Subject Headings Gone Wrong

During her presentation on subject headings, Professor Gross brought up the fact that many subject headings to describe ethnic groups or the LGBT community are often dated, inaccurate, and offensive. Librarians such as Sanford Berman have worked hard to create and revise subject headings that describe the LGBT community as well as modern phenomenon ("krumping", for example). Their work is thankless and rarely recognized by anyone except librarians, but without it, people would have a difficult time using the library catalog to find books that address new trends in culture, technology, and other areas. Poor subject headings in the library catalog restrict people's access to books on the shelves.

There is one subject heading that has always bothered me. This is the subject heading "Cookery". While inoffensive compared to "sexual minorities" or "drug addicts", people are less likely to do a subject search using the term "cookery" than they would for "homosexual" or "queer". At the same time, more people use public libraries to borrow cookbooks than LGBT materials. Why has "cookery" remained an ignored, archaic subject heading, not changed to "cooking" by the Library of Congress?

Some people have justified the use of "cookery" as a subject heading because they are under the impression that "cuisine" only refers to French cooking, or fine dining. "Gastronomy", a more encompassing term, refers to the art and science of cooking but would not necessarily be appropriate for a book that only contained recipes and no culinary lore or food science. It is also another one of those "frou frou" terms which many Americans think is solely associated with fine dining.

For the past eight years, I worked as a librarian at a culinary school. I assisted chefs and culinary students with their research, and showed them how to use our library catalog quite often. Not one of them ever used the term "cookery" in a keyword search, and not one of them would use the term in their everyday or academic discourse about working with food. As the cataloger for our collection, I made the merciful decision to modify the LC subject headings to say "cooking" instead of "cookery". It became a lot easier for people to find the books they needed, and more people used the catalog to search on their own. One day, I will take up this fight with the Library of Congress.