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2/6/12 11:40I found this story, which I had never heard before, in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg:
(At least nowadays, most university libraries classify their books by the Library of Congress system, and most public libraries by the Dewey Decimal System. I'm not sure if that was the case in the 1970s.)
I post this not just to be all "Yay for librarians and their liberal agendas!" but because -- sometimes it's easy to feel like the work that could Actually Make A Difference is impossible, and the work that's in front of you doesn't make any difference in the big picture. But sometimes it's enough just to find one small thing that you can do something to change.
For example, when gay rights organizations started campaigning against homophobia in the late 1960s, their initial efforts yielded only a string of failures. They pushed to repeal laws used to prosecute gays and were roundly defeated in state legislature... It seemed like the gay community's larger goals -- ending discrimination and police harassment, convincing the American Psychiatric Association to stop defining homosexuality as a mental disease -- were out of reach.
Then, in the early 1970s, the American Library Association's Task Force on Gay Liberation decided to focus on one modest goal: convincing the Library of Congress to reclassify books about the gay liberation movement from HQ 71-471 ("Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes") to another, less pejorative category.
In 1972, after receiving a letter requesting the reclassification, the Library of Congress agreed to make the shift, reclassifying books into a newly created category, HQ 76.6 ("Homosexuality, Lesbianism -- Gay Liberation Movement, Homophile Movement." It was a minor tweak of an old institutional habit regarding how books were shelved, but the effect was electrifying. News of the new policy spread across the nation. Gay rights organizations, citing the victory, started fund-raising drives. Within a few years, openly gay politicians were running for political office in California, New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon, many of them citing the Library of Congress's decision as inspiration.
(At least nowadays, most university libraries classify their books by the Library of Congress system, and most public libraries by the Dewey Decimal System. I'm not sure if that was the case in the 1970s.)
I post this not just to be all "Yay for librarians and their liberal agendas!" but because -- sometimes it's easy to feel like the work that could Actually Make A Difference is impossible, and the work that's in front of you doesn't make any difference in the big picture. But sometimes it's enough just to find one small thing that you can do something to change.