The Life and Times of Sanford Berman

Abnormalities, Human. Ordnance Research. Przewalski's Horse. Munazzamat Al-Tahrir Al-Filastiniyah.

"What's wrong with these subject headings? Clearly, you must see that they represent the subject," the catalogers at the Library of Congress cry.

Birth Defects. Weapons Research. Asiatic Wild Horse. P.L.O.

"What's wrong with these as subject headings? Surely, YOU must see that these are the words the patrons will use," Sanford Berman retorts. "We do want our patrons to FIND the materials, don't we?"

Sanford Berman, former head cataloger at Hennepin County Library (HCL) and long-time activist, is well known in the library world for his valiant and unrelenting efforts to reform cataloging and classification practice. In his position at HCL, Berman proactively worked to improve the catalog by applying subject headings that would be more accessible to the patrons, but were not authorized by the Library of Congress.

Berman's quest to rid the LCSH of bias and inequities began when he was working as an assistant librarian at the University of Zambia where colleagues at the library informed him that using "kafirs", an approved subject heading in LCSH, was akin to calling an American a "nigger". (Gilyard, 1999) Ever since, Berman has worked to make the LCSH more inclusive of underrepresented and minority groups, and less "…Eurocentric, Christian-oriented, male dominated [and] establishment pimping…" (Gilyard, 1999). If Berman and his staff at HCL felt that the subject headings approved by LCSH were either inaccessible or inappropriate, they would create new ones and make recommendations to the Library of Congress for changes to the authority lists. Under Berman, the HCL subject headings were distributed widely by way of the HCL Cataloging Bulletin.

While best known for his fight to modernize the LCSH, Sanford Berman is also credited as being an integral part of the founding of NoveList, a database of fiction subject headings. Under Berman's guidance, HCL began applying subject headings to their fiction collection. In 1994 when the NoveList database was introduced it used HCL's fiction subject headings list as its foundation. It has continued to grow from this foundation to include over 90,000 titles and 17,000 subject headings for fiction. (Felix, 2000)

Sanford Berman is one of the founders of Alternative Library Literature and has written profusely about the shortcomings of library practice and services in his own and other libraries. In all of this, Berman was no stranger to reprimand from his superiors at Hennepin County Library. They often chastised him for airing his views so publicly, especially when the criticisms were leveled at the library policies themselves, like the times he circulated a petition among staff at HCL against a proposal to increase fines on children's materials and opposed a program which would allow library users to rent bestsellers for $3.00 a week to avoid long waiting lists. (Gilyard, 1999). The last straw came when HCL director Charles Brown announced that the library's cataloging practices would be changed to conform to the rules of AACR2 and MARC, erstwhile coming into line with the LCSH in an effort to facilitate the implementation of OCLC.

Berman responded to this announcement by expressing his consternation with the move to both his superiors and his colleagues and concerns that these changes would render the catalog less accessible to the users. The response from his supervisors called his opposition to the move "…counterproductive to the cataloging reengineering process…", (Gilyard, 1999) "…inappropriate as well as divisive…" (American Libraries, 1999, p. 20) and indicated that any continued active opposition to the move would "…be cause for further discipline." (Gilyard, 1999). Of course, Berman did not stop and when he was going to be reassigned, a demotion in his mind, to writing a manual of cataloging practice at HCL, he decided to take an early (forced in his mind) retirement.

" 'Sandy Berman is a major pain in the ass. He runs a horse-and-buggy cataloging operation in Minnesota and he thinks he can tell us how to do our jobs. He's an insufferable, self-righteous, unrealistic, naïve, head-in-the-clouds idealist who knows nothing about the real world of grind-it-out bibliographic data.' " (Dodge & DeSirey, 1995, p. 70)

Sandy Berman may have been a thorn in the side of the Library of Congress during his time at Hennepin County Library, but don't think that retirement will stop him. He has continued to voraciously write letters to any who will listen, and many who don't want to, continuing his quest to make the library accessible to all.

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