By Tor Haugan, November 17, 2020, Berkeley News.
Editor’s note: This article contains terms that, while offensive, are included to provide historical context.
Gisèle Tanasse’s class visits come with an apology.
When she’s introducing students to the UC Berkeley Library, and helping them sift through its collections using the online catalog, she warns them about what they might find.
“You’re going to see some things that are really othering and problematic,” says Tanasse, Berkeley’s film and media services librarian, recalling her message to students during a pre-pandemic interview at Moffitt Library’s Media Resources Center. “And I’m sorry.” ....
If the topic of subject headings seems wonky and in-the-weeds, that’s because it is. But subject headings are also incredibly important and powerful, bundling materials by topic within and across libraries, and opening up worlds of information that otherwise may have slipped through the cracks.
“A keyword search, which a lot of students might think to do first, will maybe bring up something from the title, the author, something like that,” says Jean Dickinson, the Library’s Slavic cataloger, who serves on the Library’s cataloging and metadata group that developed the proposal to introduce the new subject headings. “But what if the title is called The Bluest Eye, so you don’t know what it’s about?”
With help from librarians — and with buy-in from the American Library Association — the grassroots effort to drop “Illegal aliens” from the Library of Congress’ subject headings wound its way to the halls of Congress, only to be thwarted by conservative lawmakers. The pushback was unprecedented: Never before has Congress intervened in the routine, and decidedly mundane, process of updating Library of Congress subject headings. (The effort, sparked by students at Dartmouth, was chronicled in the 2019 documentary Change the Subject, screened as part of Berkeley’s Documentaries at Doe series.)
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