ALA Grants Sandy Berman Honorary Membership
The American Library Association gave Sandy Berman an honorary lifetime membership, the association’s highest honor.
“Sanford Berman was nominated ‘for his accomplishments as a cataloging theorist and practitioner and for his commitment to making catalog records accessible to library users. Using subject headings as a tool for social awareness, Berman has had a profound influence on the way librarians think and work.’”
Berman is one of my heroes because of how he advocated for subject headings to represent groups of people and subjects that were often not represented favorably by terms the Library of Congress chose for their subject headings. Some people consider his tactics to be subversive and nontraditional and thought of him as a trouble maker, but a lot of us admired his work. He should be on a librarian trading card. (The Library of Congress Subject Headings are used by libraries around the world. Using terms people are familiar with and that fairly represent topics in libraries is important so people can easily find information.)
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