Library catalogs are notoriously difficult to use, but for marginalized members of the community, we anticipate additional barriers that arise due to the disconnect between the language used in catalogs and the spontaneous way that members of marginalized groups speak.
One way this can be studied is through the application of the concept of code-switching to the question of knowledge organization system use. Code-switching as described in linguistics is the movement between languages (or ways of speaking). In language-learning contexts, code-switching is often studied as a way of introducing borrowed language from one vocabulary into another (often from the mother tongue into the target language, but other cultural reasons emerge for integrating words from another language into speech). Researchers interested in social aspects of language, especially by members of marginalized groups, have also adopted the term code-switching.
When approaching an information retrieval system, for example, a library catalog, how do members of a marginalized community (e.g., LGBTQ+) engage in “code-switching” to adjust the terminology they use regarding identity? Specifically, we anticipate that LGBTQ+ community members expect that they will need to modulate the terminology they spontaneously use when querying a system. Further, there is a discourse in knowledge organization (KO) that presumes controlled vocabularies that are comprised of terminology that aligns with the terminology of the marginalized group will lead to better search results in IR systems; to our knowledge, no research has been done to 1) investigate the usability of (or the desirability to use) specialized controlled vocabularies for members of marginalized groups, 2) assess the extent to which users of IR systems anticipate the need for code-switching, and if so, their ability to succeed at finding adequate search terms, or 3) what they themselves expect or want.
Relatedly, the LIS literature is mute on the extent to which social justice is actually addressed by controlled vocabularies. Intuitively, specialized controlled vocabularies seem to be an ideal solution for members of marginalized groups when querying systems, yet mainstream users also exhibit difficulties with using “traditional” controlled vocabularies. To what extent do marginalized communities benefit from specialized thesauri that have been designed with their needs in mind, but have not necessarily been informed by user studies and that remain untested?