The Prejudicial Materials Working Group of RBMS’s Controlled Vocabularies Editorial Group invites your feedback on approximately 50 proposed new and revised terms for the RBMS Controlled Vocabulary for Rare Materials Cataloging (RBMS CVRMC). The Controlled Vocabularies Editorial Group (CVEG), a committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), maintains RBMS CVRMC.

RBMS CVRMC is a thesaurus of genre and form terms that are specific to the needs of the rare materials community. However, the proposed terms, used for indexing works that are prejudicial in nature or related to systems of oppression, also have wider applicability beyond rare materials. Genre and form terms are used to provide controlled description of what resources are (e.g. dictionaries, biographies, diaries, correspondence), rather than what they are about. 

The working group has reviewed extant terminology in the thesaurus to broaden terms from “literature” to “works” and revise selected existing scope notes. We have also drafted new terms for types of prejudicial works that were not previously represented in the thesaurus as well as terms related to colonialism and enslavement. The proposals within the Prejudicial works hierarchy are not meant to be exhaustive but to provide a scaffold for the future. CVEG encourages the community to propose additional narrower terms to further expand this section of the thesaurus.

The proposed terms can be viewed as a hierarchical list and as a comparison of terms with their original forms. Terms are generally also viewable on id.loc.gov, but they may have outdated information that has not yet been updated to reflect the working group’s most recent decisions. The documents linked above, which match what is found in the feedback survey, are the most up-to-date version.

We encourage you to submit comments, suggestions, and other feedback during the public review of the terms, April 17-May 26, 2023. Please submit your feedback using this Google form: https://forms.gle/KByizVqw419tcL3J6. Note that all fields on the form (including those with identifying information) are optional, and the form may be submitted more than once. Each term is listed individually with its scope note, variants, and relationships. You may submit feedback on as many or as few terms as you would like.

During the review period, members of the Prejudicial Materials Working Group will also hold a live public forum via Zoom:

• Wednesday, May 10, 2023, 12 pm PST / 1 pm MST / 2 pm CST / 3 pm EST

The session will be 90 minutes and will include a brief presentation on the history of the project and an overview of the proposed terms, with plenty of time for questions. More details, including connection information, will be provided closer to the event.

We hope to get feedback from a wide array of stakeholders, and we encourage you to share this announcement with others who may be interested. You can also see where we have already distributed the announcement.

Best,

Maren Cornett, on behalf of the Prejudicial Materials Working Group