Abstract
In libraries, one of the less obvious instances of bias, racism, and harmful language can originate from the way we classify books, assign cutter numbers, and shelve them. Cutter numbers are alphanumeric codes to further identify the book, providing more specific information about the subtopic within a related subject. University of Miami Libraries, like most academic libraries, utilizes the Library of Congress classification system, which defines such cutters. Once we discovered that the Library of Congress had just recently officially deprecated the racist cutter “.N” to describe Black people, we immediately started our remediation project. Beginning in November 2021, and during three intensive months of work, a small group formed by librarians and student workers at University of Miami Libraries was able to reclassify the records in our catalog, relabel the material, and reshelve more than 1,600 books in an attempt to fight racism in our catalog.