The title of this post makes more sense if you are already aware of this tweet that became a meme/copypasta back in 2019.

I thought of this phrase when I came across this post on Bluesky this week.

It is true. There is no library jail.

I know this because at the institution where I have been working since 1999, there are items in the library catalogue of my old name and not my current name and no one is in library jail.

(The above image is from Adventure Time, and this particular episode first aired in 2011).

Ironically, the Library of Congress has authority records in which my name is correct.

This was made possible thanks to an established relationship with the linked data of the Library of Congress and of Wikidata and a personal request that was kindly passed on, received, and acted upon.

This connected but separate relationship between LoC with Wikidata suggests a way forward. Australian librarian Hugh Rundle also comes to a similar conclusion in his post, The Gulf of America:

We don’t have to rebuild everything completely from scratch. Especially when it comes to controlled vocabularies, we might think about techniques akin to speciation by building on top of existing systems with local variations. We can use local extensions that both add new terms and define alternatives. We can incorporate specialist vocabularies over the top of broader ones, and use additional vocabularies when more generic subject headings are problematically based in a particular worldview, not nuanced enough, or simply too broad. And perhaps the era of Linked Open Data replacing systems designed for browsing card catalogues is nearly, finally, upon us? Enabling many names to point to the same thing via an opaque identifier would solve some of these problems.

This work is possible but it won’t be easy. It will require work.

A great example of the work and care that is involved I found in is this 20 minute presentation from the University of Michigan’s Monique Rio from code4lib 2025. It’s called, Making Good on Good Intentions.

Library of Congress subject headings don’t always reflect the values of the institutions using them, and they change at the speed of Congress. Over the years there has been a desire for institutions to choose for themselves what words to use for LC terms, and there have been a variety of ways to do this.

The University of Michigan used the method of creating local authority records to replace the terms. This worked well for our records, but because we include records that aren’t ours–from the Alma community zone and from HathiTrust–these changes weren’t applied to all of the records in our catalog. This meant that for users using our discovery system, instead of only seeing our preferred terms, they had a mix of our preferred term AND the current LC term. On top of this, University of Michigan has an LC Subject Browse application, and all of our preferred terms weren’t included–because they aren’t technically LC terms anymore–effectively downgrading their usefulness.

With inspiration from a presentation by Triangle Research Libraries Network for the ALA in 2021, we came up with a plan to thoroughly fix this problem. Right before the Fall 2024 term, the solution went into use. We went into the project thinking it would be a simple “replace this phrase with that phrase” problem, and it turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than that.

This presentation will discuss why this is a hard problem, how we fixed the problem, and what institutional structures enabled us to actually get this work done.

Why is my name still out of date in the library catalogue of where I work? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure.

In order to find out, I will need to refresh my understanding of (Canadian) name authorities, learn how they are managed within our system, and will likely reach out to my OCUL colleagues and friends at Scholars Portal.

(And just to be clear – this is not an “elbows up” post. This is more of a “sleeves up” call to action. Let’s work together and for each other.)