Ever since it happened last week, this has been troubling me. I would like to address it at length, but I don't feel that I have the time right now. But if I don't say anything, I know that it will fade from my mind. So here is the quick & dirty version.
I was helping a patron (who was a person of mixed race) find a recent book with information about interracial adoption. One of the books that I found, which seemed to be exactly what she was after was Mixed Race and the Law: A Reader, edited by Kevin R. Johnson, published in 2003 by NYU Press.
I glanced at the Library of Congress subject heading, in case I needed to search for materials in this area again. It was "Miscegenation -- United States". My patron was with me, looking over my shoulder. I quickly scrolled up so she wouldn't see that nasty word. ...
I know that some words in the English language can have slightly different shades of meaning and intensity in various places. For me, miscegenation is a throwback to the worst of the Jim Crow laws. The very word suggests that interracial relationships are wrong and that the offspring are flawed.
I was particularly troubled because this was a brand new book. If it had been written in the 1950s, and its record hadn't changed, maybe I wouldn't have been as shocked.
Half an hour later, during a quiet time at the reference desk, I went to one of the multi-volume sets of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). I was hoping that somehow this was an individual mistake, and not something more systematic. But no, miscegenation was in there. To make things worse, it was to be preferred over "Racially Mixed People", a much better alternative [well, not exactly - see my clarification]. I'm not the first person to have noticed this - see this study for a more detailed description.
As a reference librarian, I need to know enough about LCSH so that I can use it to find things in the catalogue. And it's a very useful tool. Once I have the correct subject heading for my topic, I know that my search is nearly over.
But finding that subject heading can be difficult at times. LCSH subject headings are not all intuitive. You can't just think of a subject and expect that your guess will be the official subject heading. The legendary cataloguer from Minnesota, Sandy Berman (and it's with sadness that I realize I probably won't get to meet him in person) has given numerous examples of how the subject headings can bear no relationship to contemporary language and mores. His most famous example is the light bulb. In LCSH it's "electric lamp, incandescent" as he was quoted in this City Pages article. Several other examples can be found at the website about Sandy Berman, as well as in a chapter of Revolting Librarians Redux, edited by Katia Roberto and Jessamyn West, published in 2003 by McFarland.
{sarcasm}Maybe it's a good thing that LCSH is too strange for the uninitiated to use - because then people like my patron will be less likely to see the offensive subject headings!{/sarcasm}
LCSH is basically a huge taxonomy, of like everything. I know that managing a taxonomy isn't easy. In my previous job, I maintained a Lotus Notes database about the company's competitors and important developments in our industry - which used an in-house taxonomy. You need to be both consistent (so that there's stability) and flexible (to handle the inevitable changes). A measure of humility helps too - I may think that a particular term is the correct one, but if everyone in the company uses something else, I should go with that, to make things easier for the most important people - the users (that's patrons - now that I'm going back to Australia, I'll be using more of the Australian words for things).
I know that LCSH is very difficult to change - and that there are some good reasons for this (being just a reference grunt, I don't claim to understand the reasons). But the persistence of words like miscegenation is evidence of a real problem in the process. If librarians are at all worried about looking irrelevant and out-moded in the 21st century - well we need to fix problems like these, it's not just about marketing ourselves better.
