#homosaurus

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Feral Friday!  

Today we’re highlighting another gem from our zine selection, Decolonizing Library Science by Archivist (and former, long-time UWM Special Collections Graduate Intern) Keahi Ka’iwalani Adolpho. Created on the eve of the 2016 edition of Milwaukee Zine Fest while they were a student in the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) graduate program at UW-Milwaukee, this zine offers up a compelling reflection on Adolpho’s personal experience as a “non-binary, queer, hapa (mixed Native Hawaiian)” academic and a glimpse into their early research and critiques concerning MLIS graduate education and the field of Library Science as a whole.  

Decolonizing Library Science underlines the importance of rigorous internal critique in the interest of creating truly inclusive institutions and serves as a great example of the power of unregulated, independently, and accessibly produced publications like zines to provide a platform for underrepresented voices and perspectives. And we love the shoutout to the treasures of the Little Free Libraries in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee at the end!

In addition to their work in Archives and Special Collections, Adolpho is currently a member of the Homosaurus editorial board and co-edited Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries, which was published by Library Juice Press in 2023. They also co-created the Diversity Residency Toolkit as part of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Residency Interest Group. Their research interests include trans and gender diverse inclusion in libraries and archives, reparative and ethical metadata, and diversity residencies.  

--Ana, Special Collections Graduate Intern

[thedaythatwas]

me describing one of my summer jobs: oh yeah I’ll be updating our university gender studies library’s online catalogue with search terms to make queer texts more accessible to a broader audience. the project is working to dismantle heteronormative hegemonies in information science by reclaiming and subverting dominant lexicons and centering decolonization in the language we use to access queerness in archives—

the search terms in question:

[thebookewyrme]

Are you asking for like the metadata that a library might use? We would use the Library of Congress (or possibly Dewey but ewwww Dewey) subject heading system. Unfortunately the actual LCSH is kind of shit about anything having to do with homosexuality, but there is an awesome project called the Homosaurus, which basically fills in all the controlled vocabulary for any and everything having to do with sexuality. The list on the vocabulary page is alphabetical, but if you click on the links it’ll show you related terms in the vocabulary, so once you start with one you can build off of it to build your book metadata. One you might start with is “Gay Erotic Literature”, or the “MLM (Men Loving Men)” heading. From there you can get more specific about the types of characters in the book, themes played upon, and even specific sex acts.

Anyway, that’s how I would do it, because I am a library nerd. If you didn’t want to go that route, I would also use the AO3 master tags, which are a controlled vocabulary of their own and do much the same thing but will be more granular to things more specific to the genre of literature. Unfortunately you probably know where to find a complete list of those, if such a thing exists, better than I.

Cataloguing BL books

For readers of “m/m romance”, “original slash”, etc. what kinds of info would you put in a book index? I’m not thinking in terms of recs but in terms of basic info like genre.

[no-where-new-hero]

Trick or treat! 💀

Have a pride dinosaur!

[fictional-worlds-are-exquisite]

this might be my favourite logo for anything ever actually

[designchic75]

That explains the existence of the rarely mentioned homosaurus. 🤣🦖🦕

[beepartcollection]

Commission for homosaurus rex on Discord of his gf's D&D character :3

[falseroar]

It might just be because I’m tired/slightly sleep-deprived, but it’s really funny to me that the Library of Congress uses the same subject heading (“Triangles (Interpersonal relations)”) as the preferred term for both love triangles and triads.

Does this book you’re looking at involve a character trying to decide who they prefer of two love interests, or three people figuring out they all love each other? The library sure won’t tell you, go read the book and figure it out for yourself.

[croutoncat]

Hi Homosaurus Rex

rawr, in gay

[chrysocollatown]

This was cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.

The Homosaurus has an entry for asexuality! :O

So i just found this LGBT thesaurus last night via Twitter and, as per usual, i went to look up if they had something on asexuality. And they did.

But what’s a thesaurus?

Well, the Merriam-Webster says:

a : a book of words or of information about a particular field or set of concepts; especially : a book of words and their synonyms.

b : a list of subject headings or descriptors usually with a cross-reference system for use in the organization of a collection of documents for reference and retrieval.

They’re basically thematic lists of selected words used mainly by libraries and archives to describe and organize their material. Think of the canonical tags in AO3 and other systems that let you index and filter stuff. (In fact, you can think deeply about that checking this paper on fandom folksonomy. Anyway.)

Tell me more about this Homosaurus thing

Here’s what the front page of the site says:

This is an International Thesaurus of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Index Terms that is currently used by https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net.

This vocabulary was originally a project of the International Homo/Lesbian Informatiecentre & Archives and compiled by Jack van der Wel (with support of Ellen Greenblatt) in 2013. That offline document has been transcrabed [sic] into the Linked Data provider under development here.

The Digital Transgender Archive was launched in January 2016, so it makes sense that they updated their thesaurus by the end of the previous year, before putting it online. The DTA focus on materials created before the year 2000, so currently they don't seem to have any asexuality related document up, but when they do it should appear here.

Also, in the tweet mentioned above the folks at the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives (CLGA) say they have started to use this thesaurus, and as of now they have one (1) item in their digital collection tagged as such. (Anyone in Canada that can donate them some more?)

Ok, and why is this important?

Well, it means that libraries, archives and other institutions that work with documentation and specialize in sexual and gender diversity now have a reference work that justify the explicit acknowledgement of asexuality while cataloguing ace-related material.

Which... should be like, a bare minimum given the subject of their work. But you never know, especially in places without a strong ace activism or where ace groups haven’t established a relationship with other local LGBT+ organizations.

It also means that it may influence other thesaurus makers in social sciences and sexology and so on to include asexuality in their controlled vocabularies, as well as the folks in charge of other taxonomies and classification reference works... like the Dewey Decimal Classification System. More on that, soon-ish.

As a sidenote: Should i contact them to tell them that manga doesn’t have a plural? Or do people in North America say mangas enough for it to be considered the most common and appropriate use of the word?

[cricketpress]

We created this super fun logo for the website...

Homosaurus 

This is an International Thesaurus of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Index Terms that is currently used by https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net.

This vocabulary was originally a project of the International Homo/Lesbian Informatiecentre & Archives and compiled by Jack van der Wel (with support of Ellen Greenblatt) in 2013. That offline document has been transcribed into the Linked Data provider under development here.

*we also designed the logo for the Digital Transgender Archive!*

[metadata-uber-alles]

The heading "Asexual people" was added to the Library of Congress Subject Headings in 2016; "Aromantic people" mere months ago in April 2022!

And Homosaurus, a whole new set of vocabulary specifically for queer topics, has been gaining a lot of traction.

Tumblr is cutting off the preview text just before it gets good: "Librarians gathered in 1970 to challenge Library of Congress classifications and catalog subject headings that aligned homosexuality with deviance."

[frozentee]

Don't Mess With Homosaurus You Will Get Jurasskicked Lgbt Shirt

[dabbingtee]

Homosaurus Dinosaur Lgbt Mug