Cutter Numbers and Racism: What You Can Do
Laura Streett, Vassar College
SENYCON 2025
Cutters .N3 - .N5 and .O
- LC classification system
- demographic cutters used to denote "race or ethnic group"
- .N is for the term "Negroes"
- .O is for the term "Orientals"
- have been deprecated but are still present in many of our stacks
Sample demographic cutters from ClassWeb
What's the Point? Will Anyone Notice?
Although deprecated, some new publications come with suggested call numbers that include the cutters = inconsistency in our cataloging
LC Classification determines in what order books will be shelved. If one author publishes a series of books on the same subject over a number of years, they could be shelved with a gap in between = possible confusion for folks who are trying to browse
This is just one example of the systemic racism represented in our catalogs. Addressing these issues will be long and hard work. Cleaning up cutters is a relatively easy first step.
What we did
- the "we" includes me, but I am not a cataloger. The lion's share of the work was completed by two of our library assistants: Emily McNeal and Jake Eschler.
- our "seed" list of call numbers came from Netanel Ganin's post on a blog that no longer exists (but we copied it before it went!)
- We added to the list using my fairly lame search in Alma. (.N in call number, narrowed by subject headings)
- We added even more using an analysis (by U Wisconsin Madison?) in the Alma Analytics Community folders.
- Since Feb 2024, we've re-classed approx 1,800 volumes
Resources and References
Vassar College Library lists of call numbers
Engelson and Soma. "Implementing Antiracism in Technical Services." ATLA Summary of Proceedings, 2021.
Howard and Knowlton. Browsing through Bias. Library Trends (67/1) Summer 2018
*tables:https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706989/file/supp01.pdf
Ganin, Netanel. “Every Occurrence of N4 in the Library of Congress Classification Scheme.” inevermetadataididn'tlike.wordpress.com (no longer available - see Vassar lists)