Finding Palestine in the Library
Library cataloging policies and practices can have the unintended but harmful consequence of erasing Palestine as a place of publication, particularly for books published prior to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This blog post will explain how Palestine is erased in the catalog and shares search strategies for discovering books published in Palestine.
The current genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza is causing tragic and unnecessary loss of life. The genocide also targets the culture of the Palestinian people, similar to what occurred during the Nakba in 1948. As a librarian, I am concerned about the current attack on cultural sites in Gaza, including the intentional bombing of libraries and archives. As scholars will become increasingly reliant on publications from Palestine held in libraries worldwide, it is necessary to understand the ways our cataloging policies disadvantage Palestinians and can make it challenging to find materials published in Palestine. Searches by place of publication may not be common by users, but libraries do rely on them for collections analysis: place of publication analysis can help us understand the diversity of our collections.
Library catalogs record the place of publication in two locations: 1) in the fixed fields as a code from an established list of country codes maintained by the Library of Congress and 2) in the Place of Publication tag (260/264) as free-text, transcribed from the book being cataloged.
Fixed fields (coded data)
The country code list was first compiled in 1967/1968. According to documentation, “Codes are assigned according to present geographic boundaries. A place which has historically been located in more than one political jurisdiction is coded for the jurisdiction in which it is presently located.” Cataloging policies largely come from national libraries, such as the de facto national library of the United States, the Library of Congress, whose job includes being a repository of government documents. When a country no longer exists, the code is retired and reassigned to the new state. The Soviet Union, for example, fell after the code list was published so its code was retired. This policy privileges nation states and can have the unintended consequence of erasing peoples who are Indigenous from the catalog. Due to this policy, books published in Palestine during Ottoman rule and the British mandate are retroactively assigned the country code of “is” for Israel. This can be seen in WorldCat by doing a country code search for “is” and limiting the results to dates preceding the state of Israel, such as 1800–1947:
https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=cp%3Ais&datePublished=1800-1947
Approximately 144,000 records in WorldCat return in the result (the true number may be slightly fewer since books with unknown publication dates such as “19uu” that could be published after 1948 will appear in the result).
Fortunately, there are country codes for Gaza and the West Bank (“gz” and “wj,” respectively) for finding Palestinian published books post-1948. To find these materials, you can search WorldCat using these codes:
https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Acp%3Awj+OR+kw%3Acp%3Agz
The result is 32,480 records in WorldCat published in Gaza and the West Bank.
Fixed field searching is seen as reliable because the countries are recorded as standardized codes. This normalizes the data and makes it easy to query on information. When Palestinian publications are recorded as published in Israel, libraries unintentionally erase Palestine as a place with an historical record. This is why in the next section I will describe alternative ways of searching for publications from Palestine in the catalog.
Place of publication (free-text transcribed from book cataloged)
Place of publication is also recorded in another part of the record: the 260 or 264 tags in the subfield $a. In the absence of a fixed field code for Palestine, the place of publication in the 260/264 can be useful — since it is transcribed from the book, it will not be changed retroactively. A search for Palestine in the place of publication returns 3,417 results in WorldCat:
https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=pl%3APalestine
This search has several downsides. First, the terminology is not coded so the result will include any location named Palestine (there are over a dozen Palestines in the United States alone as seen on the Wikipedia disambiguation page). Second, this data is directly transcribed from the work so Palestine is not necessarily recorded. For example, if a book states the place of publication as Ramallah without also including Palestine, it might not appear in the results. Third, this is limited to one spelling of Palestine, which has dozens of spellings. It is possible to search on multiple variants of the spelling of Palestine using an OR boolean (the list of variants was taken from the Wikidata record and may not be exhaustive or accurate). This increased the number of records to 32,500:
Search of Palestine in multiple language variants
While this returns a good number of results, it still demonstrates the disadvantage Palestine has lacking a code. A standardized code controls the form of data, which ideally prevents the complications that come with free-text searching.
Conclusion
This blog addresses the place of publication data, which is important but not the only data in the catalog where discovery of Palestine can occur. Books about Palestine can be found using subject headings, but these can also be problematic. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are a way to find materials on subjects in the catalog using controlled language. The subject heading for Palestinians is Palestinian Arabs. This is not ideal for several reasons. It denies the unified identity of Palestinians, which includes more groups than Arabs. Most users would expect to be able to search on Palestinians in the catalog, and might not know to search for Palestinian Arabs instead.
While these policies are not intended to erase Palestinian history, they can do so nonetheless by perpetuating the harmful myth that Palestine never existed and has no identity. In this post I wanted to bring more awareness to the way cataloging policies can hide Palestinian publications, in hopes that it might help researchers and librarians to find Palestine in the library.
Jamie Carlstone
Librarian, Northwestern University
All opinions are my own
Please reach out @jamie-carlstone.bsky.social or through the contact form on my website
More Resources:
https://culturalheritageterminology.co.uk/resources/ (see Glossary and section 1.9 for Palestine)
