Statement on harmful language in the library catalogue

Cardiff University Library Services aims to establish an inclusive culture and fully supports the university’s commitment to foster, develop and promote equality and diversity in all our practices and activities. Our collections are diverse and we endeavour to describe our resources in a way that is accurate and respectful to all communities who create, use and are represented in the collections we manage.

We acknowledge that the content and existing descriptions of our collections reflect the personal and societal biases of both their creators and the times in which they were produced. Consequently, they may contain outdated and/or offensive wording, imagery, beliefs, or stereotypes, including language that is racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, or otherwise derogatory and harmful. Similarly, we recognise that the international cataloguing standards we use to describe and categorise materials are often ingrained with, uphold and perpetuate oppression and prejudice.

Cardiff University does not endorse the biases expressed in these materials and reflected in the established systems that describe them. While Cardiff University Library Services staff are committed to using inclusive and respectful language when describing resources, you may encounter insensitive, outdated, or inappropriate language in our catalogue for the following reasons:

• When describing resources, we transcribe key information, such as publication titles and names of organisations or events, directly from library materials to ensure accuracy and item discoverability. This information may contain offensive language or outdated terms.
• We have retained harmful terms to preserve historical accuracy and fully represent the material in its’ original format; we do not censor historical language which documents the social context, issues and attitudes of the era in which a resource was produced or the opinions of its’ creators.
• We do not alter creators’ use of self-identifying terms. This may include now-outdated language that was deemed acceptable and used by the creators’ community to describe themselves at the time, or derogatory terms used against their community which the creator has reclaimed.
• Many of our resources are hosted by external institutions and commercial vendors, which create and provide accompanying descriptive records that we are unable to amend.
• Some older records may not have been updated to reflect current understanding and changes in terminology. Records may also contain language that is contested and/or varies within and between communities.
• We use standardised vocabulary lists such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to enhance search and discovery of resources. Library staff do not have direct control over the language used in these vocabularies, which often fail to accurately capture the experiences of marginalised communities, are frequently biased and continue to use outdated and/or harmful language because change requests to terminology must go through an extensive review and approval process to be updated.

We recognise our responsibility to describe our collections and their creators accurately and sensitively, with particular care for our many materials which result from, are created by, or depict marginalised groups of people. We strive to ensure all our users feel respected and valued, and we are actively working towards mitigating harm caused by offensive language in our catalogue. We adhere to the Cataloguers’ Code of Ethics and are implementing remedial actions in our cataloguing practices, which include an ongoing process of:

• Identifying, determining suitable alternatives for and remediating harmful language in subject headings within existing records where we have agency to make changes.
• Ensuring the use of inclusive, accurate and current language going forward to describe newly acquired resources and improve the ways in which marginalised communities are represented in our collections.
• Regularly consulting relevant current resources regarding both harmful and favoured language used to represent marginalised communities: both to inform our choice of vocabulary and maintain awareness of any changes in contemporary language use so we can adapt our practices accordingly.
• Raising user awareness of, and reasons behind, the potential presence of harmful language in our library catalogue, addressing user reports of offensive terminology and encouraging feedback so we can learn and improve our practices (please see below for more information).
• Supporting efforts in the profession to contest and replace biased and harmful terms in Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
• Developing and supporting anti-racist and inclusive institutional strategies by engaging in discussions and participating in larger initiatives across Cardiff University and the wider library community in Wales.

As use and understanding of language evolves over time, we acknowledge that maintaining and updating our many thousands of records to ensure they describe resources accurately and respectfully will be a reflective and ongoing process. We understand that we may not always make the right decisions, and welcome feedback to help us address and improve our approach to this complex issue.

If you have questions or comments related to these approaches, please contact us at cataloguing@cardiff.ac.uk to get in touch.

We will review and address any language reported as harmful in accordance with this statement and cataloguing policy; balancing our commitment to describe resources accurately and sensitively, preservation of original context and need to ensure resource discoverability.  Possible actions may include, but are not limited to;

• replacing the harmful terms in the identified record with more appropriate language
• retaining the language in question and providing additional descriptive information to provide context for the materials and acknowledgement of the harmful terminology in use
• making no changes to the identified record (for example in cases where the record is the property of an external institution and we are unable to amend it).

We will update this statement as required to reflect our evolving understanding of the issue and adjustments to our processes. This statement acknowledges the efforts of and draws on similar statements published by many other libraries and archives tackling bias and harmful language in their descriptive records.