The Library Catalog Was Never Neutral

The catalog has always made an argument. It argues that certain concepts are the correct way to organise knowledge. That certain vocabulary terms are the appropriate descriptors for certain communities. That certain hierarchies of subject headings reflect the actual structure of human understanding rather than the particular cultural position of the people who built the hierarchy. It makes these arguments invisibly, through the authority of institutional structure and professional practice, in ways that have made them very difficult to challenge. The challenge is now underway — in a growing body of scholarship, in specific institutional projects, in the 2026 launch of the DALAM Digital Library by the UArctic Thematic Network, in a 2025 special issue of the International Journal on Digital Libraries dedicated to "Indigenous knowledge and digital collections," in a 2025 paper in the Journal of Archival Organization on repatriating Indigenous knowledge in US archives, and in the day-to-day work of catalogers who are finding that the vocabulary they were trained to use does not fit the materials they are being asked to describe. The challenge is not new. Catalogers and critical information scientists have been documenting the biases embedded in library classification systems since at least Sanford Berman's 1971 work on prejudice in subject headings. What is new is the scale of digital distribution, the AI dimension that amplifies historic biases at machine speed, and the organised presence of Indigenous and marginalised communities in the conversation about how their knowledge and cultural heritage is represented in systems they did not design and were not consulted about. The Specific Problem With Subject Headings Library of Congress Subject Headings — LCSH — is the most widely used controlled vocabulary in North American library cataloging, applied to millions of records in thousands of institutions. It was developed by and for a specific professional culture, in a specific historical moment, and it encodes the assumptions of that culture in ways that have proved remarkably durable. The durability is not accidental. Controlled vocabularies derive much of their value from stability — a subject heading that changes disrupts every catalog record that uses it, every cross-reference built on it, every indexing decision that depended on it. The cost of updating LCSH at scale is real and significant. It requires not only changing the heading but auditing every record in which it appears, tracing its effects through the authority file, and communicating changes to every institution that maintains a local catalog copy. The incentive structure of the profession has historically favoured stability over accuracy when the two were in tension. The result is that terms assigned to materials about Indigenous peoples, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ communities, and other marginalised groups in the mid-twentieth century have persisted in catalog records far longer than would have been acceptable in any other public-facing institutional context. The harm is not merely terminological: cataloging decisions determine discoverability, which determines what researchers find, which shapes what knowledge gets produced and whose knowledge gets cited. A community whose intellectual and cultural production is systematically misdescribed in library catalogs is a community whose knowledge is systematically undiscovered. The DALAM Initiative and What It Represents The DALAM Digital Library — Decolonization of Arctic Library and Archives Metadata — launched by the UArctic Thematic Network in January 2026, represents one of the most structured responses the field has produced to the metadata decolonization problem. DALAM was created in 2023 by the Polar Libraries Colloquy, emerging from a recognition among its members that libraries and archives working with Arctic and Indigenous collections were at the beginning of a decolonization process and lacked consistent guidance for how to proceed. The library provides three categories of resources: research publications on metadata decolonization; linked dictionaries, thesauri, and subject heading lists built through consultation with polar and Indigenous communities; and Indigenous community maps and geographic names lists that reflect local knowledge and perspectives rather than colonial naming conventions. The geographic naming dimension is particularly significant. Place names in library catalogs and finding aids are almost invariably the colonial names assigned by European explorers and administrators — names that displaced, suppressed, or simply ignored the names by which Indigenous communities had known those places for generations. The substitution of Indigenous place names is not merely a symbolic act: it connects catalog records to the knowledge frameworks within which those places have meaning for the communities whose heritage the records describe, and it makes those records more accurately findable by researchers working within Indigenous epistemological frameworks. Data Sovereignty and the Limits of Digitisation The digitisation of Indigenous cultural heritage materials presents a specific set of problems that the library field's general digitisation frameworks do not adequately address. The traditional digitisation rationale — that digitisation increases access while reducing wear on physical originals — assumes that increased access is an unambiguous good. For many Indigenous cultural heritage materials, this assumption does not hold. Sacred objects, ceremonial knowledge, restricted oral traditions, and materials whose access is governed by community protocol cannot be made freely available in digital form without violating the governance structures that give those materials their meaning and their integrity. A digital library that makes unrestricted access its default setting is a digital library that cannot appropriately hold materials governed by Indigenous access protocols. The Indigenous data sovereignty movement — represented by organisations including the Global Indigenous Data Alliance and frameworks such as the CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) — argues that Indigenous communities have the right to govern data generated about them, by them, and for them, including the right to determine the conditions under which that data is shared, accessed, and used. The CARE Principles were developed explicitly as a complement to FAIR, addressing the governance gap that FAIR leaves when applied to community-controlled knowledge: FAIR tells you how to make data findable and accessible; CARE tells you whose authority governs whether it should be found and accessed at all. A 2025 paper in the International Journal on Digital Libraries describes the co-creation of a digital repository for ovaHimba knowledge in Namibia — a process that required extended community consultation, fieldwork to verify archival recordings with community members on their own land, and the design of storage systems that reflected the community's own priorities for knowledge sharing rather than the priorities of archival institutions. The resulting repository is a legitimate model for what community-controlled digital preservation looks like: slower than institutional digitisation, more expensive per item, and considerably more likely to produce an archive that the community whose knowledge it holds actually recognises as its own. The Journal of Archival Organization on Repatriation The 2025 paper by Journal of Archival Organization on repatriating Indigenous knowledge in US archives provides a useful framework for thinking about the limits of the decolonization concept as it is sometimes deployed. The paper argues that archival repatriation — returning cultural heritage materials to Indigenous communities — has been underutilized within the broader vision of decolonial futures, and that the concept of return intersects uncomfortably with Western archival methods in ways that the field has not fully worked through. The US Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act provides a legal framework for repatriation of specific categories of objects; it does not address the much larger category of archival, photographic, and documentary materials held in US archives that were produced by or about Indigenous communities without their consent. The paper's central argument — that archival repatriation functions as both a paradigm and a practice — has implications for digital libraries specifically. Digital repatriation: the provision of digital copies to originating communities, which has become the most common institutional response to repatriation claims, resolves the access problem without resolving the custody problem. A community that has digital access to its heritage materials held in an overseas archive has not regained control of those materials. It has received a copy. The distinction matters for sovereignty, for governance, and for the fundamental question of who has the authority to determine how materials are described, shared, and used.