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Indigenous languages in the British Library catalogue: a critique of ‘Indians of North America—Languages’

Indigenous languages in the British Library catalogue: a critique of ‘Indians of North... The British Library holds a significant collection of printed materials in, and about, North American Indigenous languages that largely speaks to a history of colonial and settler-colonial projects and collecting. This article suggests one way of exploring what that collecting context means for how we find, experience and encounter language texts in the library. It offers an approach to ‘reading’ catalogues that puts texts in conversation with cataloguing systems to both contextualise and challenge the legacies of collecting in knowledge organisation today. It traces a brief history of the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH), ‘Indians of North America—Languages’, a term that reoccurs in the British Library's catalogue. This history shows how parts of the catalogue are artefacts of problematic bodies of knowledge, whilst also surfacing examples of Indigenous resistance that can be used to reframe the catalogue. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Art Libraries Journal Cambridge University Press

Indigenous languages in the British Library catalogue: a critique of ‘Indians of North America—Languages’

Art Libraries Journal , Volume 48 (2): 5 – Apr 1, 2023
5 pages

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Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of ARLIS
ISSN
2059-7525
eISSN
0307-4722
DOI
10.1017/alj.2023.5
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The British Library holds a significant collection of printed materials in, and about, North American Indigenous languages that largely speaks to a history of colonial and settler-colonial projects and collecting. This article suggests one way of exploring what that collecting context means for how we find, experience and encounter language texts in the library. It offers an approach to ‘reading’ catalogues that puts texts in conversation with cataloguing systems to both contextualise and challenge the legacies of collecting in knowledge organisation today. It traces a brief history of the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH), ‘Indians of North America—Languages’, a term that reoccurs in the British Library's catalogue. This history shows how parts of the catalogue are artefacts of problematic bodies of knowledge, whilst also surfacing examples of Indigenous resistance that can be used to reframe the catalogue.

Journal

Art Libraries JournalCambridge University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2023

There are no references for this article.