Library of Congress subject headings, according to the Library of Congress website, comprise the most widely adopted subject indexing language in the entire world. They are used by librarians and researchers to help narrow and specify searches in order to find exactly the subject/information the researcher desires. In the New York Times article, Another Word for ‘Illegal Alien’ at the Library of Congress: Contentious, author Jasmine Aguilera details the controversy over the usage of the term “illegal alien” in LOC subject headings. A petition to remove the term from LOC subject headings was recently brought to the Library of Congress, by Dartmouth student Melissa Padilla and her peers, after she repeatedly noticed the term in her studies. The term, she argues, “criminalize[s] the choices our parents made in order to provide us with better lives, and obstacles we overcame in order to survive.” Her lament at the cruel way in which the term was used and supported by the LOC, struck a chord with Congress Librarian David S. Mao, who decided along with his contemporaries, to stop using the term in subject headings. This decision outraged lawmakers on the right, who saw this abandonment of the term as a desert from law in order to make a case for social justice. The conservative lawmakers argues that the LOC is compromising their dignity by forgoing the use of a term that is still legally accurate. I personally believe that the Library of Congress being overruled in some places by the government, while upsetting in terms of social justice, is a positive display of our government’s system of checks and balances. I found a lot of subjects that felt the need to specify that the humans it discussed were African-American, seemingly implying that the literary standard for women was a Caucasian woman. Perhaps, in the future, these subject headings can be conducted publicly, with input from society allowed in order to prevent pejorative titles from “slipping through the cracks” of the people who ultimately get to choose these titles.
