay, “What’s in a Name?”2 In its defense, the Bureau explained that it had kept the term because it remained the preferred or most easily recognizable word among Black elders. This was my father’s generation, one that had insisted on being called Negroes rather than colored in the earlier decades of the 20th century. The Library of Congress discontinued the use of “Negroes” as a subject heading in 1976. Going forward, the Library determined to us the term “Afro-Americans” for materials on the “permanent residents of the United States,” while using “Blacks” for materials on persons “outside the United States.”3
And there it was, in a drawer that began with “Nebraska” and ended with “Neon,” the old Peabody catalog showed its age as a pre-1976 artifact that used subject categories which included “Negro,” “Negro Race,” “Negroes,” and “Negroes-Education.” Chris Aldrich’s point was an important one. By retaining its card catalog, though no longer updated, the Peabody Library provided me and other researchers an opportunity to discover a snapshot of the library, its cataloging practices, and more. Was it hard, as in difficult, unwelcoming, and even violent, for patrons to encounter terms such as Negro in the Peabody catalog? Yes, research on such terminology suggests (though with the caveat that this varied among generations.) Is it difficult, or hard, for this researcher to discover the word still “in use” in a historical artifact on our campus? Yes. I was a first year college student in 1976 and don’t have to dig deep to recall that by then I preferred Black and Afro-American as terms of self-identification. That year, as a student new to Black Studies, I was changing. And so, it turns out, was the Library of Congress.
BTW, you can read Nicholson Baker’s 1994 essay “Discards,” from The New Yorker, here, and more from Chris Aldrich over at his fascinating Substack @notemaking, here:
.— MSJ
Carole A. Larson, “Library of Congress Subject Headings: Blacks,” Negro History Bulletin, 47, no. 3 (July, August, September 1984): 13-16.
For a probing look at the history of the N-word see, Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Random House, 2003) and Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007). On the N-word in the classroom, see Dr. Koritha Mitchell, “Teaching & the N-word: Questions to Consider,” March 23, 2018, and listen to “The N-word in the Classroom: Just say NO,” a C19 Podcast. You can also watch Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor on “Why It’s So Hard to Talk About the N-Word,” courtesy of TEDxEasthamptonWomen.
Daniel N. Joudrey, Arlene G. Taylor, and David P. Miller, Introduction to Cataloging and Classification, 11th edition (Libraries Unlimited, 2015).