Wednesday, May 18, 2016

More on LC Subject Headings

On Thursday, May12, 2016, the House Appropriations committee met and very narrowly passed legislation to fund the Legislative Branch for 2017. While I would not normally say that is unfortunate, this year that bill includes language requiring the Library of Congress to keep the subject headings "aliens" and "illegal aliens" rather than change them as ALA and many other librarians believe should be done. The vote on the amendment to remove LC headings statement was 24-25 with 2 members either not present or not voting.

All is not lost - the Senate has no such language in their bill (at least not yet). Provided it is not added to the Senate bill, the Senate and House negotiators will have to work to bring the bills into accord. Since the vote in the House Appropriations Committee was so close, they will have little bargaining power to convince the Senate to adopt it. I will continue to update you on this issue.