Library of Congress: “POTUS pawns” – ACRLog

September 17, 2026

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Library of Congress: “POTUS pawns”

In March 2025, I wrote about anticipatory obedience at the Library of Congress, describing how LC fast tracked changes to the Library of Congress Subject Headings relating to the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali. When Trump issued an executive order on August 27th directing federal agencies to change Lake Ontario to Lake America, catalogers around the world waited to see how LC would handle the changes. Well, we didn’t have to wait long.

On September 3rd, LC scheduled a proposal to change the subject heading Ontario, Lake (N.Y. and Ont.) to America, Lake (N.Y. and Ont.). On September 4th, LC published an announcement that the tentative changes would have no comment period. On September 11th, the change to “Lake America” was approved and is now the valid heading for LCSH.

As I mentioned in my post last year, the speed with which this happened is astounding—just eight days! The division at LC that makes these decisions, the Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division (PTCP), moves notoriously slowly, which has been a frustration for the library profession for decades. Over the years, they have deferred or declined to take on much-needed projects because of short staffing. But it turns out they can move very quickly when they want to.

While for decades the practice for LCSH changes has included a period of public comment, these most recent changes were approved with no comments allowed—even more drastic than the perfunctory 24 hours of public comment that was provided for Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali. The Lake Ontario announcement was made with this language:

This tentative list is published without comment period. The proposed changes are made in accordance with Public Law 242-80th Congress, approved July 25, 1947, “to provide a central authority for standardizing geographic names for the purpose of eliminating duplication in standardizing names among the Federal departments, and for other purposes.”

It’s certainly striking to change procedure suddenly after decades and justify it by pointing to a law from 1947!

As Matthew Haugen, Rare Book Cataloger at Columbia, points out in a post on the Cataloging Lab, the head of the PTCP division justified the changes to Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali in February 2025 by saying “The Library of Congress defers to the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN) for place names contained within our controlled vocabularies and classification. For more information, please see our Subject Headings Manual sheet H 690 Formulating Geographic Headings and visit the BGN webpage.” Haugen notes that if you actually look at that instruction sheet, it says: “Although the BGN decision, when it is obtained, is preferred over any other name forms for all names other than those of New Zealand, catalogers should also consult other standard authorities.” There are multiple places where LCSH deviates from BGN standards, including using Great Britain instead of United Kingdom. LC could always change their policies to provide more flexibility in their geographic name policies. There’s no reason that LC can’t choose to deviate from BGN in the case of Lake Ontario, except, presumably, fear of retribution.

This week I received a copy of a letter from Sandy Berman (still at his typewriter and sharing out news at age 92) imploring LC, “DON’T DO IT.” Well, they did it, and they certainly stepped with unprecedented energy to fall in line.