A Well-Read Woman

At the same time, if a database user finds “criminology” turning up only books published during or after 1985[,] there would be enough of a question mark to check what went on, i.e. consult the [subject heading] authority file and learn that this is a new heading, etc. etc. Seems to me that’s one of the major benefits of Subj. Hdgs. online will give users.6

This memo reveals not only the conundrum of making widespread changes to headings but also how new computer technology would change both the workload for catalogers and the ease of making changes. Starting in 1980, LC began a massive project to convert the main card catalog to an electronic system. This project is still not complete, and staff had to undergo extensive training sessions in the basics of personal computers and how to use them for cataloging and other library applications. Many staff members were resistant to adopting technology too quickly and understood the fallacy of spending an enormous amount of manpower creating an entirely new system that might become obsolete before it was completed. Today LC still has catalog cards backlogged to 1898 that have not been fully integrated into the online catalog.7 But one advantage of converting the catalog was that, finally, batch corrections to vast amounts of records were possible.

By the 1980s LC was under a huge amount of pressure from outside librarians to reform LCSH. Catalogers who worked at other libraries had no say in the terms they were forced to use to describe books. They no doubt fielded questions from their users about why, for example, a term such as “Cookery” was used for cookbooks. They saw daily the difficulties their users faced in finding books and were probably at a loss to explain the complexities and minutiae of LCSH to people who simply wanted to find books quickly. One of these fed-up librarians was Sanford “Sandy” Berman, a cataloger at the Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis. In 1971 he published his first book, Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Headings Concerning People. His book’s chapter titles seemingly covered most of the topics that the Social Sciences II Subject Cataloging Section was responsible for:

I. Races, nationalities, faiths, and ethnic groups

II. Chauvinism, the “Bwana Syndrome,” and the Third World

III. Politics, peace, labor, law enforcement, etc.

IV. Man/Woman/Sex

V. Children, youth, “idiots,” and the “underground”

In his introduction he began by admitting the usefulness and irreplaceability of LCSH but then launched into the heart of the crusade he would take on for the next forty years:

In the realm of headings that deal with people and cultures—in short, with humanity—the LC list can only “satisfy” parochial, jingoistic Europeans and North Americans, white-hued, at least nominally Christian (and preferably Protestant) in faith, comfortably situated in the middle- and higher-income brackets, largely domiciled in suburbia, fundamentally loyal to the Established Order, and heavily imbued with the transcendent, incomparable glory of Western civilization. Further, it reflects a host of untenable—indeed, obsolete and arrogant—assumptions with respect to young people and women. And exudes something less than sympathy or even fairness toward organized labor and the sexually unorthodox or “avant-garde.” . . . Just because, in short, we were “brought up that way” is no valid reason for perpetuating, either in our crania or our catalogues, the humanity-degrading, intellect-constricting rubbish that litters the LC list.8

Berman alluded to the fact that, despite LC’s insistence that they were just following “common practice” of how terms were used in books and other scholarly works, this controlled vocabulary was not created in a vacuum. The librarians who approved LCSH terms had their own biases and prejudices, whether or not they realized it. Berman was careful to note that the point of his book was “not to riot, if you please—only to remedy long-standing mistakes and to gain for the profession

a genuine, earned respect among people who read and think.”9

When Berman’s book came out, it received mixed reviews in library-related publications. But there is no doubt that it got librarians, and especially catalogers, talking about their work and questioning it in a new way.10 When Ruth started her job as a subject cataloger in 1971, the same year Prejudices and Antipathies was published, she and her coworkers read and discussed the book. Some probably didn’t think that LCSH needed any major changes as it was, and at least some others might have felt powerless to change a system in which they were firmly embedded. But those with a more radical bent, such as Ruth, might have seen her position as a way of fighting the system from within. There is no existing correspondence between Ruth and Sandy Berman in her collections of papers or his at the American Library Association Archives. Perhaps the two never even spoke to each other at conferences. But Ruth’s coworkers agreed that she was firmly on Berman’s side. She submitted many heading changes, including some that seemed irrational to other people at LC. Thompson Yee remembered an incident in which Ruth passionately advocated for a new subject heading, “State-sponsored terrorism.” She fought tooth and nail for it, but the committee decided it wasn’t needed.11

Berman’s main target at LC was Mary K. D. Pietris, who was the head of the Subject Cataloging Division from 1978 until 1992 and one of Ruth’s supervisors. Berman, armed with citations from books for evidence, regularly wrote letters to the library—addressing them to Pietris and the Subject Cataloging Division—to request changes to subject headings. Pietris diligently wrote back to Berman about why a term could or could not be changed.12 In 1977, with support from the Library of Congress, the ALA Subject Analysis Committee established the Racism and Sexism in Subject Analysis Subcommittee, which was charged with writing a report with recommendations.13 The subcommittee reported that an “important and guiding document” was Joan K. Marshall’s On Equal Terms: A Thesaurus for Nonsexist Indexing and Cataloging—a book similar to Berman’s—which had been published in 1977. The subcommittee first met in 1978 at the ALA conference, and Ruth wrote a summary of it in the Library of Congress Information Bulletin’s lengthy appendix of reports from the conference. She described its four current projects: an evaluation of subject heading terms applied to groups of concern to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a revision of subject headings related to Native Americans, the compilation of research on African American–related headings, and a bibliography of research on terminology related to women.14

Berman and Pietris published an exchange of their letters in the March 1981 issue of the cataloging publication Technicalities. Pietris was no doubt exasperated with Berman’s obsessive campaign, but she was able to keep a sense of humor about the situation and always tried to adhere to the policies and procedures in place at LC.

In 1987 Daniel Boorstin retired as librarian of Congress and President Reagan nominated Princeton University’s celebrated Russian and Cold War historian, Dr. James Billington. Once again librarians were agitated that another academic was being nominated to lead the nation’s largest library and library policy nationwide. Just a year and a half after Billington was confirmed as librarian of Congress, Sandy Berman wrote this outraged letter to him:

You must be kidding! (But I’m afraid you’re not.) Anyway, I lately learned that you’ve proposed the elimination of all subject and other tracings (i.e., access points) from LC bibliographic records as a cost-cutting, speed-enhancing measure. Rumor has it that YOU never search catalogs by anything but author or title . . . so why trouble with subject headings and various “added entries.” . . . In short, what WE consumers need out here on the front lines is better, more fulsome and functional cataloging from LC, not less . . . If better, more adequate cataloging will cost more, then please tell us. Tell that to the library community and ask for our help in getting LC the greater resources in money, equipment, and personnel that it needs. I’ve personally been known as a severe LC critic. But I’m at base a friendly critic. And would be among the first to sign a petition for more appropriations for LC. Or write my Congressional representatives to increase your funding. I’m completely willing and ready to do that. All I await is your admission that things need to be improved. And that you want the extra resources to start improving.15

Clearly Billington’s proposed plan to eliminate subject headings never got off the ground (whether Billington seriously considered this or it was all a misunderstanding is unclear). But perhaps something in Berman’s letter or in feedback from other librarians struck a nerve. The next February, Billington submitted to Congress a budget request that was 22 percent higher than the previous year’s, the largest increase since World War II. He noted bluntly:

The Library has been allowed to fall behind. It has simply not been able to keep up with inflation in book prices, with the requirement to absorb sequestrations, and with the need to absorb all or most of recent mandated annual pay raises. An essentially declining annual appropriation has begun to erode the Library’s ability to serve the nation. The Library now employs 475 fewer employees on Federal appropriations than in 1984. This alarming erosion should not be allowed to continue.16

Although the final appropriations bill included less funding than Billington had asked for, an extra $5.2 million was provided for hiring catalogers to tackle the library’s “arrearage,” its backlog of uncataloged books.17

A few years later, in 1992, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging was established.18 This network allowed major research libraries to join in the process of submitting headings for approval to the Policy and Standards Division at LC. Catalogers at member libraries were trained to recognize when a new heading was needed and how to submit a new heading for consideration. Berman spoke at a cataloging forum at the Library of Congress in February 1993, a month after Ruth retired.19 By then his influence was widely felt at the library. Slowly but surely, changes had been made to LCSH in the direction of inclusivity. An article published by University of Memphis librarian Stephen Knowlton in 2005 revealed that out of the 225 headings that Berman listed in Prejudices and Antipathies, 63 percent had been modified to his suggestions or something close to it.20 For instance, “Eskimo” was changed to “Inuit,” and “Group sex,” the heading that Ruth established in 1974 and mentioned in her letter to Gabe Horchler, was slightly modified. Its record now reads:

LC control no.: sh 85057499

LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85057499

HEADING: Group sex

000 00475cz a2200205n 450

001 4708870

005 20120326094948.0

008 860211i| anannbabn |b ana

010 __ |a sh 85057499

035 __ |a (DLC)sh 85057499