Decolonizing Dewey (025.49)

Episode Transcript

Dr. Marcus Brody Look Indy, the Roman numerals!

Indiana Jones Dad was on to something here ...

Dr. Marcus Brody Now we know the source of the numbers, but we still don't know what they mean.

Indiana Jones Dad sent me this diary for a reason and until we find out why, I suggest we keep it to ourselves.

Elsa Schneider Find something?

Dr. Marcus Brody Yes. Three, seven and ten. That window seems to be the source of the Roman numerals.

Elsa Schneider My God, I must be blind.

Indiana Jones Dad wasn't looking for a book about the lost tomb, he was looking for the tomb itself! Don't you get it? The tomb is somewhere in the library. You said yourself it used to be a church.

Adwoa Adusei So that was a clip from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusader, where Indy and a colleague are on the hunt for the Holy Grail, and the diary of Indy’s dad has led them to a library in Venice. It makes searching for items in libraries sound so exciting!

Krissa Corbett Cavouras You’ve got primary sources! You’ve got Roman numerals! And when you find the item you’re looking for you get to literally dig into it! Obviously, this is the Hollywood version of finding something in a library. But, if you listened to last month’s episode you’ll appreciate the tie-in to libraries that used to be churches, right? 

Adwoa Adusei I hope our listeners are excited for this episode. In some ways, searching for a resource at the library can feel a bit like a scavenger hunt or an archaeological dig. There are so many ways to find what you’re looking for, but first you have to find the right set of words or then find the right numbers.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Ah yes, you are of course referring to what some librarians call the old Dewey Decimal dance.

Adwoa Adusei Old is one way to think about it! This form of information retrieval was created in the late 19th century by Melvil Dewey, in order to arrange and classify books, both old and new, based on subject. Almost 200,000 libraries in over 100 countries adopted Dewey’s classification system — so ideally, you can find the same book by searching for the same number in relatively the same location in any participating library. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras It sounds simple enough, organizing all known and not-yet-known information in the world. Obviously I’m kidding, because when you start to get into the nitty gritty of cataloging it’s not actually simple at all. And, that’s what this episode is all about. Many libraries in America have used the same classification systems for over a hundred years—for as long as Brooklyn Public Library has been around. But a lot has changed since the 1890s—so today on Borrowed, we will explore how those changes might be reflected—or not—in the library catalog. I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras.

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei. You're listening to Borrowed: stories that start at the library. 

[Theme song]

Adwoa Adusei You know, using a library catalog isn’t that far off from that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusader. You start off with a name perhaps, or dare I say, keyword? Then you connect ideas until you find the answers or items that you’re looking for.

Djaz Zulida For me, it felt like a treasure hunt, where I was trying to find all of these different critical pieces of information and make sure they were all in the right place at the right time.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s Djaz Zulida, a Job Information Resource Librarian at BPL. They worked as a cataloger at the start of their library career. And, while it did feel like an Indiana Jones treasure hunt some of the time, Djaz noted a key difference between the library catalog and a treasure map: the library catalog is not just a collection of clues and numbers that's as neutral as a treasure map. It was created a long time ago, and it has implicit biases built in. Here’s Djaz again. 

Djaz Zulida I noticed that some of the things that I was looking at were like ... eh, iffy. You know, some of the terms were kind of racially insensitive, some of them were pretty questionable as far as current LGBTQ terms. And I started feeling like, okay, well, if this is bothering me, I know what to look for, but this is what I'm coming across—you know, what's the experience like for, you know, people coming into the library? How are they going to find something that has this, you know, descriptor that's like wildly out of date? 

Adwoa Adusei So that excitement of the search that we’ve been trying to drum up in this episode can actually be quite frustrating. For now, let’s forget about the sometimes confusing run of numbers on a book spine. When we first approach a search, it’s often with a set of words in mind. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Right. So, what some listeners may not realize is that items in a classification system like Dewey Decimal correspond to a standard set of terms called the subject headings, which are used as the index to help find similar items under the same subject. 

Adwoa Adusei And it’s not just in library catalogs — you can find subject headings by looking at the title page of pretty much any book published by a major publisher in the United States. Right under the copyright and year, there are Library of Congress subject headings for that particular book. So, for example, I've got a book in my hand that might sound familiar to some of our listeners: Palaces For the People by Eric Klinenburg, and I see that the Library of Congress has assigned the following terms: “Infrastructure (Economics)—United States” and “City planning—United States” and so on. The Library of Congress began to set the standard for those subject headings in the late 1800s, and they are still used by many different types of libraries around the world. Here's Djaz again.

Djaz Zulida Subject headings are like, sort of in the background doing some of the heavy lifting so that when people are looking for things, they can actually find it. With the caveat, though, that the people who invented all of these subject headings were old dead white people. So they are not all very contemporaneous. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Today, you might approach our library website like you would a search engine. You type in a set of words related to the topic you’re hoping to read about. Let’s say you’re looking for a book on immigrants in Bushwick and you type in “Immigrant, New York." A whole set of resources comes up, and on the right hand side of your screen, you’ll see the subject headings that are going to bring you to other material about that topic. Now, in order to be more user-friendly on BPL’s website, we’re calling those as “tags,” because that’s more familiar to people.

Adwoa Adusei Before last year, if you put in those search terms, “Immigration, New York,” you’d see a subject heading called “Illegal Alien.” That’s exactly what happened to Melissa Padilla when she was a freshman at Dartmouth College.

Melissa Padilla Trying to figure out how the library worked, especially since essays are a big part of liberal arts life. I ended up not knowing how to find works on immigration and undocumented people in general.

Adwoa Adusei So, Melissa set up an appointment with Dartmouth librarian Jill Baron so she could get an overview of the library catalog.

Melissa Padilla And as we're scrolling through, I'm just realizing that the word "Illegal Aliens, Illegal Immigrants" just keeps coming up and up. And it was very incongruent with, you know, the titles of the articles or the books that I was seeing. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Encountering that term, “Illegal Alien,” felt very personal to Melissa.

Melissa Padilla I think I almost put it in the mindset of when I was a child. I grew up in Georgia. I always knew that I was undocumented. And so whether it was in the media, right, like the things that I was seeing, or if it was, you know, my classmates using those words or talking about my community in a derogatory way because that's how they just associated the word. It really did shape my childhood. It shaped how I saw other people and how I kind of perceived them to see my community. You know, from what I know about us, it never made sense to me. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Jill, the Dartmouth librarian Melissa was working with, explained that while they could make a local change at the University, to make the change outside of Dartmouth, they would have to petition the governing body that standardizes the subject headings: the Library of Congress.

Adwoa Adusei Over the course of the next four years, Melissa and fellow Dartmouth student activists worked with librarians and the Dartmouth administration to do just that. Their efforts were recorded for the documentary film, directed by Jill Baron and Sawyer Broadley titled, Change the Subject, which showed the steps from changing the term from “Illegal Alien” to “Undocumented Immigrants” within the Dartmouth library catalog all the way to meeting with lawmakers in Washington, D.C. because, as Melissa describes it: 

Melissa Padilla It was a systemic problem that if we fixed it at Dartmouth College, it would be like putting a Band-Aid on some bigger problem.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The Library of Congress rejected their initial application in 2014, but their efforts were covered in the media and eventually gained support within the American Library Association, which endorsed the change. So, with the support of the ALA, the Library of Congress approved the subject heading change in 2016 … but that journey was not yet over.

Adwoa Adusei 2016 was a tumultuous political year: the year Donald Trump gained prominence in the presidential race, in large part due to his racist attitude toward undocumented immigrants. So, the subject heading change at the Library of Congress did not go unnoticed. Republican representatives in Congress pushed back against the change, and the story was covered in national media outlets.

Reporter on 'The Blaze' So we scrubbed these terms in the first place because some college students felt that they were dehumanizing ... ?

Rep. Diane Black This is where we have political correctness gone amock. We see a group of very liberal students ... 

Reporter on 'Newsmax' What on earth is going on over at the Library of Congress?

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The Library of Congress has a formal process in which subject headings can be changed, and it’s been going on without external political influence since 1909. But 2016 was the first time in American history that Congress attempted to stop a change in the library’s catalog terminology. As a result, although the Library of Congress had technically approved the subject heading change, none of those changes were implemented. So, effectively, libraries using the LOC system still had the “Illegal Alien” subject heading term in their catalogs.

Melissa Padilla It was kind of an example of how much impact a word can have on just one person. And like for me, it shaped my entire life. And it's not asking people to solve, like the question of what is life. We're not asking people to make a dramatic change. It's literally just changing the words that we use to talk about other communities that we may not be a part of.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The “Change the Subject” initiative runs parallel to broader activism around words we use. For example the “Drop the I” campaign started by young people in 2010 to disrupt usage of the term ”illegal” to describe people. But before these examples of early 21st-century linguistic activism, librarian and cataloger Sandy Berman is often referenced as a pioneer of suggesting alternative subject heading terms. Berman has brought forth over 200 petitions before the Library of Congress. 

Adwoa Adusei Yes, Berman was active from the 1970s up until the 1990s, and believed that continual removal of terms with pejorative social associations was a necessary exercise in confronting bias within library catalogs.

 Krissa Corbett Cavouras According to Steven A. Knowlton, who wrote about the impact of Berman’s work on cataloging, “Of the 225 headings Berman suggested changes in, 88 (or 39%) have been changed almost exactly as he suggested, while an additional 54 (or 24%) have been changed in ways that partially reflect Berman’s suggestions.” So. digging into Berman’s recommendations for changes to the catalog was really interesting. I mean, up until the 1970s, subject headings “Homosexuality” and “Lesbianism” were cross-referenced with “sexual perversion,” alongside subjects such as pedophilia and sex crimes. 

Adwoa Adusei Right, and Berman advocated and won other changes to the catalog. Examples include the deletion of subject headings such as “Mammies” in favor of “Child Care Workers, Wet-nurses, and  Nannies” with no African American subdivision; deleting “Underdeveloped areas” in favor of “Developing countries” and the deletion of the terms “Jewish Question” and “Yellow Peril.”

Krissa Corbett Cavouras For librarians and catalogers in the 1970s and up to the 1990s, when Sandy Berman and others were making changes to subject headings, it would have been a lot of physical work to create those new terms and correct problematic cross-references, right? Because physical card catalogs were still the dominant mode of information retrieval. So, you’d have to go through and re-print hundreds of cards. But Sandy Berman certainly wasn’t the first librarian to challenge widely-accepted subject headings. 

Adwoa Adusei Exactly. In the 1930s, librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley re-labeled and re-arranged the shelves of Howard University Library without waiting for the Library of Congress to catch up. Porter Wesley is considered an African American pioneer in librarianship, one of the first to attend Columbia University’s library school. After working at NYPL’s 135th Street branch, where she rubbed shoulders with Harlem Renaissance elites, like the historian and collector Arthur Schomburg, whose collection of African American literature makes the basis of the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture today, Porter Wesley went on to become the head librarian of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center where she nearly single-handedly assembled and cataloged the collection on a shoestring budget. Here’s Porter Wesley speaking in an interview from 1992. 

Dorothy Porter Wesley Schomberg was writing me: "Where can I find a copy of this book? Do you know anything about it? Where can I find a copy of this book?" And on the other hand, I would write him, I said, "I want a copy of Benjamin Banneker's almanac with a photograph which had been drawn Benjamin Banneker." Nobody seemed to be able to find that, I think it was 1792 almanac. So Schomberg helped me to find things and I helped him to find things, although I was building a library for Howard University. 

Adwoa Adusei That recording was from an interview conducted by Louis Massiah in 1992 and you can hear the full version on the podcast Archival Revival: Camera Original Conversations on Black Life. We’ll put a link in our show notes.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras As Porter Wesley assembled these works, she realized that if she maintained the rubric outlined by the Library of Congress subject headings—and specifically the Dewey Decimal cataloging scheme—then most of the titles would fall under only one or two numerical ranges. In a series of oral history interviews conducted in 1993 and 1994, Porter Wesley said that the Dewey Decimal System “had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization … So all libraries, many of them white libraries … every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a Black poet, went under 325, [the term for colonization]. And that was stupid to me.”

Adwoa Adusei By physically relocating authors and subjects of the African diaspora amongst their eurocentric counterparts, Porter Wesley more or less desegregated the library’s shelves, bringing to light some of the inherent biases of early classification that were a direct result of societal marginalization and racism.  

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Dorothy Porter Wesley and Sandy Berman may have started the linguistic crusade for more accurate and unbiased subject headings, but the movement doesn't stop with them. It continues to be taken up by scores of people in the library profession who are urged on by patrons’ need for truthful representation. 

Heyrling Oropeza I was interviewing a couple of teenagers and one of them, he was a senior in high school and he was about to graduate, and he asked this question about having proper terminology. How can they trust the library knowing that not all the terms are actually up to date and reflective of who they are as people?

Adwoa Adusei That’s Heyrling Oropeza, a librarian at BPL and another member of our Alternative Classification Committee along with Djaz Zulida, who we heard from earlier in the episode. Here’s Djaz again. 

Djaz Zulida If we don't describe things the way that people think to find them, they won't find them. If we don't use modern language, you know, if we don't keep up with things, if we're not nimble, you know, nobody's going to use search terms or think about how somebody talked about something in the 1950s or the 1930s or in 1895. You know, we have to shift, we have to change, and it’s something I always keep in the back of my mind.

Adwoa Adusei And Heyrling.

Heyrling Oropeza As an immigrant myself, I feel that people here in New York, and working with other nonprofit immigrant organizations, to use their word, their language, which is "undocumented," I think means a lot to them. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras In Fall of 2021, with a Democrat for President, the Library of Congress finally officially changed the subject heading within their databases and publications from “Illegal Alien” to “Illegal Immigrant,” essentially removing the word “Alien.” For many activists like Melissa Padilla, this is only half a step in the right direction. The term “Alien” certainly dehumanized its subjects, but the term “Illegal” also unjustily criminalizes and stigmatizes its subjects as well. Replacing “Illegal” with the term “Undocmented” is one of the new rallying cries in this petition’s almost decade-long journey. Here’s Melissa again, reflecting on the Library of Congress’s change.

Melissa Padilla There's an opportunity here to have a conversation about what this means for everything moving forward. It's not just undocumented people who are who are kind of feeling the brunt of pejorative terms, like there's other communities and there's also questions about the petition process and the power structure of who gets to make the decisions about these changes. 

Adwoa Adusei And here’s BPL librarian Heyrling Oropeza again.

Heyrling Oropeza This just shows the relationship between government and Library of Congress can't be separated at that level. So, we each at local levels need to decide whether to separate ourselves from that or, you know, continue to be a part of it. 

[Music]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Libraries across the country are making changes within their catalogs at a hyper-local level. Here at BPL, we’ve done something similar to what the librarians at Dartmouth College did. In summer of 2020, we masked the LOC subject heading for “Illegal Alien”  (and now “Illegal Immigrant”) with the term “Undocumentated Immigrant.” There are several other terms that have been masked in our catalog, and we’ll put a link to those in our show notes.

Adwoa Adusei And the work of BPL’s Alternative Classification Committee isn’t over! We are looking forward to further public discourse about subject heading changes within our local catalog, and will be performing an audit of outdated terms, like this one that Djaz pointed out during our conversation.

Djaz Zulida For me, I noticed that some contemporary books published in the last couple of years, maybe even some DVDs, a couple of items, had the subject heading "Transsexual." Transsexual is not an offensive term, but it is not a term that's commonly in use in the United States to describe somebody who's transgender. 

Adwoa Adusei The American Library Association and the Public Library Association continue to convene discussions around these issues. We’ll give links to some of these in our show notes as well.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei It wouldn’t be a Borrowed episode without books! BPL Civic Commons staff member Brynna Ververs put together a list of books to go along with this episode—in this case, all books that fall under the subject heading “Undocumented Immigration.”

Brynna Ververs Well, I found these titles through the BPL's website. Most of them I just searched the phrase "Undocumented Immigrants" and a whole wealth of books popped up, something like eleven pages of everything that had that tag in it. So, all books that had content related to migration, documentation, those were all listed very nicely together. I tried to pick a list that was very broad in terms of subject matter and writers. I wanted to curate a list of the variety of experiences of being an undocumented immigrant.

So, the first book is Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, translated into English by Lisa Dillman. This is a book that I really enjoyed. It's a really short book, it's only about 100 pages. But it is a fascinating, challenging, exciting, beautiful read. The author really avoids naming a lot of place and activities. So we get kind of the periferal idea of this is happening in Mexico City, or in a village in rural Mexico and the narrator is encountering these people who are untrustworthy or shady. But by not labeling them as drug traffikers or coyotes or people who smuggle anyone across the border, it creates this kind of fairy tale-like environment where something that's very politically realist, that we're accustomed to thinking about, becomes this fable-like, mythical story about humanity, identity, language, and who we are when we travel from one place to another.

The second book is a novel from 2020 by Lysley A. Tenorio called The Son of Good Fortune. It's a good contrast to the first novel that I picked because it's a very funny and relatable book. It's about a family of Filipino immigrants who are—the colloquial term is "tago ng tago," which means "hiding and hiding." The family doesn't have the proper documentation to stay in America, which the son didn't know for the first ten years of his life. And the story is kind of his reckoning with the idea of him not really being a part of this place where he grew up, where all of his friends live, where his entire life is. And I really enjoyed this book because we're really accustomed to reading about tragic endings and we really only get to see in the news and the headlines the worst case scenarios, and we don't see these people living their every-day lives when there isn't necessarily the immediate threat of deportation or incarceration. It's more of a quiet, humanistic look at how does it feel to live every day not feeling like you belong, not knowing where exactly where your home is going to be ten years from now.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, Krissa Corbett Cavouras and Adwoa Adusei. You can find a transcript of this episode as well as the full book match list on our website: BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is produced  by Virginia Marshall with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, and Robin Lester Kenton.This episode was written by me, Adwoa Adusei. Thank you to our beta listeners on this episode: Melissa Morrone, LaCresha Neal, and Kat Savage. Our music composer is Billy Libby. Meryl Friedman designed our logo.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed will be back next month. Until then, you have our permission to arrange your books however you see fit.

A note on numbers:

We thought it would be interesting to give this podcast episode a classification in Dewey Decimal, so we asked BPL librarian Djaz Zulida (a former cataloger) for help and decided to title this episode "Decolonizing Dewey (025.49)." Here an explanation of Djaz's thinking:

• 025.49 is a Dewey Decimal number that refers to "Subject headings, Library of Congress," which gets at the content of this episode.
• Another potential Dewey Decimal number is "Podcasts—Library applications (070.579738)." This subject heading came up for one particular book, Podcasting : a practical guide for librarians, but it seems super close to the right area.
• There's a bit of controversy over the best place to put podcasting. Some prefer 791.46—the 700s are Arts & Recreation, 791 is Public entertainments, and .4 is film/radio/TV/etc., versus 000s are Information, 070 is Journalism & Publishing and .57973 is online publications, also somehow podcasts were under 006, Special topics in Computing.
• You can play around with this tool to get a rough idea of how call numbers are built or use this tool to look at call numbers and subject headings.