[AUDIO PLAYBACK - Clip from Mary Poppins] 

- Confound it, Banks, I said, do you have anything to say? 

- [GIGGLING] Just one word, sir. [GIGGLES] 

- Yes. 

- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! [WHEEZING] 

- What? 

- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. [GIGGLES] Mary Poppins was right. It's extraordinary. It does make you feel better. [GIGGLES] 

- What are you talking about, man? There's no such word. 

- Oh, yes, it is a word. A perfectly good word, actually. Do you know what there's no such thing as? It turns out, with due respect, when all is said and done, that there's no such thing as you. 

[END PLAYBACK] 

[THEME MUSIC] 

CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I am reminded of how subversive Mary Poppins is. I'm Charlie Bennett, and we're in the studio with Fred, Wendy, Sonya, and the guy from the last shift still hanging. 

FRED RASCOE: That's Ben. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: I know. 

FRED RASCOE: He's here. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: I like giving them silly nicknames when they're on the couch. 

FRED RASCOE: Oh, the guy. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: The guy, the dude, the person on the board, the hanger-on, some guy named Steve. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. 

FRED RASCOE: Our show today is called "Cruising the Library". 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: Can we add an expialidocious to it, Fred? 

FRED RASCOE: Sure, like "Cruising the Library Expialidocious." How's that? 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: Great. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] 

FRED RASCOE: "Cruising the Library"-- without the "expialidocious" is the title of a book by today's guest, Melissa Adler. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: She'll be talking about why we need to be careful with catalogs because for all their usefulness, they are systems of naming, and naming has power. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Leading the discussion today are our supercalifragilistic colleagues and frequent guest producers Marlee Givens and Sonya Slutskaya. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: If you want to join the conversation, the hashtag for this show is #lits411 for Lost in the Stacks, episode 411. Feel free to tweet your thoughts, questions, or your own invented words with that hashtag. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: I'd like to see some of those. Our songs today are about systems of power, resistance, meaning, and all possible definitions of cruising. Oh, my. Hello, sailor. In fact, let's get this show started with a song called "Cruisin'" by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps right here on Lost in the Stacks. 

[GENE VINCENT, "CRUISIN' "] 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: This is Lost in the Stacks, and our guest today is Melissa Adler, a professor in the faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She is also the author of the book Cruising the Library, Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge, which is about subject headings, and classification systems, and labelings as a mechanism of control in the library. I began the interview by asking Dr. Adler how she came up with the book title. 

So our first question, of course, is about your book. And the title is Cruising the Library, and there is a lot of cruising metaphors-- browsing, lingering. And so we really like that traveling. When did you come up with that metaphor, and what does it mean to you? 

MELISSA ADLER: Oh, that's a great question. Do you want to know? My editor, Richard Morrison at Fordham, was the person who came up with this title. Well, he didn't exactly come up with the title. It was first the chapter title. It was going to be the chapter on Intersectionality and race and sexuality, where I look at Roderick Ferguson's work, Aberrations in Black, and I look at the cataloging of that book. And I go into a discussion of Munoz's work on cruising. 

My editor said, no, that has to actually be the title of the book itself because he thought that that really gets at the idea of it, so going into this library space that one could call a sort of utopian space in a certain way, and thinking about how queer people can occupy, and travel, and cruise around in the library and find my books. 

So it's a perfect kind of metaphor, I think, because of the way that queer readers, particularly, reside in and hang out and linger in the HQs. Right? I think a lot of us have our own experiences of that particular section, but that that section doesn't contain it all. So we have to wander a bit to find all the books. But there's something very magical, I think, and important for queer people-- queer readers, in particular, about the library space. 

MARLEE GIVENS: And I think that the word "cruising" has a particular resonance for that group as well. 

MELISSA ADLER: That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. 

MARLEE GIVENS: So there's this idea of cataloging and classification as being a system for simplifying things for the user and simplifying things for the cataloger. But it seems like, especially after reading your book, that cataloging is really an act of naming and that cataloging can really affect the user's experience. So how do you see the role of the cataloger in the experience of the user? 

MELISSA ADLER: Well, I guess I see the cataloguer's role as being so complicated because the cataloguer has to work within the confines of an existing system. You have a Library of Congress classification, or the Dewey system, or the Library of Congress subject headings. And for any given concept, there might be a usable, relevant, accurate heading or class, and there may not be, and there might be multiple things that fit. 

And the cataloguer's job, I guess, it's always to meet the needs and desires of an anticipated user, which is always complicated. Because there is not just a singular user. And if you are in a large academic library, for example, or a public library for a broad public, you are expected to have a general user in mind, whereas if you work in a more discipline-specific kind of library or community-specific library, you might have more opportunities to go more specific and gear your subjects toward another kind of imagined user or a specific user, particular user, I suppose. 

MARLEE GIVENS: There's a subject term that you've used in previous writings, "paraphilias." Can you talk about that as an example? 

MELISSA ADLER: So paraphilias is interesting because it does come from psychiatric literature. And it's a term that I think most queer people, for example, presumably, some of the people that this subject heading is presumed to be about, I suppose, people that are seeking information or reading materials will not think to use that term. They won't know it. Most people don't what that word means. Most people have never heard of paraphilias. I've seen it come up on Law and Order in pop culture world. But it's really rare. It's not something that's in the vernacular of most users of public and academic libraries. It's a discipline-specific heading. 

So I guess the cataloguer's role is to try as best to know their users and what they might be looking for. But in the case of paraphilia, there's not really a better heading. That's the problem. It's not really a good heading there. So you do the best you can, I guess, and add as many rich keywords in the rest of the record as you possibly can. Facilitate access through keyword searches and so on, maybe add a local heading. Did that answer your question? 

It's hard to say. It's hard because a cataloguer's job is hard. And that's one of the things I try to get across in the book is, it's hard. There's so many volumes of headings, and classes, and so on. But even with that vast array of terminology and so on, there's a limit to what's possible. It sets a whole bunch of different kinds of limits. 

MARLEE GIVENS: We'll be back with more from Melissa Adler, author of Cruising the Library, Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge, after a music set. 

FRED RASCOE: File this set under HQ 76.3 U5S753. 

[KRAFTWERK, "AUTOBAHN"] 

MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "53rd and 3rd" by the Ramones, and before that, "Autobahn" by Kraftwerk, songs about cruising in every sense of the word. 

[ROCK MUSIC] 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and today we are talking about representation and misrepresentation in the Library of Congress classification system. Our guest is Melissa Adler of the University of Western Ontario. In her book, Cruising the Library, she discusses the concept of how library organization makes the user work too hard to adapt to the system. In other words, Dr. Adler puts it, the system is creating the user instead of the other way around. We asked her to elaborate on this concept. 

MELISSA ADLER: Oh, I'm kind of borrowing that idea from Ron Day. He works with this in a variety of different contexts, social media and so on. But this notion that the system calls out to us, hails us as subjects. And if we don't identify these subjects, if we can't find things using the subject categories that the system requires us to, we might fail in our search for knowledge or information. But there's also a way in which sometimes-- especially, I think, this becomes really clear in social media-- the way that we're hailed, we're called out to, and there's a way in which these structures might produce desires or might produce interests and so on, identities, and that we might feel compelled to respond in particular ways. And that our subjectivities are in dialogue with these systems, and that we feed it back, that we give back to it, depending on how we respond, that there's a feedback mechanism there. 

And I think that's true in the library as well, although not in such a obvious way. But that is there as well, I think. I mean, that notion of being in the HQs and what happens in that space between a person and their books is that idea, I think, finding something you didn't know you were curious about. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Well, that is the whole idea of the browsing experience. And here at Georgia Tech, we've moved most of our books out of the library. And our users, even the users inside the library, are relying on our virtual systems to do this kind of cruising and browsing. And we're doing a lot to transform the physical space. For example, we've taken away our reference desk, and we're making it more of a retail experience so that the transaction is more collaborative. 

But we know that most of our users are not coming physically to the building, and they're experiencing our online presence. And we have to rely on a commercial virtual browsing platform that is built on classification. So in our previous radio show, we were talking about classification, in particular. And our archivist colleagues said, well, why do you even need call numbers? Why can't you just use barcodes? And why can't people browse by subject headings? In a library like ours, do we really need the call numbers anymore? Is it just because our acquisitions and virtual browsing systems that we rely on are using those? 

MELISSA ADLER: Oh, that's interesting. I'm always going to be in favor of-- this is what I say in the book as well. Part of my project is critique, for sure. Part of my project is to suggest that there are better ways of doing library subject access, and so on. Part of the goal is to do a historical project to unmask the ways in which this is really a reflection of the way that people view subjects in relation to the American project, but that there's also something really lovely, and good, and powerful-- not in a negative sense, that there's something really wonderful about the disciplinary lines as well. 

To walk through the library space, to be surrounded by a section, books that have all been selected by librarians about a particular topic, and you can stand there and browse for any length of time and potentially discover new things that you didn't know were out there-- that's a really good thing. Maybe this goes back to Sonya's earlier question about what is the cataloguer's job or responsibility. I think it's that, that that's part of the experience for me, and I think that a lot of people share that experience. 

So I would say that, with all its flaws and with all of its problems and so on, that there's still something really important about preserving the library space and the order-- or perhaps not the order, but some kind of order, perhaps different orders. Experimenting with different kinds of orders, I think, would be really fun and interesting if there was endless resources and time. But yeah, I wouldn't do away with the call numbers, personally. 

I see what you're saying, and I think that there is something important about virtual browsing as well. And I know that many libraries are making those kinds of transitions, and it makes sense in a lot of places. But I wouldn't say that every place should be making that kind of transition and that there's something really good about the ways that libraries select materials, assemble them into various arrangements, and make it so that people can find what they're looking for, or find things that they didn't. That, I think, is the power of browsing is you find things you didn't know you were looking for. And subject headings don't always retrieve everything on a subject. Right? I think that's one of the ideas that that's an ideal, but that's not what happens with subject cataloging. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: But do you think we can create a virtual space which is just as comfortable for browsing, and cruising, and lingering? 

MELISSA ADLER: Not personally, no. I think there are lovely systems. I love LibraryThing, for example. I think that's a really lovely system for recommendations. It's very participatory. I love that site, and I think it's very useful. And I've used it to find materials. But for me personally, there's no substitute for the physical space. So I'm always going to side with, there needs to be places where that physical space is protected as well. 

MARLEE GIVENS: We'll return to our interview with Melissa Adler and our discussion about library catalog systems on the left side of the hour. 

MANDY: Hi, I'm Mandy, the accordion-playing data librarian, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Sometimes we use this little reflective pause in the show to encapsulate an essential idea, a "too long, didn't read" summary of the episode. Today we're doing just that with Melissa Adler's book. If we could pick any one point for you, listener, to take away from this episode, it's that the Library of Congress, for all its positive attributes, is still a state organization reflecting the values of the state in which it was created. As Dr. Adler puts in her book, "one of my central claims is that these systems must be understood as tools that have contributed to the construction of a national history and identity of the United States, and I suggest that the subjects were not only arranged in relation to one another, but in relation to an imagined nation and its interests. As the Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, its knowledge organization systems must be analyzed as instruments of statecraft." 

Instruments of statecraft is my next band name. File this set under JN2916.P45. 

[CAKE, "COMFORT EAGLE"] 

(SINGING) We are building a religion 

FRED RASCOE: That was "Controller" by the Rough Talons. Before that, "Control" by La Sera. We started that set with "Comfort Eagle" by Cake. Songs about power and resistance. 

[TELEVISION, "FRICTION"] 

MARLEE GIVENS: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. Today we're talking about how library classification systems can be problematic, including the US's own Library of Congress classification system. Our guest today, Melissa Adler, writes about how these problems can manifest themselves. We asked Dr. Adler to talk about an example of the controversial Library of Congress classification term, "illegal aliens." 

MELISSA ADLER: Well, I guess, for that example, the illegal aliens example, to me, brings to mind the ways in which the Library of Congress is, through and through, a US federal institution. So there's just a limit to what it can do. And I guess this is where I've been really trying to focus my attention, and this is one of the things that I really try to drive home. When I am faced with opportunities to teach the catalog, or to teach this in research methods, I try to emphasize the way in which the Library of Congress is absolutely the Library of Congress, and that its headings and that its structures reflect not just the late 19th century worldview, but I would say it goes even farther back to when Jefferson first classified his books and the Library of Congress purchased his cataloging classification. 

And I think that, to me, is the more troubling part of this conversation. So there's the line of thinking which is that you can change the structures, and you can change the names and so on. And we can always work toward improving the system. But as long as that system is the Library of Congress system, it just, to me, really carries so much in the way of colonialism and imperialism, and the illegal aliens heading really just brings that into sharp relief, I think. It just makes it so clear. 

Because if it's the case that Congress could get that involved with what the library calls its subject headings and then says that, well, this is a legal language, this is a congressional language, therefore it has to stay. We just realize the ways in which our library systems are codified in and by a government institution, a US government institution. 

And so this is why I say maybe we don't need these systems. Maybe we think about other ways of imagining and ordering libraries. Because I think that the physical space is something really important, but that maybe there is something to be said for local systems or local systems that augment, or revise, or undo the Library of Congress system, even if it's just in particular sections of the library or something like this because I think that this is an issue, the US government piece. That was a long-winded way of answering your question. 

MARLEE GIVENS: No, but it's perfect because, as Sonya and I were talking about it, I remember in the epilogue to your book, you were talking about the collapsing of the apparatus and the classifications that collapse under their own weight. If we take back the control locally, it's like saying this state system doesn't matter. 

And I said, this reminds me of a line from a movie. There's a scene in the movie Mary Poppins. It's the scene where Mr. Banks is going to be fired, and he all of a sudden realizes how ridiculous this is. And he starts to laugh, and he says supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And the bank Board of Directors say, that's not a word. And he says, it is a word. It's a perfectly good word. And do you know what there's no such thing as? There's no such thing as you. 

And I just thought that was a delightful parallel, at least in my mind, just the fact that we can say, well, this may be a system, but it's artificial, it's an apparatus. It doesn't exist. And we can choose to do something different. 

MELISSA ADLER: Yeah, that's right. And I think that the desire-- I mean, this is where the control piece comes in. Of course, you have to have control in order to have these uniform vocabularies. And that's how standardization is made possible. That's how these universal global systems are made possible. And it's because you have to use these different mechanisms of control to make that happen. You have to simplify common sections to terms that can be accessible anywhere. And the benefit is that you can use these kinds of vocabularies in catalogs all over the place, and you can go into a library anywhere, and if you're vaguely familiar with Dewey or the Library of Congress, or what have you, you can probably find what you need. 

But it's very American-centric. I think it's damaging not just in the US, where I think it's very obvious that it's damaging, and reductive, and marginalizing, and all of those problems. But then when you take it to the international context, the problems are even worse. And yeah, the benefit is that there's greater access, but I think that we also have to think about how can we do that, but also privilege the local context. 

And I think this is where, hopefully, linked data has a capacity to do better than what we've got so that we can have multiple systems speaking to one another across languages, across cultures, and so on. So I think that that's a hopeful turn. And I'm really curious to see how that all comes through in the coming years. 

But I also think that just working at the very local level and saying, OK, how do we see the world, and how can we make ourselves reflect that, or how can we make our systems reflect that, or our website, or our virtual browse reflect our view of the world? I guess. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: I'm pessimistic. The system always wins. The old one collapses. The new one is being created. It reproduces itself. Hopefully, we can do something in the meantime about it, at least about some of it. 

MELISSA ADLER: That's right. And the systems are always limited. They always involve choices and priorities and so on. There's always going to be problems with these. And that's the diversity argument that there's always problems. So there's always change. There's always context. Within any given context, there's diversity. There's diverse perspectives. So to say that there's our way of seeing things, there's always going to be a multifaceted, lots of perspectives in any given scenario. But you can make different kinds of choices, depending on your context. To think that you can just fix it and then be done is an illusion. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we have been speaking with Melissa Adler, professor in the faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She is also the author of Cruising the Library, Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge. We'll be back after a music break. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

FRED RASCOE: File this set under PS2649.P36N6. 

[PIERO UMILIANI, "MAH-NA-MAH-NA"] 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: "Kocka Mow-Mow" by The Dinks. And before that, "Umtcha Umtcha Da Da Da" by The Rhythmic Eight. And we started off with "Mah-Na-Mah-Na" by Piero Umiliani. Songs with words that exist because we decide they exist and mean exactly what we decide they mean. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

FRED RASCOE: Today's show is called "Cruising the Library," and we explored how systems like the Library of Congress can frame how we librarians and archivists define and assign identity to our users. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah, it's almost like we create the users. 

SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Yeah, we are part of the apparatus, just cogs in the machine. 

MARLEE GIVENS: But if it's just an apparatus, is that real or imagined? And are the users real or imagined? 

CHARLIE BENNETT: After that last music set and all this talk, I feel kind of like we're in some Lewis Carroll chapter about libraries with Alice in Wonderland. It feels very weird, Fred. 

FRED RASCOE: While also simultaneously being instruments of statecraft. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Dude. 

FRED RASCOE: Let's roll the credits. 

[TALKING HEADS, "FOUND A JOB"] 

Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, produced by Charlie Bennett, Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: That very Fred Rascoe was our engineer today. We miss you, Matt and Will. And the show was brought to you in collaboration with The Collective, a library conference designed to create collaborations between next generation academic librarians, archivists, and library staff. 

FRED RASCOE: They're on the web at thelibrarycollective.org where you can see the program for this year's conference and learn more about how The Collective pursues its goals. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Legal counsel and supercalifragilisticexpialidociousness were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. 

WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special thanks to Melissa for being on the show, to Marlee and Sonya for helping produce this episode, and thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. 

FRED RASCOE: You can find us online at lostinthestacks.org and you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and plenty of other places we don't even about. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week on Lost in the Stacks, the seminal works episode. Sounds kind of important. 

FRED RASCOE: Mmm, Sounds kind of important, indeed. Time for our last song today, and it's a special request of our guest. Melissa Adler explores how knowledge organization shapes perceptions of identity and how we can take steps to bring a more inclusive mindset to that very organization. It's difficult work, but when it's done right, it's library magic. 

So for Melissa, this is "Library Magic" by The Head and the Heart right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. 

[THE HEAD AND THE HEART, "LIBRARY MAGIC"] Drawn to that sort of library magic 

Whispering through the dusty aisles 

Watching all--