Why do we use LCSH? What are its benefits and limitations?
Three Decades Since Prejudices and Antipathies: A Study of Changes in the Library of Congress Subject Headings by Steven A. Knowlton(LCSH) is the main thesaurus for subject access in bibliographic records used by most libraries. It is very comprehensive and is continually being updated and added too. Unfortunately, terms are not always updated quickly or sufficiently to remove outdated, offensive, or problematic terms. There are also political influences and concerns surrounding the updating/changing of some terms that may lead to a change to is not the
LCSH should be first source for subject and genre headings and if terms are offensive, outdated, inaccurate, or not specific enough other existing established alternative thesauri should be used . Homosaurus and African Studies Thesarus are not faceted, in their place or to supplement them. Only alternative vocabularies with source codes assigned by the Library of Congress should be used. Genreally, these vocabularies are specialized to describe a specific subject area and are not comprehensive and also do not have facets so are limited in their use for descriptive cataloging and should generally be seen as supplementary to LCSH when faceted headings are needed/desired. The use of locally created subject headings is NOT recommended. The purpose of controlled vocabularies and established thesauri are so that there is uniformity among description across libraries, this is especially important for libraries who use and contribute to shared catalogs, such as OCLC WorldCat. This allows for collacation of like materials when searching, since materials about the same subjects are described using the same language. It also allows for several authority control processes. When a term is updated or changed with the LCSH, since the terms are all coded and should be controlled in OCLC Connexion, they are able to run processes to updated all the terms in the records in most cases. There are also processes that run in local catalogs to update the terms once they have been changed in LCSH.
--- Ref pcc statement about unreliability of lcsh due to political influence, etc. — ---Also consider adding issues of LC headings when they are changed but still are under terms that are offensive/wrong. Example Sadomasochism is under the broader term Psychosexual disorders, so while that term is not added to a record by a cataloger, currently Primo is "enhancing" records in Hollis to display "other search terms" based on the subject trees and will show "Psychosexual disorders." See this record in Hollis as an example: http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990077274030203941/catalog
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Within Harvard Library the SACO Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Anti-Racism Task Group (SACO DIBAR Task Group) "is charged with reviewing controlled terms governed by the Library of Congress Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) for possible revision in light of EDIBA principles." Their wiki page tracks headings under consideration and includes a form for staff to submit terms for the group to review, they ask for the following information with each submission: the existing term, a proposed preferred term, the MMS ID of the corresponding bibliographic record in Alma, and references to any related sources and/or justification/reasoning for the change.
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Best practice for LCSH headings that use "illegal" or "alien" to refer to people
Relevant articles
The Language language of Cataloguingcataloguing: Deconstructing deconstructing and Decolonizing Systems decolonizing systems of Organization organization in Librarieslibraries: https://ojs.library.dal.ca/djim/article/view/7853
The old and the prudish: an examination of sex, sexuality, and queerness in Library of Congress Classification: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2022/the-old-and-the-prudish/
Three decades since prejudices and antipathies: a study of changes in the Library of Congress Subject Headings: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/steven.a.knowlton/files/knowlton_three_decades.pdf