Sanford Berman (see preceding News and Comment piece) has been working tirelessly for years to improve the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and keep the subject headings and classification system up to date. As mentioned in his article, Berman points out a subtle bias that is created because library catalogs do not truly represent the subject heading and classification that is indicated. His example of climate change denialism is but one classification that should be added, and it is not correctly represented with the term climate change skepticism.
As Berman mentions, the Library of Congress is slow to make changes. This is not only because they are a conservative institution but because they are undergoing a “modernization” of cataloging rules. The Library of Congress is moving toward a new system that will provide many other access points to information than were found in older library catalogs. It still takes considerable effort to make even the simplest of subject heading changes to become more modern, or remove an archaic item, and it seems as though the Library of Congress might not be working as fast as they could to modernize the classification schemes.
Library Information Systems are heading toward more social interaction that allow for tagging materials by patrons. These systems do not necessarily have formal subject headings from the Library of Congress; however, the system is trying to overcome some of these issues, current relevance being one important one. This is done with a social tagging element as both patrons and librarians are using keywords (such as denialism, AIDS denialism, etc.). This is not formalized, which in itself is a problem. Since anybody can tag, there is no control, and there is no guarantee that the tag is relevant to everyone. This also creates another bias.