What’s in a name? How Library of Congress Subject Headings reveal the past

Special Collections holds a small selection of travel guides produced in the 2nd half of the 20th century with a specific purpose. But you wouldn’t know it just from the title, and that was the point. The first Damron travel guide, compiled in 1964 by California businessman Bob Damron, featured addresses of gay bars across the U.S. 

Similar to the Negro Motorist Green Book of the 1930s, which provided advice on safe places for Black roadtrippers to eat and stay in Jim Crow-era America, the Damron guides offered gay and lesbian travelers lists of LGBT-friendly businesses. But carrying around a guidebook (the pre-iPhone thing to do!) with a title like “Gay Travel Guide” emblazoned on the cover would’ve outed readers in a potentially dangerous way. 

Now that we hold discreet Google-machines in the palm of our hands with access to infinite travel blogs of every flavor, printed travel guides are more suited to historical research. But if you’re looking for insights into what it was like to move through the world as a queer person in the 1970s, how would you know that a book titled “Bob Damron’s Address Book” would be a perfect resource? Librarians, that’s how! Specifically, catalogers whose primary duty is to describe our collections to make them as accessible as possible. 

One tool catalogers implement are Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). These standard descriptions aid researchers not only by describing resources with helpful keywords, but also by linking to other relevant resources under the same subject headings. 

For example, our record for the “Damron Women’s Traveller” contains 40 subject headings, 18 of which include the term “lesbian.” And if you click on one of those subjects, it brings you even more records that contain the same LCSH, leading you to more relevant resources, all thanks to the meticulous work of catalogers.