Library and Information Science Commons^™

Going Beyond Book Displays: Providing Safe Spaces For Lgbtq Youth, Lisa Gay-Milliken, Jeffrey Discala

STEMPS Faculty Publications

School libraries should be a space where students of all ages feel welcome and safe. I (Lisa) can speak from experience when I say this is not always the case, not in the 1980s and not today. Even in the school library, a place I now cherish, I was fearful of ridicule and harassment. I was frustrated because I did not see myself—a young, questioning, and confused lesbian—in any of the books. Gay and lesbian characters didn’t exist on those high school shelves. “But that was the 1980s,” you say. It hasn’t gotten much better for much of the LGBTQ …

Queering The Library Of Congress, Carlos R. Fernandez

Works of the FIU Libraries

This poster will attempt to apply the techniques used in Queer Theory to explore library and information science’s use and misuse of library classification systems; and to examine how “queering” these philosophical categories can not only improve libraries, but also help change social constructs.

For millennia, philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, have used and expounded upon categories and systems of classification. Their purpose is to make research and the retrieval of information easier. Unfortunately, the rules used to categorize and catalog make information retrieval more challenging for some, due to social constructs such as heteronormality.

The importance of this …

More Cataloging, More Libguide, Hannah R. Leone

Blogging the Library

The way I have unified the LGBTQ titles—all 700-odd of them—is by using a local information field in the catalog. Quick cataloging lesson for you non-librarians: when I talk about subject headings, for example Gay Culture, those go in a field designated by the number 650. This means that it’s a universal, standardized field and that the headings in those fields will be recognized anywhere. For local subject headings, those that are only used within one library (ours, in this case), the field is designated by the number 690. I’m using one of those 690 fields with the heading “LGBTQ …