Gender + Sexuality Resource Center Community Library

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If you use Princeton University’s Library, you might be familiar with the Library of Congress subject headers in a catalog record. These act as search terms and help you find books. However, these terms tend to be really out of date and reinforce pre-existing power structures, limiting the discoverability of materials by, for, and about marginalized communities. Efforts have been made to remedy this in individual institutions—Princeton’s GSS Reference Collection, for example, utilizes the Homosaurus controlled vocabulary in addition to Library of Congress terms. Inspired by this practice, we have used our own controlled vocabulary to ensure discoverability by using up-to-date terms relevant to our community while maintaining standards of consistency. We have tried to be as specific as possible and use terms that respect the people/experiences they are describing. 

Because of the software used to develop the catalog, some search terms might be clunky, unusual, or broad. Additionally, the search engine only pulls up exact matches of the search term, so you might have to experiment around with search terms to find what you are looking for. If you are having trouble finding what you’re looking for, try one of these tips.

• Search for full words rather than abbreviations (eg. search “bisexual” instead of “bi”). For certain nations and disabilities, abbreviations are provided (eg. “ASD” in addition to “autism”, “UK” in addition to “United Kingdom”).
• The search engine cannot recognize misspelled words, so double check your spelling! If you are using a search term that does not have a standard spelling, you may need to experiment with different spellings. Similarly, if you are using a debated term, try searching synonyms or similar words until you find what you are looking for.
• Many books will have one or more countries listed in the tag. This can indicate one of many things: the author is from that country, a major character is from that country, the book is about or set in that country, or either the author/character is diasporic from that country. For example, a book about somebody who’s Bangladeshi and living in Ireland would be listed under both “South Asia ( Bangladesh )” and “Western Europe ( Ireland )”. Keep this in mind when looking for books on a specific national identity, ethnic group, or cultural group.
• Similarly, when searching for countries, continents, ethnic/cultural groups, or regions, search the noun form of the word rather than the adjective (eg. search "Asia" instead of "Asian", "America" instead of "American". Many of our subject tags are in noun form, so while some might come up with the adjectival form, you will likely get more results by searching the noun.
• Looking for memoirs, oral histories, biographies, or autobiographies? To reflect the multitude of ways people choose to tell their stories, these books are all grouped under the search term "personal experiences".
• Still not finding what you're looking for? Email us at gsrc@princeton.edu with the subject header "Library Book Request" and tell us what you are looking for. Our student librarian will get back to you when they can with books that fit that topic.

Think a book is missing a tag or search term? We can’t read every book, so it’s hard for us to know every term relevant to a given book. You can help improve our catalog by letting us know about missing search terms in our feedback form!

You may notice that in the notes section for some books' catalog records, there are the letters "CW" followed by a series of potential triggers. These are content warnings. Some of our books contain offensive, upsetting, or potentially triggering material; other books might contain material that readers may not want to read in certain settings (for instance, reading a novel with a graphic sex scene while at work). Content warnings enable readers to make an informed decision about the books they read. Only you can decide if a book is right for you, and content warnings are one of many tools that can help you do that.

Importantly, not all of our books have content warnings listed, and the books with content warnings do not necessarily cover every potential trigger. Additionally, these warnings do not yet have page numbers listed, so something that only happens on one or two pages will be listed the same as something that occurs repeatedly throughout the book. Our librarian cannot possibly read every single book in the collection, so we have certainly missed instances where there ought to be warnings. We encourage you to look up books on your own before choosing whether or not to read them. If you read a book and believe there is a content warning that should be included in the catalog, use our feedback form to let us know. We will take a look and add it to the catalog if the information seems helpful to other readers.