The inaugural submission to our feedback form for users to submit language they find offensive or harmful in UW Libraries catalog records, archival finding aids, or digital collections is from our Health Sciences and Media Cataloger, who wrote:
I am cataloging the Harrison L. Caldwell papers, an African American civic leader and school principal. The online finding aid unfortunately still refers to him as a Negro; it would be nice if we could change that to African American sooner rather than later. I also added a much fuller bio for him in the OCLC record (123949322).
The Harrison L. Caldwell papers are an archival collection of original records and papers held by UW Special Collections. To provide access for users for archival collections like these, UW archivists create finding aids – inventories and outlines that help users find information in that record group, collection, or series of archival materials. Finding aids describe the archival collection as a whole; archives and libraries in most cases do not have sufficient staff time or funding to describe or digitize physical archival materials at a more granular level than that (i.e. at the individual document level). To remediate our finding aid, UW archivists updated the finding aid’s biographical information and abstract to replace “Negro” with “African American.”
For additional user access to archival collections like these, a record in the UW Libraries catalog is created by catalogers describing the archival collection and pointing to the online finding aid. Catalogers create this additional record because the online archival finding aid resides in a separate finding aid database from the library catalog that doesn’t get searched from the library catalog.
To remediate the catalog record for this archival collection, the UW cataloger changed one of the subjects assigned to this work from “Negro” to “African Americans — Washington (State) — Seattle.” Subjects in UW libraries catalog records adhere to terminology from Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). In the late 1970’s, the LCSH term “Negroes” was replaced by “Afro-Americans,” which was in turn changed to “African Americans” in 2000. When an LCSH term is changed by the Library of Congress (who maintains and oversees the LCSH controlled vocabulary), the changes generally automatically roll out to associated bibliographic headings (the same headings used in records representing library resources like books and archival collections). This automatic updating is one of the main efficiencies libraries gain by using standardized vocabularies like LCSH. Somehow this particular record did not get that terminology update (errors do happen, especially with our catalog records and finding aids numbering in the millions), but now it has been updated to current, more inclusive terminology.