Cataloging and Acquisitions
Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate of the Library of Congress
News
- 05/16/2023: Announcement: Expanding Inclusion of Armenian and Thai Scripts in Bibliographic Records (PDF, 84 KB)
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05/05/2023: At the urging of a member of the library community, the Library of Congress (LC) examined the current standard practice for capitalization of the word "indigenous." The Chicago Manual of Style, amongst others, capitalizes the word indigenous when referring to peoples and cultures, similar to the treatment of the word black. As a result, the Library has decided to change its current practice in the Library of Congress Subject Headings and the Library of Congress Classification for indigenous in order to be in alignment with its own change of practice for black. When referring to things other than people and culture, such as plants or animals, usage will continue to be lowercase.
This change will not occur as a tentative list, as it entails no change of meaning or spelling, but will be available as soon as the edits are made. Due to normalization, there should be little or no impact on a system’s ability to control the headings, which will give libraries time to make this change without impacting access.
We anticipate that the changes in LCSH will be completed by May 30, 2023; and those in LCC will be completed by June 30, 2023. The majority of the changes in LCSH are in scope notes, so the number of headings that are directly impacted is fairly small, and are listed here:- Internet and Indigenous peoples
- Libraries and Indigenous peoples
- Museums and Indigenous peoples
- Racism against Indigenous peoples
- Social work with Indigenous peoples
- Urban Indigenous peoples
- 04/03/2023: Announcement: Incoming LCSH Proposals: Expedited List Experiment Ended (PDF : 75 KB)
- 03/27/2023: Evaluation of Headings for Indigenous Peoples (PDF : 74 KB) The Library of Congress recognizes that many of its subject headings for Indigenous peoples living within the United States and bordering countries are either incorrect or offensive. The Library is committed to rectifying these errors and is determined to do it correctly and with respect for Indigenous peoples, their customs, culture, and languages. Currently, the Library receives proposals to create and update Library of Congress Subject Headings related to Indigenous peoples and tribal names and considers them on a case-by-case basis. Moving forward, the Library is committed to engaging with Indigenous communities to co-create more holistic solutions to resolve this complex problem.
The Library of Congress is grateful for input from a variety of sources to inform our approach, including the National Indigenous Knowledge and Language Alliance and conversations with attendees at the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums. - 03/24/2023: The Library of Congress has reviewed the feedback regarding the proposed change in practice to allow family names established in RDA name authority records to be used as subject access points in bibliographic records. The feedback was uniformly positive, and in our discussion we were able to resolve all questions presented. Therefore, the Library will proceed with implementing this change. Two tasks are required: 1) name authority records for families will have the relevant 008 fields updated and the 667 deleted and 2) the SHM H 1631 will be updated to give guidance in the implementation of this policy. OCLC will be kindly making the required changes to the authority records. We are already working on the instruction sheet. Once these two changes are completed, we will make an announcement, and then all institutions will be free to implement the change.
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