LGBTQ+ Fiction Indexing
Koraljka Golub · 2025
Subject searching has become an essential feature in today’s online services, enabling users to discover content based on specific themes or topics. However, this process is fraught with challenges, particularly when it comes to fiction. The professional subject indexing languages need to continuously update their indexing terms to reflect new and emerging language, particularly in diverse and evolving areas like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and other sexual or gender identities (LGBTQ+) fiction. Social tagging platforms, like Goodreads and LibraryThing, rely heavily on user-generated tags to index books. This leads to a wide variety of terms being applied inconsistently. Automated indexing systems can misinterpret the context and miss the subtleties of the narrative, leading to inaccurate or overly general subject terms. The design of search interfaces also plays a critical role in subject searching. Many interfaces lack the ability to support hierarchical browsing, narrower or broader searches, disambiguation, translation of search terms to terms used by the system, which are crucial for navigating the complex landscape of fiction or, really, any document collections. Addressing these challenges requires a combined approach of updating subject indexing languages, implementing indexing policies that foster high exhaustivity and specificity, improving tagging consistency – for example via providing suggestions from subject indexing languages, and enhancing search functionalities. Automated tools likely have a role to play in suggesting themes that professional indexers and social taggers might have missed, too, but are missing important LGBTQ+ aspects. How to best combine the professional, the social, and the automated approaches to LGBTQ+ fiction indexing remains a major future research challenge.