Introduction

In the modern-day information environment, libraries heavily rely on various classification systems in order to process new materials and organize their collections. One of the most prominent means of doing so involve controlled vocabularies, wherein the standard for a material's subject matter is defined in a consistent manner by a regulatory body, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in academic libraries. However, what happens when the ways these subject headings are classified are inaccurate, outdated, or even discriminatory? For members of the LGBTQI+ and queer communities, the LCSH and similar controlled vocabularies pose these very challenges. Over the years, LGBT-related subject headings have undergone many shifts in how they are hierarchically classified, yet as these materials continue to gain visibility, the existing structures for classification may prove too broad or ill-defined. These communities may find alternatives, such as social tagging systems, to be a more relevant method for classifying specific terminology and materials made by queer people, for queer people. Through a thorough analysis of existing literature, one can see that existing controlled vocabularies like the LCSH are unable to do the LGBT and queer communities justice on their own, and the integration of social tagging and other nontraditional systems could benefit information professionals and patrons alike.

Comparison of Samples in Controlled Vocabularies & Social Tagging

In order to understand the current standing of queer topics in controlled vocabularies, a sample of books and how they're classified in the LCSH versus how they are classified on a socially-tagged platform can illustrate the disparity starkly. Melissa Adler sampled 20 books with queer- specifically transgender- subject matter and went to WorldCat to compare how the cataloguers may have classified these books, when compared to the lexical social tagging- also called "folksonomies"- done by readers and book owners on the platform LibraryThing. While the LCSH has a wide variety of narrower terms that fall under the heading "Transgender people", only four of the books examined had any of these terms assigned (Adler, 2009, pg. 322). Furthermore, it's important to note that some narrower terms like "Tranny" are still registered by the LCSH (Adler, 2009, pg. 321), which is understood today (and developing at the time of this study) as a fetishizing and hurtful slur against transgender individuals. By contrast, 17 out of 20 books were tagged with some mixture of specific tags relating to wider transgender identities, including "Genderqueer" and "Drag queens" (Adler, 2009, pg. 323), which were more precisely relevant to the books subject matter more so than a generalized heading of "Transgender". Adler points out that, "As a large, government bureaucracy, the Library of Congress participates in and enacts a mainstream discourse, often closing off spaces in which self-naming might take place. Social tagging, however, offers a space for such a lexicon to develop" (Adler, 2009, pg. 312). One of the primary means by which the LCSH contributes to this exclusionary discourse is by the inherently hierarchical structure of their classification system; Not only may this frame a given social group in an antiquated way, it limits a subject heading to just one place within the structure. Social tagging, on the other end, allows multiple terms to be applied on one material, and over time, "folksonomies become collections of all of the terms people use to identify the object being tagged" (Adler, 2009, pg. 315). At the time of Adler's study, WorldCat had only begun to implement social tagging within its catalog, although none of the books sampled had been tagged (Adler, 2009, pg. 317). However, it appears in an instance like this that social classification would greatly benefit both the cataloguing body, who may have their workload lightened as patrons contribute the majority of knowledgeable metadata, and the patrons themselves who feel that these works are properly classified for themselves and others to easily access with integrity.

Almost 15 years later, and there have been a number of strides made within the LCSH and other controlled vocabularies to be more inclusive; However, they still face the same tension as they ever have in justly representing marginalized groups like the LGBT community, and as Marika Cifor et al. compare these institutional classification systems to a grassroots queer lexical database like the Homosaurus, modern-day discrepancies can be noted. They begin by illustrating that, "queer and trans pasts are mediated by the information infrastructures that organize, describe, and construct those pasts to make them accessible to users" (Cifor et al., 2023, pg. 2169). Similarly to Adler's work, the biases of institutions and the cataloguers they employ can and will soak into systems like the LCSH, even if they purport themselves to be objective tools. As this creates a deep information need for the queer community, the Homosaurus provides a controlled vocabulary in use by back-end cataloguers with a focus on LGBTQI+ topics (Cifor et al., 2023, pg. 2170) alongside the LCSH; While the LCSH may classify "Family" without more specific scope notes, the Homosaurus makes distinctions for non-biological familial units that are common for various queer groups, like "Chosen Family", "Ballroom Families", and "Leather Families" (Cifor et al., 2023, pg. 2177). This is one example of a semi-socially generated system that can be used in tandem with wider subject headings to maintain a level of consistency and organization needed in an academic library, for example, although it isn't without its own challenges. The Homosaurus is structured hierarchically just like the LCSH, and while it is committed to implementing queer lexicon that have been overlooked in the past, it still 'boxes' terms in to broader and narrower topics, and use for (UF) terms that are entry only and considered synonymous (Cifor et al., 2023, pg. 2175). It could be argued that these issues would be present in any controlled vocabulary with such a structure, and when it comes to developments in the last decade, the Homosaurus works to fill in those gaps with a comprehensive queer vocabulary that leaves no stone unturned.

Further explorations of the Homosaurus, LCSH, and other controlled vocabularies can show how these databases are structured and framed. The Homosaurus is not without its own biases but it does set a much higher standard for the granularity and relevancy of queer topics in the information environment, and as Brian Dobreski et al. explore through comparison with the LCSH and Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT), these databases themselves need to be more inclusive, instead of deferring to outside sources. With 618 identity-related terms taken from the Homosaurus, only 153 matches were found in the LCSH and 176 in the LCDGT (Dobreski et al., 2022, pg. 502). What this points to is a need for an expansion of inclusive vocabulary overall, regardless of whether the structure is more traditionally hierarchical like the LCSH, or faceted like the LCDGT. Dobreski argues that, "While LCDGT offers increased flexibility through the use of facets, it also cannot provide the conceptual coverage of the specialized Homosaurus vocabulary" (Dobreski et al., 2022, pg. 503). It's important to remember that the LCSH is reliant on literary warrant (Dobreski et al., 2022, pg. 504) in crafting its lexical database, something not uncommon with many controlled vocabularies but an important factor to remember when it comes to epistemological biases brought to marginalized identities and subject matter.

Case Studies of Controlled Vocabulary Development

One sorely overlooked part of the queer community that has been treated this way are its intersex members. Intersex people have historically been and continue to be denied agency over their bodies, their medical treatment, and with most relevance, the way that controlled vocabularies describe them. Melodie Fox explores how applicable terminology within the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system has changed over time, and what this may reflect for wider conceptions of intersex identity overall.

While the term "intersex" has a rather consistent definition, "The purpose, interests, and theoretical perspectives surrounding intersex found in the literature changed rapidly enough and were at odds enough to render the concept unstable" (Fox, 2016, pg. 582). Intersex had previously been classified in the DDC under the term "hermaphrodite", which is now understood as a slur against the community. In these previous iterations prior to the 1990s, "hermaphrodite" was classified under broader terms including "Physiology", "Monstrosities (congenital defects & deformities)", and "Sexual disorders" (Fox, 2016, pg. 586-587). Despite these broader terms developing over time to reflect modern academic consensus, it wasn't until the 2011 edition of the DDC that "intersex" was classified under terms such as "Labor economics" and "Social services", the first year of classification under anything besides a medical context, and one that deemed it deviant or monstrous at that (Fox, 2016, 588). Most crucially though, this broadening of classification only occurred in the first place after Dewey fielded public feedback on their internet blog, along with related topics like transgender and asexual identities (Fox, 2016, 591). While the DDC and LCSH may have different classifying criteria, they are not so dissimilar that what has happened to "intersex" in the DDC hasn't likely been reflected in the LCSH as well. When considering this history of pathologization that is only being overturned in the last decade, the intersex and wider queer community may not only find these systems to inaccurately classify relevant materials, but they may have an overall distrust for the institutions to do socially just work for them altogether. Fox's case study on the shifts of how intersex may be classified points to not just a theoretical, but tangible need from this community and their allies to be recognized for their personhood and patronage in the information environment that the wider queer community would benefit from as well, in such a way where social tagging and classification has been the only work doing so, so far.

Something similar has happened to the ways in which transgender subject matter is categorized in the LCSH. As Matt Johnson explores, while "Transgender people" was given main subject entry status in 2007, it made the previously existing terms that many individuals identify with including "Transsexual" subordinate terms (Johnson, 2010, pg. 667). This speaks to a less common but still stark issue facing controlled vocabularies, that in this attempt at reclassifying to be more relevant overall, many members of the wider LGBT community have the granularity of their identities scrubbed because of the inherently hierarchical structure. Johnson suggests social tagging and the advent of interactive, web-based resources to help alleviate the overwhelming pile of describable resources that may need to be catalogued at any given moment (Johnson, 2010, pg. 675), which would both give meaningful classifications to these materials while also not making any of them compete in a hierarchical, inflexible manner.

The Role of the Cataloguing Information Professional

One factor of this inflexibility that is often overlooked is the role of individual cataloguer; K. R. Roberto examined the tenuous position that librarians may find themselves in when they are tasked with describing and providing for the lives of transgender individuals, while relying on the shortcomings of the LCSH and other controlled vocabularies as has already been established (Roberto, 2011, pg. 56-57). As this lexicon has absolutely no chance of being truly inclusive, "We should attempt to use language that reflects users' realities and the realities of those described in the works we are cataloging" (Roberto, 2011, pg. 63). While the most obvious answer to support this proposition is the use of social tagging like the Homosaurus or LibraryThing provides, for a librarian working on the spot with the LGBT public, strategies that are more immediate in fulfilling the information need must be present.

Having different methods of knowledge organization (KO) is certainly one way to keep this shortcoming from happening. As Bullard et al. navigate two different KO projects, a librarian's best response to a shortcoming of their institution's classification system may be honesty about the matter alongside a willingness to direct the patron to the resources they do have. As many of these, "[LGBT2QIA+ ] libraries find themselves in similarly tenuous relationships of stewardship, location, and independence among academic institutions and local activist and community groups" (Bullard et al., 2020, pg. 395), the resources they provide to their patronage is certainly not limited to academic material as classified by the LCSH, and the KO projects they worked on reflected these wider needs that were particularly non-hierarchical, such as the reclassification of material once generally designated for young adults or as erotica into something based on the actual relationships portrayed in these fiction works (Bullard et al., 2020, pg. 398). These projects were not created to be a complete replacement for the LCSH as previously stated, but instead to fulfill the neglected information needs of both academic and non-academic works covering queer subjects, for queer patrons. As a result, they are reliant on non-traditional- almost faceted or ontological- means to classify the materials instead, in such a way that will continue to receive feedback from the wider field of information science for improvement.

Looking to International Struggles in Socially Just Classification

While the focus of this literature review has been primarily on the LCSH and other English-language subject headings, the examination of international databases written in other languages may illustrate wider information justice issues faced by queer people around the world. Paulo Vicente et al. look at how the Portuguese Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) represents and misrepresents sexual orientation and the worldviews through which this classification system functions, and what could be done to improve it. Vicente identifies that in the broader European and particularly Portuguese context, critical cataloguing has been rarely noted and has little literature to point to for precedent (Vicente, 2024, pg. 111). This alone raises alarm bells about the specific marginal identities that have yet to be given justice in non-English information environments. Yet like the English-language LCSH examples prior, the UDC also has its classification roots of sexuality in an, "inadequate correspondence between the concepts of 'sex assigned at birth' and 'sexual orientation'" (Vicente, 2024, pg. 111). The UDC's present-day terminology is even more staggering when it classifies gender or sexual identities like "Transsexuals" or outright 'deviant' terminology like "Sexual Perverts" alongside more recognizable terms for orientation, like "Lesbians" and "Bisexuals" (Vicente, 2024, pg. 112). Most interestingly, "Heterosexuals" are not located in the UDC at all, an exclusion that, "Mirrors the assumption of heterosexuality as the norm" (Vicente, 2024, pg. 113). While this version of the UDC was collected and published two decades ago, it offers a frightening glimpse into an information desert that surely not only harms the Portuguese queer communities, but may be reflective of non-English speaking queer communities the world over. While at one point in time it may have been relevant, the developments of social tagging cannot exist in the vacuum of just the English-speaking world, and bringing attention to the information needs of the international queer communities may bring them strong vehicles for inclusive developments overall.

Questioning the Perspectives Brought to Cataloguing Altogether

With all of this talk about the injustices faced by LGBT patrons in America and beyond, it may appear to be a gargantuan task to change these systems; This doesn't just mean change within the controlled vocabulary itself, but change in how individual librarians maintain their collections and meaningfully connect patrons to the materials they need that they have been systematically excluded from in the past. Drabinski sets forth some points for "queering" the manner in which these information professionals can examine their own collections and cataloguing methods in practical ways. Drabinski establishes that while critiques of controlled vocabularies and other organization systems are well documented, "From the perspective of user services, the problem of inaccessible knowledge organization is one that can be productively addressed at the moment of mediated research" (Drabinski, 2013, pg. 95). For an individual patron, biases against themselves or their research is just as reflected by the biases of the librarians assisting them as the collection they are working with, and may contribute to an active discouraging for queer individuals to see themselves as represented or welcome in the library at all. Under the queer perspective, even the entire process of categorization is, "discursively produced and historically contingent rather than as essential or articulable once and for all" (Drabinski, 2013, pg. 101). It is up to the librarian, then, to mediate the tension between a collection that may misrepresent or be passively hostile towards a portion of its patronage; Rather than just regurgitate the headings that have already been designated, an information-literate and socially-conscious librarian may instead choose to inform the patron of these inherent biases to their systems, essentially giving 'informed consent' of sorts about the challenges any database may have when representing marginalized groups (Drabinski, 2013, pg. 107-108). This can both fulfill the information need of the patron, while also teaching the user about the pedagogical structures at play within their databases so they can potentially find more accurate and granular material in the future, all thanks to the queer perspective initially applied by the librarian.

As the field of information science looks forward to the ever-increasing responsibility of maintaining database resources, Bethany McAuliffe questions whether "queering" the catalogue as Drabinksi argues will ever truly be just representation for those communities and their information needs. Recognizing the librarian as a median between the biases of controlled vocabularies and the patronage who may be affected by it, the only way to truly remove these hegemonic structures is a multi-faceted approach to contending with biases and making the library space one that is truly open to all patrons (McAuliffe, 2021, pg. 218). So while the additional implementation of socially tagged systems may be a strong compliment to the LCSH and other controlled vocabularies (McAuliffe, 2021, pg. 216), there is still a long way to go to make the library truly, authentically inclusive. Practically speaking, however, this is a strong place to start, and one that has already made big waves in terms of diversity and representation of the queer and LGBT communities.

Concluding Thoughts

When one looks at the literature concerning queer cataloguing and controlled vocabularies in the last two decades, one may see many changes congruent with the increasing visibility of these groups overall. In the coming years, these identity groups may be increasingly politicized for reasons based in bigotry and hatred, and may not have access to the resources afforded to non-queer individuals. It is deeply, thoroughly important at these times that libraries, their databases, and the organization systems they rely on work to facilitate a relevant place for LGBTQI+ and other marginalized individuals to see themselves represented and welcome. While the LCSH and other classification systems have their flaws, there is nothing stopping more libraries to welcome public interaction with this process in their own collections, and with the complimentary assistance of social tagging and other systems, libraries can cement themselves as the de facto place for queer people to feel heard and seen.

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