Adrian Williams oral history interview, 2022.

Ways of Knowing Oral History Collection

Interviewee: Adrian Williams, Member of the Homosaurus Editorial Board, Cataloging and Metadata Librarian at the University of Kentucky.

Interviewers: Emily Drabinski & Amanda Belantara

Date: Aug 30, 2022

Location: Virtual Interview; University of Kentucky

Emily Drabinski: Today we're interviewing Adrian Williams, Cataloging and Metadata Librarian at the University of Kentucky. The interview was conducted for the Ways of Knowing Oral History project. The interview took place virtually on August 30th, 2022, recorded locally by Justin Hicks at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. The interviewers are Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski, based in New York City. Adrian, we'd like to start by hearing a little bit about your background in education.

Adrian Williams: I've worked in academic libraries for most of my adulthood. My first role was at a community college, African American archives. I was their archival intern, and my role was signing graduate students and other visitors and making descriptive metadata, well, starting a descriptive metadata project for the undescribed materials that that archive had had, and that was my first role, and that was where I got familiar and began to form a love of cataloging and that sort of aboutness of things. From there, I started my MLIS at Florida State University, and I needed to pay for that MLIS, and so in order to do so, I got a job at their library because they offered tuition reimbursement. That was at the medical library there. I was the technical services assistant, and I was hired to do cataloging, but I really did everything because it was a small library. I did circulation, cataloging, I helped with the E-resource management, I helped with reference, and it was a great place to learn what types of librarianship I would be interested in pursuing in the future because I just got to do everything or got to do the entry level role of everything. And so there I really settled on cataloging and I moved over to the FSU's main library to be their cataloging associate and just do that full time. From there I came here to the University of Kentucky as their cataloging and metadata librarian, and I've been here since January of 2020.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a little more about your area of professional expertise? You said that you grew to love cataloging and metadata work. Can you tell us more about why you've chosen that as your area of focus?

Williams: I chose cataloging because I guess as a twofold reason of professional interest and personal capabilities. I have a fairly low social battery, and so reference never really worked well for me once it got into reference interviews and consultations and whatnot. I loved helping by email, but those conversations never really worked well for me, whereas cataloging, I could just be by myself with the book or the DVD or whatever audio visual resource I was cataloging and I could look through it, go to Classification Web or Library of Congress's website, see what subject headings worked well for describing this resource, what it was about, and it felt very, not necessarily intuitive, but very natural to be able to just put things in their proper place or as proper of a place as existed at the time, because of course, subject headings are ever-evolving and revisions are always happening. So, putting the subject headings that exist within the moment, matching it to that resource as it exists within the moment.

Drabinski: We wanted to zoom out a little bit and talk about your first encounters with the Homosaurus. Can you tell us how you learned about the vocabulary and how you felt when you found it?

Williams: I can't remember exactly when was the first time I learned about it. I remember in 2019, back when I was still staff at FSU and even before that, being a student at FSU, looking for resources on being LGBTQ, being trans or being non-binary and not being able, putting the words that I knew to look for those into the library catalog, and nothing related to what I had just put in bouncing back to me. It was all just medicalized resources or medical resources or histories and encyclopedias, not really memoirs or studies, or just nothing that I could find that actually helped me find what I was trying to find. And then back in 2019, I remember Homosaurus being authorized to be used in MARC records and being really excited to start using it. I hesitate to say this, but trying to go to my supervisor as a staff member and say like, oh, could we maybe start using this? And that supervisor just not being interested. And then I got here and I had the same talk with my supervisor, and this supervisor was very interested. We worked together on a pilot project around pulling all the books that we have on what the LCSH, non-monogamous relationships, and seeing if any of those could also have the Homosaurus term Polyamory. And out of those 23 resources, which isn't much, but you know, it's 23 of them, about 20 of them had to do with polyamory. And so we added the Homosaurus terms to that. From there we were like okay, which other subject LCSH could we look at? Well, Sexual Minorities is pretty broad, and so let's look at that. Let's see what Homosaurus terms we can add to that. And when I say we, it was me mostly, but having institutional buy-in is a huge part of doing this work because it means time not spent doing other things, and so my supervisor was very happy for me to not be doing those other things, to offload me a bit so that I could work on comprehensively adding Homosaurus to our catalog. I really appreciate that.

Drabinski: Was it exciting when you found Homosaurus? Did you feel like it was liberating?

Williams: I had my doubts, to be honest. In my MLIS I had read about the history of different LGBTQ vocabularies and how they were used in a singular library or a group of libraries, but they'd never found wider usage. While I hoped that Homosaurus would have wider usage, I knew the history of those other vocabularies, and so I just wasn't sure how it would go. But now a couple of years out from starting that pilot project, I've seen several dozen libraries using Homosaurus now, and that number grows every week, every month. I got an email yesterday afternoon asking me, someone had looked at, had watched one of my Homosaurus presentations and had a clarifying question around URIs. And so, oh, okay, another user, we got 'em. We got another one. I would say that at the start, I wasn't necessarily excited. I was optimistic. Now I would say as I look into the future of Homosaurus, and the present as well, I'm pretty excited about where it's going and where it is right now, how far it's been able to come with the vocabulary it has, with its structure and how it's grown and expanded and clarified, and also the increase in users that we've had. I find that pretty exciting.

Drabinski: Were there any terms that interested or excited you when you saw them in the Homosaurus?

Williams: A lot of the terms specifically related to different cultures. So like the terms Tom and Dee, which are used in Filipino lesbian culture. The term M?h?, which is used in the Hawaiian culture. These very culturally specific terms are what excited me the most. Seeing terms that are used by a people without translation, without colonialism sort of twisting, or not twisting, but making it fit into the vocabulary, like letting it be for its own sake versus trying to make it fit. LCSH, as you know, it needs to be in English, or if it's not in English, there needs to be a parenthesized English term. There needs to be some equivocation there, some reconciliation. With Homosaurus, there doesn't need to be any reconciliation there. It can just be. So those culturally specific terms are what excite me the most.

Drabinski: When you initially reviewed the vocabulary, did you see anything that was missing?

Williams: Something that was missing that I'm working on expanding right now as part of the board are the different ethnicity terms. We had African American librarians, we had Latinx librarians, but we didn't have Indian librarians, we didn't have Chinese librarians, not librarians, lesbians. We didn't have Chinese lesbians, we didn't have Indian lesbians, we didn't have Pakistani lesbians. Adding those ethnicity-specific terms has been something that I've been working on. That's one. This isn't something that I noticed but was pointed out to me by Bri is at the time when I was coming onto the board, we didn't have many terms around asexuality or aromanticism, and many of those terms have been added. I think there are a few more.

Drabinski: I'm interested in how intersectionality works inside of the Homosaurus, and the intersections of gender and sexuality terms with terms related to race and ethnicity. I wonder if you could say a bit more about how you see that working in the Homosaurus and how the Homosaurus has affordances for that that we don't see in traditional cataloging systems.

Williams: With LCSH, you're not going to see, you will see African American gay men. You do see African American women, African American gay men, African American lesbians, but it's not really supposed to be there anymore. It's supposed to be in LCDGT, and so there's this fragmentation of what's allowed versus not allowed in these different LOC vocabularies.

Drabinski: How are race and class and other axes of difference, disability, language of origin, how do those work inside of Homosaurus, and do you see a difference between how intersectionality is managed in Homosaurus versus how it's dealt with in LOC?

Williams: Obviously Homosaurus is an LGBTQ+ vocabulary, so everything that is added to the vocabulary has to be from some sort of queer content. That being said, every group has queer people. Every ethnicity, every class structure has queer people, and so when there is a gap in that structure, when it's noticed, say that we don't have terms for two spirit sexualities to Indigenous genders, Indigenous sexualities, something that we've done is to reach out to groups to see what terms they would like added to the vocabulary, how they would like to be described. That's something that we've done. When we notice that one term is missing, we ask ourselves, well what other terms are missing around this? How can we not just add this term, but how can we build this out? How can we just add further context to the living history that is queerness, that is transness?

Belantara: I just want to ask a follow up question to something you mentioned a moment ago, and apologies if I get the acronym wrong, but you referenced the LCDTG. Did I say it?

Williams: Yeah, demographic group terms.

Belantara: Could you tell us a little bit about what that is exactly?

Williams: Back in around 2012 or so, well after Library of Congress genre form terms were made a thing, genre form terms were meant to be separated out from subject headings so that you could put in the MARC record this is a children's book, this is a documentary, this is a clarinet performance. That was separated out from Library of Congress subject headings, and it got people asking, well if genre form terms can be separated out, can we also separate out demographic group terms? I wasn't in these conversations because I was in high school or whatever, and so my recollection and my understanding of this might not be perfect. But can we also separate out demographic group terms, because they're not a subject really. If we were to separate out demographic group terms, where would we put them in the record? What would they be used for? And what they're used for right now in 2022 is to tell the reader what is the audience for that work and what is the creator of that work, and that's put in the 385 field and the 386 field, if I remember correctly. Demographic group terms, if you have a book that is meant for Catholic students, you can say that this book is meant for Catholic students. If you have several works that were created by Maldivian priests, there is a term that you could use and you can say oh, these works were all created by Maldivian priests. And if anyone is looking for works created by Maldivian priests, then they can just search for it, and it's perfect and awesome. So that is demographic group terms, but it is also obviously limited, because what is this book for, who is this book for? Who is this book by? It is not who is this book about. That's a completely different thing. And so Homosaurus is the subject part of that. You can still use demographic group terms if you have books written by trans men. You can say that these books were written by transgender men, and you can also have the Homosaurus term Transgender men to say that this book is about transgender men.

Belantara: You've already talked about this a little bit, but I wanted to delve in a bit deeper. You've presented before on your work integrating Homosaurus terms into your local catalog at the University of Kentucky. Can you tell us about how that project got started and why you felt it was so important?

Williams: As I said before, being a student, being a user of libraries, I've been trying to find information and books about myself for a lot of my life, and I couldn't really find those books very easily. Seeing that this vocabulary exists to make it easier to find these books, to discover these works, I felt pretty optimistic about it. I wanted to help the users that I serve better find our LGTBQ+ resources. I know they exist, becauseI catalog them. They pass through my desk. That's how that project got started, just wanting to make it easier for LGBTQ students and younger researchers to find these works in the way that they would think to search by them. A lot of the undergraduate students, they wouldn't type Sexual minorities--United States. They would type LGBTQ people, Non-binary people. Some of them would search Gender nonconforming people, but not all of them, and so it's helpful to have both of those terms in the catalog for them to search by both Gender nonconforming and Non-binary and Gender diverse, et cetera. Yeah, so I started on those projects. I did a presentation at the 2021 LD4 Conference, and when I did that presentation, I would say I was midway through that more comprehensive sexual minorities project, and it was also there that the Homosaurus board was giving a presentation as well, and so they attended my talk and I felt very starstruck and nervous, like K.J. is there, oh my God. And then from there, K.J. contacted me about possibly joining the board, how I would feel about it, the work that I thought I could do. I attended a meeting and it went well. I could see a place for myself and a space for myself in doing that more editorial work, and so I hopped on in.

Belantara: In terms of integrating the Homosaurus terms into the library where you work, did you face any institutional resistance to the project?

Williams: No, not at all. I had the support of my supervisor, and I'll be honest, this was 2020 and Breonna Taylor was happening, George Floyd was happening, and a lot of the administration was interested in showing that no, we're a progressive place. We do good social justice work over here. There's just a lot of support around that kind of thing, to be honest. So no, I didn't get any pushback.

Belantara: Did any of your colleagues express any type of concerns in terms of being able to implement the new terms?

Williams: They didn't, but I also, I didn't tell the reference librarians about it until things were already underway, and they were excited, because at least a couple of them had interactions with students where they had to apologize for the terms that they were typing in to describe how they were searching for trans people and LGBTQ people, and so they appreciated that they wouldn't necessarily have to type in just those terms anymore.

Drabinski: You mentioned the uprisings that were happening around the time that you got approval to get this project underway. Did that external political ferment shape anything about the urgency of the work for you? Do you feel like your work in the library is influenced by those external political contexts?

Williams: I would say around that time and for a lot of that year and even still, especially when I'm outside biking and just sort of existing in the outside world, I feel pretty helpless. As a black person, if I am biking too fast and someone takes it the wrong way or someone is concerned that I might be like, hmm. Ahmaud Arbery really made me very scared for myself because all he was doing was taking a jog and he had his earphones in, and that's me for a lot of the time I'm outside. I'm on my bike with my earphones in, just living my life, and to know that I could just be living my life and someone takes that the wrong way and punishes me for it, it just makes me feel very scared and helpless. Working on this project, it made me feel to a certain extent that I was at least doing something for someone. It made me feel that at least I was doing something. I felt less helpless, even though it doesn't make a difference with how my race is treated by others. It could make someone slightly less ignorant to find a resource and maybe even read it or maybe even watch that documentary.

Belantara: When you're working on this project, do you collaborate with others at the library? And if so, how do you work together?

Williams: I don't really because I'm the primary cataloger. There's the cataloger for oral histories. I talked with her a couple times about how she could use Homosaurus, and so she's used it for LGBTQ interviews that the Nunn Center has done. A lot of my collaborative work has either been on the board itself or with librarians at different libraries who are starting in on this work, and so linking them to different resources, different presentations outside of my presentations such as if they're at a consortium, linking them to Jessica Fisher's presentation because she implemented Homosaurus at a public library consortium. University of Kentucky is an isolated library. They're not a part of a consortium. The way that we put Homosaurus in records, we don't really have to be concerned with it affecting other people's catalogs. But when you're in a consortium, your catalogs are all linked up to each other, and so I link them to those presentations. I give them the documentation that I've written up and answer any questions that they have. That's mostly how I collaborate around this.

Belantara: When you're working on this, how do you choose which records to update, and what are your selection priorities when making decisions around metadata?

Williams: Throughout 2020 and 2021, it was all retrospective, just the materials that we have so far on LGBTQ topics and just trying to get all of them enhanced. But these days, now that they've all been enhanced, it is incoming resources. I do the documentaries. I like for the documentaries to have updated and comprehensive metadata. A lot of them have very general subject headings like gender studies, women's studies, and that makes me angry to see extremely broad subject headings. Those are the ones that tend to get my attention the most. But also recently published titles that have that current terminology, not just in what I add to them, but in the content matter itself. Just making sure that the subject headings match what is actually being talked about in the book.

Belantara: The Homosaurus is a linked data vocabulary hosted online. What does it mean that the vocabulary is linked data, and how is that different from a print thesaurus?

Williams: You have reached my weakness and understanding of this sort of thing. As I understand it, linked data exists within the Semantic Web and it uses your eyes to, I understand the description part of things more than I understand the technology part of this. Linked data is meant to be this thing where eventually when catalogs can be searched for on Google and on the wider web, you can put in search terms or author names and find them in a library that's close to you. Homosaurus is a linked data vocabulary in that the structure of it makes it easier to be integrated into the wider web.

Belantara: What are the affordances and limitations of working with linked open data in a library setting, and why do you think it's important that the vocabulary is built in this way?

Williams: I would say one thing to look out for is that when something exists within a linked open data context, it's freer and looser than an authorized subject heading that is changed and controlled more bureaucratically. There's also that question of where is this? I would say that it's easier for a resource to leave the axis of control. With a book that just exists in a library outside of the internet, it can just sit on its shelf and be discovered on that shelf and also within the catalog, whereas if a resource exists within a linked open data context, it can be found by anyone, and to a certain extent changed more easily. The metadata around it can be perhaps changed more easily than an isolated resource might be. But that's just my understanding of that. It's not necessarily correct.

Drabinski: Would you be able to integrate Homosaurus terms in the local catalog as easily if they weren't adopted as part of the Library of Congress accepted MARC vocabularies? Does that play a role?

Williams: It does play a role in smaller libraries who don't have the time to integrate Homosaurus into their catalog by themselves or don't have the resources to do so. They can go to OCLC or WorldShare Record Manager and get the records that have Homosaurus already added to them. Having more libraries use Homosaurus makes it easier for libraries that just can't integrate it to still get those records, to still get that bibliographic description. If you're only integrating it locally, that means that only your library can benefit from it, whereas if you're putting Homosaurus terms in OCLC or WorldShare Record Manager, multiple libraries can benefit from it.

Belantara: Let's say I'm a cataloger at one of the institutions that you just described that doesn't have the ability to create records using Homosaurus and I wanted to search for one that did use it. Is there a way to actually search specifically for records that use it, or is it more a matter of going through all of the results for that particular item and seeing which ones have the abbreviation for Homosaurus in the record?

Williams: When a Homosaurus term is put into an OCLC record or a WorldShare Record or in your local record, you also put the source code "homoit" beside that term, and then you also put your I after the source code. You can search by source code to see a record with that title that has that source code in it.

Belantara: That's cool, thank you. I didn't know about that.

Williams: It is cool. That was really how Homosaurus was able to get wider usage, is MARC added a source code for it so that it could be authorized and used well and consistently.

Belantara: Can you tell us about how enhancing records with Homosaurus vocabulary has improved access to materials?

Williams: For example, the pilot project that we did with non-monogamous relationships/polyamory, the 20 books that were about polyamory, most of them were also in Spanish, and so they didn't necessarily have the word, and my accent is terrible, but poliamorosa, poliamor, but not polyamory. When you did a subject search for Polyamory, none of those texts showed up. But now when you do a subject search for it, all those books show up. Adding Homosaurus to these records improves search, and that makes them more widely searchable. It adds more context around that work and more terms that a user might search by. It works toward accounting for each user's familiarity with that subject and what terms they would use. For the most part, I'm not taking out any LCSH. I am merely adding Homosaurus. When a work isn't actually about what the LCSH term that's on it is about, then yeah, I'll take out the LCSH as per PCC policy, but I'm not taking anything away. I'm only adding another way for people to search for this work.

Belantara: Can you talk about your philosophy behind that decision?

Williams: At an academic library, our primary audience is undergraduate students and graduate students and also faculty, mostly faculty and graduate students when it comes to the library and what is being asked for. But that's not the only people that's going to be searching for things. Also within those groups, there's a diversity of perspective and life experience and just familiarity with LGBTQ topics. Yes, I could take out that LCSH that has that more medicalized perspective and that more conservative perspective, but that would also mean that older faculty and older researchers and people just less familiar with current LGBTQ terminology would have more trouble finding it. Keeping both the LCSH and adding the Homosaurus makes it so that more people can find what we have.

Belantara: Have you gotten feedback on your work in terms of implementing Homosaurus? Have you gotten any feedback from people who use the library?

Williams: Well, not from people who use the library, because most people who use the library don't know that I as a cataloger exist. But I have gotten feedback from the reference librarians here who are thankful that it exists and that they don't have to just use the more conservative LCSH vocabulary to guide their reference interviews and their consultations around. They can use that more current terminology that the undergraduate students, the graduate students would know. They've been really excited about it.

Belantara: How do you sustain this work inside of your institution, specifically since it sounds like you're the sole person taking this on? How do you manage to prioritize it amongst everything else that you do?

Williams: It's a lot of time blocking, a lot of time management, making sure that I'm working on it consistently. It's hard because it's honestly a lot of work to do. I would say I have the support of my supervisor and offloading at least a couple things that either she can do or one of the staff catalogers can do. Having my supervisor's support and my administration's support has been extremely helpful. Also, I did a lot of this work while we were all at home during quarantine and there weren't physical books that I had to keep track of. I really got a good chunk of this done during quarantine, and I'm really thankful for that. Now that we are on hybrid schedules, I do a lot of this work when I'm at home. I have my Alma report of resources that I still need to add terms to, and I work through it on my at-home days for an hour or on my Friday. That's just what I do. In that way I am just consistently chunking away at it. A lot of time management, institutional buy-in, if we're going to use a buzzword here, and self-motivation and passion around it. If I weren't passionate about it, it could have fallen off. It could have fallen by the wayside. But I care a lot about making sure that, one, Homosaurus is integrated into our catalog to as much an extent as I can make it, and two, that Homosaurus as a vocabulary is well structured and is working well for our users.

Belantara: I have a little follow up question to what you just said. Have you heard about other cataloging librarians or people doing cataloging work, have you heard of other people also making use of the extra time afforded through the pandemic or remote work? Has that enabled a lot more of this type of work, whether it's with Homosaurus or another alternative vocabulary? Have you heard that that's maybe had some positive impact?

Williams: Oh, for sure. Working from home is so great, and that's something that I've heard echoed from a couple of other cataloging librarians. I would say most of the emails I got happened within that 2020, 2021 timescape, but of course I still get emails every couple months or so. I can't speak to too many cataloging librarians and what work they've been able to get done during the pandemic, and of course, state to state, region to region, a library's acknowledgement of the pandemic varies so much. I honestly can't really speak to too many catalogers who have been able to integrate this and how the pandemic has helped or hindered that, but from the couple that I've spoken to about it, it's been helpful to just have that time away from the library to do these sort of retrospective projects and to make these back-burner projects put on the front burner a bit.

Drabinski: We'd like to shift now and talk in a little bit more depth and detail about your work as part of the Homosaurus Editorial Board. Can you tell us a bit about how you first got involved with Homosaurus and who invited you to that board?

Williams: I did a presentation at the LD4 Conference, I believe 2020. Link Data for All Conference is an annual conference that takes place in July, and it covers topics around linked data, libraries using it, Wikidata, the Semantic Web, stuff like that. Homosaurus being a linked data open vocabulary, I sent a proposal in for that conference. So I presented there. A few members of the editorial board were also there doing a presentation. It was virtual, but they were there. We attended each other's presentations. They had a discussion about bringing me on as a fellow board member, and I met with K.J. two months after that through Zoom to talk about what work I could do on the board and what my interests were, to talk about the board itself and its structure and its history and why they were bringing me on. I attended the August board meeting as a visitor to just see how things were run, and then in September I joined.

Drabinski: How did you make the decision to join? Did you have any hesitations?

Williams: I did have hesitations. It's an international controlled vocabulary, but at that time it seemed that it was used mostly in western countries, so like the United States, Canada, the Netherlands. I knew that there was one other person of color on the board, but mostly it was white people. I knew that there was interest to be a part of the board by other catalogers, and so I worried about being a token being brought on as another POC, person of color. And so part of my conversation with K.J. [Rawson], the co-chair of the board, was just discussing that there's that thing of yes I am Black, and that helps my case because they did not necessarily want to add another white person because they had plenty of white people already. The difference between being approached to add representation and another perspective but to also have agency on that board and to have my own say rather than being tokenized, if that makes sense. I wasn't being brought on as a token, I was being brought on to add another perspective and to add another voice to the ongoing conversation that was how this vocabulary would be developed and expanded and how it would evolve into the future.

Drabinski: What work have you focused on in your time on the board?

Williams: Mostly I've focused on adding those ethnicity and nationality-based terms. I've also just been doing a lot of learning about the history of the board and the structure. I've done a lot of term-based, term creation revision, structure conversations, though a good amount of us do those as well. Mostly around ethnicity and nationality, but also just the occasional term here and there, noticing that something is missing, calling it to the attention of the board and everyone working together to either build out that gap or to talk out a broader change that might need to happen with the vocabulary itself.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a little bit about what the meetings are like? How does the editorial board work together, and if you have any disagreements, how do you resolve them?

Williams: I would say it's a breath. I work in an academic library of course, and academia is very steeped in whiteness and adhering to a certain way of speaking, way of agreement, way of decision making. You have a committee, and that committee has a chair, and that chair has the final decision-making power and all that deferment and politicizing. I find the editorial board a breath of fresh air separate from those types of academic meetings. A lot of us are academics, but it's very casual. We talk about our cats, we talk about concerts that we went to. It is a board, but it's an extremely queer board that does not simply know that difficult conversations need to happen. It welcomes those difficult conversations. It welcomes the fact that not everyone is going to agree, and so when disagreements happen, we talk through it and contextualize it. I would say that rarely does anyone leave those contentious discussions feeling wrong or disempowered or not listened to at all, because everyone is listened to. Everyone has a voice and has the space to say something or to puzzle out something that they may not necessarily be able to articulate once they start in. But by the end of that conversation, they've articulated what they need to and we've listened and we've talked out the consequences and the different ways that something could go. I would say in contrast to an academic meeting where things need to take place within that hour and decided if not within that hour, then by email pretty quickly so that things can keep moving and keep up a pace within the academic cycle. The Homosaurus board can sort of sit on something for a few months while things are puzzled out and researched and talked over and everything is, to the best of our ability, considered.

Drabinski: Are they fun?

Williams: They are fun. I'm an extremely anxious person, and so the first couple were mostly nerve-racking because it was so much talking and so much active listening and contextualizing and things that I just didn't know that I needed. I would leave each meeting and I'd be like okay, I got to get these three books from the library because I don't know shit about these older historical things. But now I find a year in I'm hitting my stride somewhat and helping out more. Yeah, they're definitely fun. I never leave one thinking like, oh, that was a snoozefest, because it's not. Everything that we're talking about is interesting.

Drabinski: Traditional library cataloging uses literary warrant as a basis for including new terms. Can you talk about the ways Homosaurus develops terms in the absence of literary warrant?

Williams: I would say that it's less in the absence of literary warrant and more adding in user warrant. If a term is used in a few books, yeah, we know that we need to add it, but also if it's being used on Twitter or on Tumblr or in other online or in-person spaces, then we add it as well, and so that's user warrant. We got an email earlier this year from a person asking us to add a term that their friends had made, and it was like oh, awesome, cool, good for you. But we've searched around, we've asked people, we've looked it up and we can't find it being used anywhere by anyone else, and so we're not going to add it. But if this changes and it does end up being used by more people, then we will. We use literary warrant, but we also use user warrant. We have a rubric of green, yellow, red. Green is a mainstream term that is obvious to add. Yellow is not so obvious, but there is clear context for it, and we can find at least a couple of online spaces that are using that term. Red is we can't really find it being used anywhere and so we have to have a board discussion on if we need to add this term or should we add this term.

Drabinski: Can you tell us about any new terms that have been introduced during your time on the board that may be particularly meaningful to you?

Williams: We have both a spreadsheet for terms, but also scope notes that we're adding. The presentation that the board did at LD4 back in 2020 was them doing a crowdsource project, adding notes to each term that defines and contextualizes that term. Back in 2020, a lot of Homosaurus terms did not have current notes. But here in September 2022, almost all of our terms have notes now, and I think that's a beautiful thing. We have terms that have obvious LGBTQ context and we also have terms that are not so obvious in their context. For example, we have Amazonians in the vocabulary. Why would Amazonians be in the vocabulary? It's not just a Greek mythology, all female warriors, but it's in the Homosaurus because the Amazons were used as a cultural symbol in lesbian communities in the 20th century, early 21st century. And so having notes for each term, especially for these more historical terms, helps catalogers choose terms that fit for this work. It decreases the possibility of the wrong term being added by someone who wants to add LGBTQ terms to their works but may not be an expert on LGBTQ culture or history. There are a whole lot of straight catalogers. There are a whole lot of straight cis catalogers, and some of them are allies who want to use Homosaurus but might not have that familiarity, that education, and so scope notes help with that. On the Homosaurus site, there is the releases tab, and that has the different terms that are added each cycle. I remember when I was starting in on that comprehensive project here at UK and I came across about five or six books on Arab LGTBQ plus people, but there wasn't a term for that in Homosaurus and there wasn't a term for Arab LGBTQ people in LCSH either, and I was really itching to add that term. It also made me realize, oh, it's not just Arab people that are missing from Homosaurus. It's also Indian people that are missing from Homosaurus. There's a good amount of different people that are missing. So expanding that out and just adding the terms for these different people, it helps not just myself with these five books that I'm trying to catalog, but it helps other people who also have those books and different books. So Arab LGBTQ people, Arab lesbians, Arab gay men, Arab bisexual people. Adding those terms was really exciting for me because I had put in a little request for it before I was on the board and I was just patiently waiting for it to be added. And then I was brought onto the board and I could just do it myself, and it was like ah, power. But not corrupt power or anything.

Drabinski: Have any terms been removed from the vocabulary since you've been on the board?

Williams: Well, we did a pretty big change in that we switched from an LGBT linked data open vocabulary to an LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary, and that meant switching all of the terms that had LGBT in it to LGBTQ+ in it. That affected a lot of things. We had Lesbian religious groups and Gay theology, Lesbian theology, et cetera, and we switched those to, there are a couple of lesbian religious groups but not a whole lot of specifically gay theology, lesbian theology, and so we redirected it to Queer theology that could cover those groups a bit more broadly. We also added the term LGBTQ+-affirming religious groups because there isn't a whole lot of religion that's based around queerness, but there are religions that affirm and support queerness. We switched from bisexual theology to LGBTQ-affirming religious groups. We had a bunch of terms on Gender fluid people, Non-binary people, Transgender people, but we needed to add terms on identity, so Gender fluid identity, Non-binary identity, to provide nuance between this is a book about non-binary people, this is a book about non-binary identity. It's just different. The Homosaurus was not always Homosaurus. It was first the ILIA Gay and Lesbian Vocabulary. In those first couple of iterations of this vocabulary, it also included age-based attractions, so Ephebophilia, Gerontophilia, Pedophilia. We removed those terms because they're not queer, necessarily. There is stigma that exists that ties it to queerness, but we didn't want that stigma in our vocabulary. We did not want to perpetuate that, and so we removed those age-based attraction terms. That's something that we've removed since I came on board.

Drabinski: How do you think about the tensions between controlled vocabularies which are fixed and reflect a particular moment in time and the value of controlled vocabulary for information retrieval? Queer vocabulary has changed so rapidly in communities. How do you think about this in the Homosaurus?

Williams: I think of Homosaurus in the same way that you think of a living document. It's going to change. You can make a change one month and then have to make it again the next month. As I embrace that, I embrace that the changes that we make to the vocabulary are not permanent. They might not even be longstanding, but each change we make is for currency, it's for intuitiveness, it's for the living people that are using this and searching using it. With LCSH there's a certain amount of, and this is just my perspective on this, with LCSH there's a certain amount of unneeded respect and sentimentalism for some of the terms that we have in it. There is certainly appreciation and nostalgia for the history of the terms that we have in Homosaurus, and we of course have historical terms as well, but there's no holding onto something just to hold onto it if it's not inclusive, if it's not accessible to the different users that we have.

Belantara: What do you see as some of the most important next directions for the Homosaurus?

Williams: Big broad things that we're doing are translating it into different languages so that libraries all over the world can just use it. We know that there are librarians that have already started on translating it at their own libraries. We know that there's a Québécois translation. We know that there's a French translation. I believe there's a Gujarati translation in the works. We're excited to be working with those libraries and also writing grants to do the work ourselves and having the vocabulary translated into more languages. So that's a big thing. We are also working on documentation so that librarians, libraries that want to use it, a best practices document or guidance just help in implementing it, so that's a big thing. Also, just continuing to expand it and continuing to make sure that it is current and usable and accessible, and that just takes constant work and pivoting and learning.

Belantara: How do you plan to continue implementing the Homosaurus at Kentucky?

Williams: I'll be continuing this work by doing a periodic analytics report of the LGBTQ books that come into our library and adding Homosaurus terms to them in that periodic way, and also as I think of different LCSH terms that are outdated but still describe LGBTQ people, then pulling reports for the resources that have that, those LCSH and seeing if I've already enhanced them, and if I haven't, then enhancing them. Continuing that retrospective work in a more targeted way.

Belantara: Can you tell us about any other libraries that are doing similar work to yours?

Williams: I know that Fresno State is getting started on a Homosaurus pilot. I know that FSU, where I used to work, is getting started on a pilot as well. Homosaurus has this community Google group where users of Homosaurus can ask questions or ask for feedback about something or just ask the board things. It's not often used, but when it is used, that puts us in touch with even more people. So Fresno State, New Hampshire State Library, a bunch of people.

Belantara: Do you think the Homosaurus will ever be done?

Williams: No, no. LCSH isn't done and Homosaurus, there will always be, for as long as there are queer people in the world, we're always going to be finding new ways to describe ourselves as the culture evolves. As new people come into this world, there are going to be different ways that they describe themselves and different ways that they see themselves in relation to each other in a romantic or sexual or queer context. I remember when queerplatonic started being a term that was used. It didn't exist until it did, and then suddenly there was a word to describe this thing that I'm sure has been felt and experienced in different ways throughout human history, and there have been different words for it throughout human history, but now today we have this term queerplatonic, and so we can add it to the vocabulary and just sort of contextualize it. So no, I don't think Homosaurus will ever be done, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves in the next decade, in the next 20 or so years. I hope it continues to evolve and exist and prosper throughout the next several years.

Belantara: Now we just want to give a few moments if there's anything that you would like to share or if you want to let us know anything that we should have asked about and that we missed in our interview questions.

Williams: I would say that, and this is something that I say at the end of every presentation that I do about it as well, but if you're interested in using it, if you see that your library could use it and should use it, then I highly encourage you to do so. I can tell you that it's going to be probably slow work. It's going to take a while because this is all subject analysis. This isn't a batch process that you're going to do once and then it'll be over. It's going to be work that is sustained throughout years, ideally. As you add new materials to your library, your library changes, and that long, slow work is good work. It's worth it.