As part of its monthly specialist spotlight series, the North American Coordinating Council (NCC) on Japanese Library Resources recently profiled Junjiro Nakatomi, Japanese cataloging librarian for the USC Libraries.
"Responsible for cataloging and classification within the library systems," writes Paula R. Curtis for the council, "Nakatomi is closely involved in making these services usable and more equitable within the discovery systems curated and updated for patron use."
Since joining the USC Libraries in 2017, Nakatomi has worked to make the libraries' Japanese language materials more discoverable. He has also led efforts to update older and problematic catalog records:
One such project Nakatomi led last year was a Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion initiative to improve subject descriptions in University of Southern California’s LGBTQ+ collections. Although most libraries follow the conventions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), many of these labels contain outdated and inappropriate terms that do not reflect current DEI standards and historical realities. With the support of a Dean’s Challenge Grant (an internal grant administered by the Dean of USC Libraries), Nakatomi and a small team of specialists analyzed catalog records within USC’s ONE Archives to identify these problematic headings and added some 300 new local subject headings for approximately 8,000 catalog records.
Read the full profile on the NCC website.