Core Metadata and Collections Section Subject Analysis Committee 2024
Midwinter Meeting
January 29-31, 2024

Reported by Janelle West, Vocabularies Subcommittee chair and liaison to SAC

The Subject Analysis Committee (SAC) met virtually on January 29-31, 2024. The first two meetings consisted primarily of liaison reports, leaving the final day for continued discussion, follow-up on old business, and new business as needed. Outlined below are selected updates from the meeting.

Paul Frank, liaison from the Library of Congress Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division, reported that subject proposals for each monthly list will temporarily be limited to 200, thereby ensuring a more manageable load for the editorial group. LC Subject Editorial Meetings occur monthly and are open to the public. The 2024 meeting schedule is available online.

Also from the PTCP, efforts continue toward providing inclusive and reparative description. A Program Specialist will be brought on to work with changes to controlled vocabularies related to Indigenous Peoples. In the meantime, interim guidelines and a webpage have been issued to assist catalogers in making LCSH and LCDGT headings and associated classification proposals for Indigenous Peoples and to provide ongoing information about the project. Additionally, LC published a revised classification for Ukraine as part of an ongoing initiative to review and revise classifications for topics currently subclassed under “former Soviet Republics.”

On behalf of the Homosaurus Editorial Board, Adrian Williams, reported on two releases that occurred this year which augmented the Homosaurus by over 800 terms. These included intersex-related terms, terms associated with police interactions with LGBTQ+ people, and terms around aromantic, asexual, greyromantic, non-binary, megasexual, and Two-Spirit people. The editorial board has also partnered with representatives from the Sex Worker Project to revise and build out terms on sex work.

Michelle Cronquist, liaison from OLAC, reported that the Unified Best Practices in Official RDA Task Force is working on integrating OLAC Unified Best Practices into the Official RDA Toolkit. An updated version of the best practices document was released in October 2023.

Deborah Tomaras delivered an update on the SAC project group proposing changes to LC classification for Holocaust denial literature. The project group submitted a classification change proposal that would have moved Holocaust denial literature to the end of the Holocaust classification range, and the group recommended similar changes to the Holodomor denial classification. Holodomor denial classification was moved to the end of the Holodomor classification range as part of the revised Ukraine classification issued by LC in October 2023; however, the proposal to change the classification for Holocaust denial literature was rejected.

For fuller details from the Subject Analysis Committee Midwinter Meeting, see links to the full reports, linked below.

Written reports

Library of Congress Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division (Paul Frank) [SAC24-MW-LC]
Library of Congress Children’s and Young Adults’ Cataloging Program (Stacey Devine) [SAC24-MW-CYAC]
Homosaurus Editorial Board (Adrian Williams) [SAC24-MW-HOMOSAURUS]
SAC Subcommittee on Faceted Vocabularies (Mingyan Li) [SAC24-MW-SSFV]
Online Audiovisual Catalogers, Inc. (Michelle Cronquist) [SAC24-MW-OLAC]
Dewey Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee and OCLC-Dewey Decimal Classification (Jo Williams and Alex Kyrios) [SAC24-MW-DDC_EPC]
Library of Congress Dewey Program (Camilla Williams) [SAC24-MW-DDC_LC]
National Library of Medicine (Barbara Bushman) [SAC24-MW-NLM]
OCLC (Michael Phillips) [SAC24-MW-OCLC]
ACRL RBMS Controlled Vocabularies Editorial Group (Rebecca Flore) [SAC24-MW-RBMS]
American Association of Law Libraries (Cate Kellett) [SAC24-MW-AALL]
Art Libraries Society of North America (Sherman Clarke) [SAC24-MW-ARLIS_NA]
Music Library Association (Janelle West) [SAC24-MW-MLA]
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (Amanda Ros) [SAC24-MW-IFLA]
Committee on Cataloging: Description & Access (Daniel Jergovic) [SAC24-MW-CCDA]
MARC Advisory Committee (Peter Fletcher) [SAC24-MW-MAC]
SAC Project Group Proposing Changes to LC Classification for Holocaust Denial Literature (Tina Gross and Deborah Tomaras)
Working Group on the Devaluation of Cataloging (Margaret Joyce)
Report of the chair of SAC (Amanda Ros) [SAC24-MW-chair]