Questioning Authority

Abstract When a library adds a book to its collection, it adds a surrogate record for that book in the library's catalog. To get this record the library will either download it or create a record for the book from an international bibliographic record database. Authors have records too. These are known as name authority records. Recently the standards for creating these records changed to allow library catalogers to record more personal information about authors in authority records. This includes information about gender. There began a collective effort by a handful of catalogers to revise the new instructions so that binary gender was not encoded into the metadata of library records. This paper outlines the developments, results, and implications of this work.