[DCRM-L] Cataloging American songsters, and other racist material

[Erin Blake]

This is a follow-up on Bob Kosovsky's description of the American songsters
he's cataloging in the "Machine-press special collections" thread, where he
wrote "if anyone doubts the racism rampant in the second half of the 19th
century, one need not go further than a typical American songster."

I'd love to learn more about how catalogers are surfacing racist content as
a genre in special collections. Most of the resources I'm finding relate to
archives or to subject headings, but the items I have in mind aren't
technically "about race" they're simply "racist."

With songsters, you can get pretty far in surfacing racist content by
transcribing all the titles into the table of contents: researchers can
search for well-known derogatory keywords in direct quotes. But I'd love to
have a genre term that would convey something along the lines of  "655 _4
$a Deeply disturbing racist material that would have been considered
perfectly ordinary by most middle-class white Americans at the time" when
the ostensible subject is simply "650_0 $a Country life."

I'm particularly interested in how to bring racist content in prints and
figurines to light, given that there's usually nothing to transcribe, so
keyword searching for directly-quoted derogatory terms won't help. There
are also times where the racist content is technically just a minor part of
a generic "background" ... but I don't want to omit mentioning the
background racism when summarizing the visual content in the 520. Not only
is it currently a topic of great interest to researchers, but ignoring it
would make me complicit in treating it as unremarkable.

Thanks for any thoughts and ideas....

Erin.

______________________
Erin Blake, Ph.D.  |  Senior Cataloger  |  Folger Shakespeare Library  |
201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC, 20003  |  eblake at folger.edu  |
www.folger.edu
<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/-t5RCjRgpBtArRXC7R7_2?domain=urldefense.com>
  |  Pronouns: she/her/hers
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