For Black librarians, Helton notes, the work of cataloging usually meant “countercataloguing.” As Black collections moved from personal houses to establishments, quirky private methods (Schomburg had shelved his personal books by colour and spine-height) now not sufficed. However neither, some librarians discovered, did the purportedly “scientific” info methods utilized in most libraries, which allowed restricted area for non-European topics.
Immediately, Porter, who turned the chief librarian of Howard in 1930, is remembered because the pioneering architect of one of many world’s premier Africana analysis facilities, who hunted down forgotten manuscripts and constructed connections between the African American expertise and international Black networks. However constructing Howard’s assortment — and making it helpful to customers — additionally meant doing battle with insufficient classification methods.
Working with Latimer and others, she tweaked the Library of Congress’s normal topic headings, including ones for topics like passing, Pan-Africanism and the blues. She additionally took on the racism baked into the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
That system, first devised within the 1870s, divided the world — and all information of it — into classes of race, tradition and faith. In follow, it wedged all of Black expertise right into a tiny numerical slice of the universe.
In most libraries, Helton notes, librarians tended to shelve every little thing Black, whether or not works of poetry or sociological texts, into two places: 326, for “slavery,” and 325.26, a subclassification of “colonization and migration” devoted to “the Negro query.”
Porter began tweaking the system, in ways in which additionally powerfully reconceptualized the world. For instance, underneath the Dewey system, American historical past was organized largely round wars and presidencies. However Porter rethought that strategy, changing Andrew Johnson’s presidency into “emancipation,” Rutherford B. Hayes as “Ku Klux Klan,” and so forth.
