Re-imagining (black) comic book cataloguing: increasing accessibility through metadata at one university library

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cataloguing single-issue comic books has been a challenge that has flustered librarians for nearly half a century. At one Mid-Atlantic public university’s library, rapid growth of their trade comic book collection necessitated finding ways to make its contents more useful, usable, and accessible in the library catalogue. Familiar tags meant to increase the findability of these comics, such as pencillers, inkers, characters, and story arcs, were added to these records. The need for this project accelerated as the library began developing a collection of Black comic books, highlighted by characters such as Black Panther and Vixen and creators like Dwayne McDuffie and Ta-Nehisi Coates. This required an acknowledgement of the historically silenced contributions of members of the African diaspora and how things such as Library of Congress Subject Headings have ascribed normativity to white comic book characters and creators while tokenising the contributions of those from marginalised groups. This essay explores the technical and ethical challenges of demographic metadata using bibliographic and authority records. The aspiration of this project is increased access to the entire comic book collection, especially through socially-engaged metadata enrichment.