Paper short abstract:

Sounding the Radical Catalog captures the complexities of cataloging through sharing the voices of activist librarians who, through their practice, challenge the narrow articulation of gender, sex, identity, class and the colonialist visions embedded in library classification schemes.

Paper long abstract:

An aural investigation of the socio-historic construction of library practices, Sounding the Radical Catalog amplifies the invisible work of catalogers. As these knowledge workers make daily decisions about how to describe and order library materials, they produce the bibliographic universe piece by piece. That universe is governed by the “master narrative” of knowledge organization systems like the Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings. Their work creates meaning for library patrons who retrieve items from collections while reproducing--or interrupting--the existing knowledge organization structures.

Sounding the Radical Catalog captures the complexities of cataloging through sharing the voices of activist librarians who, through their practice, challenge the narrow articulation of gender, sex, identity, class and the colonialist visions embedded in library classification schemes. The invisible, often solitary labor and art of cataloging cannot be seen in the record. Cataloging in practice is often carried out in relative quiet, through an internal dialogue of the cataloger, who sits day after day adding complex codes; sifting through vocabularies in order to determine the best access points for an item. Recording catalogers at work allows us to capture this practice in action; to better understand the individual processes, thinking and decision making that goes into creating records; and how each librarian ultimately cannot remove themselves, institutional priorities or the constraints of standardization and time from their work. Understanding the richly human process of cataloging makes the case for continued support for these positions in the face of market pressures to automate and outsource bibliographic labor.