An Investigation into Middle Eastern Studies Librarians’ Perceptions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings in the Digital Age

Among librarians who use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), there is a growing agreement that the system encodes a Eurocentric bias in its language and organization. Efforts to not only acknowledge but remedy bias in Western classifications systems have coalesced under the framework of “critical cataloging,” a subset of wider critical theory. There is extensive literature on the effects of this bias, namely how it flattens and ostracizes non-mainstream Western subjects into generalized "other" categories. However, much of the literature today focuses on the theoretical implications of these biases, how it is intellectually degrading to the communities that have been othered. It has long been the argument of critical catalogers that reforms should center on adding headings (Olson 1998) and the removal or renaming of existing ones (Berman 1971). Conversely, this debate tends to focus less on its practical implications, such as material retrieval – functions that in the pre-digital age were heavily reliant on the catalog’s structure. However, with the advent of online tools like item tags, filters, and especially searches by keyword, the catalog is no longer the be-all-end-all for finding materials. Furthermore, the digital age has given rise to tools that can assist researchers in finding materials without directly using the catalog at all, such as LibGuides (Robinson 2016). With this context, the purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions research librarians of a non-Western subject – Middle Eastern Studies (MES) – hold regarding the LCSH. This study consisted of semi-structured, hour-long interviews with five MES librarians employed by universities that offer a full degree in Middle Eastern Studies. Through these interviews, I sought to find not only their opinions of the LCSH, but whether its Eurocentric bias is seen as a major roadblock to material retrieval in the digital age. The data collected in these semi-structured interviews was analyzed utilizing thematic analysis to uncover both evident and subtextual patterns in the responses. The goal of this study was not to critique efforts to reform the LCSH, but to investigate if its Eurocentrism poses the same obstacle that it did in the pre-digital age.