The BCIT Library is pleased to announce that our alternative Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are now live in First Search! I first wrote about this project in February 2025, read this post: Behind the scenes at the BCIT Library: Decolonizing the Collection for a more technical explanation of this project. Honestly, at that time we thought that the launch was imminent. Frustratingly, we ran into some technical issues that needed to be sorted out.
The delay was much longer than expected. “Spring is delayed this year” by Jonathan Billinger, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Once again, the fabulous Decolonizing the Catalogue team here at the BCIT Library, Cindy Chang, François-Xavier Paré, Jarrett Seto, and Cindy McLellan, did not despair. We persevered and succeeded in launching with a wider scope of problematic Subject Headings addressed.
Thanks to a wonderful librarian-sourced collaborative document, our team shared the (mostly local) Indigenous terms that we worked on with our wider library community, and we have been able to add updated Subject Headings locally in the following categories:
- Gender/Sexual identity
- Disability
- Socio-Economic
- Mental Health
- Age
- Aliens/Illegal Aliens
- Homelessness
When you click on an alternative Subject Heading in the BCIT Library First Search you will encounter the following message:
You have clicked on an alternative Subject Heading. BCIT Library staff members chose to display this term instead of an official Library of Congress Subject Heading. Please be aware that offensive terms may still be included in your search.
Screenshot of what the alternative Subject Heading pop-up looks like.
In Library Cataloguing, especially now when much of our collections are online journals and ebooks, Subject Headings are a very useful and powerful tool for searching. Electronic resources that Librarians purchase arrive in our collection with catalogue metadata embedded for searching in First Search automatically; this includes hyperlinked Library of Congress Subject Headings. However, we no longer need to platform outdated terms, we can automatically re-map to alternative Subject Headings.
Now that the alternative Subject Headings are live in BCIT Library First Search, our work will be to continue to maintain and keep the list up to date.
If you are wondering what the new terms look like, or what they are replacing, here are a few examples. Please be aware that in order to include examples, I will be using outdated Subject Headings, which reflect language that is not respectful or inclusive, and often offensive.
Some examples of official Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) still in use, that we are choosing to replace locally:
Haida Indian women.
Essentially removing the word “Indian” will make a more accurate, useful, and respectful Subject Heading:
Haida – Women.
A second example of an official LCSH still in use today:
Indian children.
This will be updated to:
Indigenous children
Example three comes from the Disability category, where the updates center people rather than the diagnosis.
LCSH uses:
Schizophrenics
We have updated to:
People with schizophrenia
These changes are long overdue. The BCIT Library is proud of what we have accomplished. We will continue to maintain this list and keep it updated to better reflect our inclusive values.