Browsing by Subject "American Library Association"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Did Libraries 'Change the Subject'? What Happened, What Didn't, and What's Ahead
    (American Library Association, 2024) Baron, Jill E.; Fox, Violet B.; Gross, Tina
    On November 12, 2021, the Library of Congress (LC) announced via a press release issued by the American Library Association that it would update the cataloging subject headings “Aliens” and “Illegal aliens” to “Noncitizens” and “Illegal immigration.” Previously, the Library of Congress had announced plans in March 2016 to remove “Illegal aliens” from its vocabulary, but this met with unprecedented political backlash from members of Congress and the conservative media, causing the Library of Congress not to follow through. During the ensuing five years, library workers advocated for the term’s removal from the subject heading vocabulary. In the face of the LC’s inaction, hundreds of libraries defied the national standard by changing the subject headings locally in order to provide more humane and inclusive description of books related to undocumented immigrants. Many in the library community received the November 2021 decision with surprise given that LC had been silent on this issue for more than five years. Many were also dissatisfied with the choice of replacement term: “Illegal immigration,” instead of “Unauthorized immigration,” as had been announced in 2016. The word “Illegal” in the heading, while not referring specifically to people, still continued to evoke anti-immigrant sentiment, and was not acceptable to those who had fought to “drop the ‘I’ word” from LC’s vocabulary for years. Three library workers, the authors of this chapter, organized focus groups in November-December 2021 in order to find out how library workers felt about the change. We invited participation through social media channels, and in all, 130 participants signed up for the 12 available focus groups. Most of the participants were library workers, although non-library workers (teaching faculty, individuals interested in the issue) were also in attendance. In this chapter, we share key takeaways from these group sessions, as well as developments over the past years and ongoing efforts to change this heading. We also discuss how attention to these headings has fueled discussion and action around broader issues of bias and power in the maintenance of library structures and standards.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Unanswered Questions? Reflections of an Historical Sort on Library School Closures
    (Journal of Opinions, Ideas & Essays (JOIE), 2019-08-01) Johnson, Timothy J
    Between 1978 and 1994, sixteen American graduate programs in library/information science closed. The author reviewed library and historical literature for discussion, analysis, or interpretation of these closures. This examination revealed a nearly incessant and cantankerous call and response between and among library educators and historians that took place in the midst of these closings, extending into the early twenty-first century. It also demonstrated that library/information science practitioners and analysts suffered a kind of professional, systemic shock that made them unable to arrive at a definitive, analytical conclusion concerning fundamental conditions that ultimately resulted in closing nearly a third of the American Library Association’s accredited programs. At the same time, these discussions outlined and defined political, economic, educational, and social conditions relevant to the closures. When the dust finally settled, a clearer, if incomplete understanding emerged of external and internal causal factors contributing to these closings. A brief case study from the closing of the Library School at the University of Minnesota in 1985 is included to illustrate one of the overlooked internal factors within universities—the administrative location of a professional school of library education within the institution—that is a pivotal, defining factor in the history of these closures. This case study elucidates what library educators and historians discussed but never resolved: that each closure was a complex event, unique in some respects, but ultimately explicable when considered as part of a larger pattern, system or model. Ultimately, these “unanswered questions” should be considered input variables that may allow us the opportunity to examine contemporary conditions, make meaningful predictions, and steer the profession away from any prospect of foundering on the rocks of repeated mistakes.