Overcoming the Barriers : Improving Access to LGBTQ Content in Collections

W. Walker

"This paper will explore some of the barriers to identifying LGBTQ+ content in collections, including the lack of metadata identifying particular resources as gay-, lesbian-, bisexual-, or transgender-related, and problems matching the terminology of users with the terminology of the resources and attached metadata. Recent changes in the application of metadata to resource records will then be discussed, including the new thesaurus of Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT) describing the intended audiences of resources and the creators and contributors to those resources. If LGBT-related creator/contributor characteristics were added to authority records for LGBT individual persons, and these characteristics were then searchable and linked to bibliographic records related to those individuals, many more resources could then be identified and potentially retrieved as LGBT." (from lgbtqalms.co.uk)