As you've probably heard, LC has decided to deprecate "Illegal Aliens" as a subject heading. https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/illegal-aliens-decision.pdf <https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/illegal-aliens-decision.pdf>

In a troubling development, Rep. Diane Black has introduced legislation to prevent this from occurring.
There's a nice article in DailyKos. describing the situation: http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/13/1514702/-Now-they-re-coming-after-the-librarians <http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/13/1514702/-Now-they-re-coming-after-the-librarians>

Based on conversations with some library folks in Washington, I think this legislation has a chance of becoming law. At the very least, it could politicize the nomination of Dr. Carla Hayden.

I also think that Code4Lib is potentially more powerful than congress in this situation. LC says that "all of the revisions will appear on a Tentative List and be approved no earlier than May 2016; the revision of existing bibliographic records will commence shortly thereafter." It seems unlikely that Congress can act before this happens. We could then implement systems that effect this subject heading deprecation without regard to Rep. Diane Black and Congress. We can scrub the MARC records. We can alter the cataloguing interfaces. We could tweak the cataloguing standard.

Or at least I think we can. Code4Lib knows better than I do. What else would we need? What might be hard for us to do if LC is forbidden to help us, officially?

"Illegal Aliens" appears a total of 91 times on 15 pages of the most recently published edition of the LC headings (8,179 pages total https://unglue.it/work/140214/ <https://unglue.it/work/140214/> )

Eric Hellman
President, Free Ebook Foundation
Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/
https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
twitter: @gluejar