One of the most well known subject heading update started in 2014 from a student at Dartmouth while researching undocumented students. With the help of the Dartmouth librarian and the American Library Association (ALA) a petition went out to the Library of Congress for a change. There was a significant amount of political pushback for this change and the Library of Congress did not make any changes until December 2021. The subject heading Illegal Aliens has been updated to Illegal Immigration, and the term Aliens has been replaced with Noncitizens.
I will now walk you through the process of reviewing this change on the LCSH website.
First I reviewed the website and clicked on the year I wanted to review. For this example I am reviewing 2020.
I am going to begin by reviewing subject headings with the letter I, for Illegal Aliens. After scrolling through hundreds of subject headings I found Illegal Aliens.
Remember, this is file is from 2020 and will not show the change.
Now, I will conduct a similar search using the letter I for Illegal Aliens in the 2022 archived files.
Here is where you will see the change made by the Library of Congress. Illegal Aliens has been updated to the new subject heading, Illegal Immigration and Noncitizens.
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