Muns, Raleigh. "The weird case of social analysis using library catalogs "
The Current (University of Missouri-St. Louis) March 6, 2006 (vol. 38, no. 1178), p. 5
On a couple of occasions I've published analyses of libraries by using the library catalog to see how many items they own using the F-word and how many using the N-word. You can read about my first foray into this area via "Nasty Word Score Card" in the book Alternative Library Literature 1992-1993 (5th floor of the TJ Library, call number Z716.4 .A47 1992/93). First, I personally consider the F-word to be an overused and fairly harmless Anglo-Saxon epithet. Its use, for me, increased after my hitch in the Navy as I fondly recall going home from boot camp for Thanksgiving and asking Mom to "please pass the f___ing butter." For purposes of my research I look for all variations of the F-word including the version that references one's female parent. The N-word I consider to be a perfectly vile pejorative term commonly applied towards those with a surfeit of melanin in their skin. I recognize its existence, but refuse to utter it aloud in any context. The N-word is just mean. The WorldCat database covers the library holdings of over 23,000 libraries. By searching WorldCat for keywords using the F-word (as well as the mother F-word), and comparing the number of items found to the results of a keyword search for the N-word, I came up with an arcane ratio which I posit loosely reflects library and societal comfort with topics of sex and racism. I call it "the F/N ratio of library social paranoia." WorldCat indicates that there are 2,632 F-word titles in libraries world wide, and 1,931 N-word titles for a world-wide baseline F/N index of 1.36. You can use this F/N number for evaluating individual libraries. So if we use the MERLIN Library Catalog to check out the four UM campuses by keyword searching for F-word and N-word, we stack up like this: UMSL = .333 (31 F's to 93 N's) The overall UM System has an F/N ratio of .371. What does this mean? It's not clear, but feel free to discuss the possible implications amongst yourselves. Literally, it merely means that the UM libraries are three times more likely to own a book with the N-word in the title than with the F-word in the title. I personally think that a value approximating 1.0 is a good indicator of a well-rounded collection. A 1.0 library is neither afraid to collect items with problematic words in the title, and also doesn't lean one way or the other. Wash U, for instance, has an F/N ratio of .938. Harvard weighs in at a healthy .951 while my alma mater, UCLA, drifts downward with a .686 value. I couldn't wait to see how Bob Jones University (BJU) measured up: BJU owns a single title with the F-word (tucked away in a chapter heading), and 9 titles with the N-word. No surprise that BJU isn't big on collecting controversial sounding titles of any type. You can use this approach to do interesting analyses with any pair of terms, though you'll need a longer essay than this to establish your methodological bases. This was meant for thought stimulation purposes only, and in no way reflects the official opinions of UMSL's or any other library (except for maybe BJU’s, I think). |
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