SANFORD BERMAN
HAS MADE A CAREER WAGING WAR ON
HOW LIBRARIES CLASSIFY THEIR BOOKS.
WELCOME TO THE RADICAL WORLD OF
GUERRILLA CATALOGUING.
For much of my early life, I preferred reading
to almost anything else, so in high school I
applied to be a messenger clerk, the lowest
possible class of library worker. They handed
me a mop and told me to clean up the child’s
pee that had accumulated in a corner of the
fairytale section. I figured it could only get
better, right? I had no idea.
When I was older, I married a black woman
who worked at the UCLA research library.
She was anxious to get out of Los Angeles, and
Africa seemed like a nice place for travel and
enlightenment. That’s how we got to Zambia.
I started working at a university library,
and I discovered they were assigning subject
headings like ‘Kafir’ – which means ‘infidel’
in Arabic – to books on black South African
people. It was like assigning the N-word as
a heading. Following a train of other such
discoveries, I confected a letter to the library
journal editor to have the entry changed. That
was really the beginning.
Later I became head cataloguer at Hennepin
County Library in Minnesota, and I noticed
so many of the longstanding headings used by
the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal
cataloguing systems, which are used all around
the world, were arcane; no one had seen fit to
modernise them. For instance, if you wanted to
look up a book on toilets, you had to search for
‘Water closets’. A light bulb? The heading was
‘Electric lamps, incandescent’. I realised then
there was a lot of work to be done creating a
more accurate, thoughtful cataloguing system.As time went on, me and some like-minded
associates, who without my blessing dubbed
themselves the Sandinistas, worked to replace
bad and inaccurate headings, like ‘Gypsies’,
which we changed to ‘Roma’. We dropped
prejudicial terms like ‘the Jewish question’
and ‘Yellow peril’, too. It took the Library of
Congress six years to create the heading ‘Sex
workers’. They had it as a cross-reference –
“see: Prostitutes”. These aren’t trivial issues;
they’re matters of serious public policy
discussion. Mass incarceration, for instance- you read about that every day. But there’s
no heading for it.
I don’t want to make an extravagant claim
about cataloguing, but what happens in the
library dovetails into other areas of social
and political life. The Library of Congress
and Dewey Decimal systems are the primary
authorities on how the world classifies
knowledge. Yet to this day the Library of
Congress system has a heading on ‘Armenian
massacres’, but not ‘Armenian genocide’.
They won’t add it because, as a government
institution, they don’t want to offend the Turks.
To me, that’s an unacceptable intrusion ofpolitics into what should be a scholarly matter
of simply reporting the truth.What I like about librarianship is that
everything that happens in the world is
mirrored in the profession. Material enters
the libraries on these topics so you have to
do something with them, denote them so
people can find them through the catalogue.
But a slavishness has developed on the part
of professionals who should be autonomous
and free-thinking. They will not depart from
established practice.In 1999 I was forced to retire. Within about
two years, management completely demolished
the database we had altered and conformed
with the old rules. It was demolition derby and
it all went down the tubes. Ever since, I’ve made
recommendations regularly to the Library
of Congress. I don’t even have a computer;
I own two vintage 1970 Olympia portable
typewriters and I make photocopies. If you
count what we did at Hennepin and since my
retirement, we’ve altered or created hundreds
of headings. We changed ‘Hermaphroditism’
to ‘Intersexuality’, and had ‘Homosexuality’
moved out of the medicine classification in
the Dewey Decimal System. And it’s not over.
People are still working to have ‘Illegal alien’
changed to ‘Undocumented immigrant’. We’re
still clamouring for change. •opinion
107 SMITH JOURNALAs told to Koren Helbig