Yesterday Donald Trump ordered the Interior Department to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in its Geographic Names System (GNIS). If your first thought on hearing the news was “I wonder if library subject headings will change?” you’re probably a librarian. Or at least someone who shares some of my uncommon interests.

Mind you, just because a government changes its name for something doesn’t mean that anyone else outside of government will go along with the change. But historically, many organizations have relied on the GNIS for names to use in maps, location designations, and place references in general. The Library of Congress is one such organization, and when in 2025 Trump made similar orders for the Interior Department to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, bypassing the usual professional and stakeholder review for such changes, the Library soon made corresponding changes to its name and subject headings. Other American libraries went along with it, adopting the new names as well (often by default, as they automatically imported catalog records from shared systems and commercial providers).

So it’s quite possible that we’ll soon start seeing headings like “America, Lake of (N.Y. and Ont.)” in catalog records at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. At this point, though, I don’t plan to make such changes in the Online Books Page catalog. To understand why not, it’s worth reviewing why libraries choose the headings we use in our catalogs. As I see it, there are three main concerns our heading choices should satisfy:

• Findability: The main purpose of headings in a library catalog is to help people find the information resources they need. To do that, the headings need to employ language our readers are likely to use in their searches, and that they recognize and follow in their browsing. That’s a strong argument for using the same terminology that people use in their everyday speech and writing, even if that differs from official terminology.
• Respect: It’s also important that the terminology we use in our catalog respects both our users and the people associated with whatever we’re naming. For instance, if someone announces a change in their own name, or the name of an organization they run, we typically respect their autonomy by reflecting that change in our catalog, even before the name becomes commonly used by others. Likewise, if a group of people associated with a thing or a name say that the name we use is insulting, or would be better changed to something else, we listen to them, and then often change the name if there aren’t compelling reasons not to.
• Standardization: This is an often under-appreciated reason libraries choose the headings they do: Not only does it help users find things if we use the same names and headings consistently across our library systems, but it’s also often much easier for us to maintain our own catalogs if we use the same names and headings as our peer libraries do. That lets us easily exchange records, share cataloging work, and conduct searches across multiple libraries. Few libraries have the resources to create and maintain their own system of headings, but since the Library of Congress does, and is a major source of catalog records for libraries, most American libraries adopt their headings rather than maintain their own terminologies. The advantages of standardization typically outweigh concerns about less-than-ideal heading choices, or the differences in the needs of the Library of Congress’s primary user constituency (which ultimately is the US Congress) and the needs of local library communities.

Given these concerns, changing Lake Ontario’s name in my catalog would not be in the interests of the library I run, or of its users. Changing its name to Lake America would make books I list about the lake less findable, because few people will normally use that name. I’m aware of anyong besides Trump using or calling for that name in the past, and the lake’s been continuously called “Ontario” since before either the United States or Canada were countries. (“Lake America” might get picked up by this president’s enthusiastic fans, his sycophants, or people and agencies he can order around, but those represent only a minority of my users.) The change is also blatantly disrespectful, not only because it ignores the usage and preferences of the people who live around the lake, but also because Trump announced the name change, for a body of water shared by the United States and Canada, explicitly to retaliate against Canada in a trade war that remains ongoing.

That only leaves standardization as a reason to go along with the change, should the Library of Congress adopt it (which I should note is not yet certain). But with the development of linked data and related technologies in libraries, and with software I’ve developed for The Online Books Page, it’s no longer as important as it once was that my library use all the same headings as other libraries. Simply holding back certain revisions to a standard terminology is easier to sustain than other deviations I might make from that terminology. I’m already doing some automated revision of headings in records I import to our extended shelves, and it’s not a big change to make those automated revisions use older headings for certain names and subjects. I’ve also had software support for automatic conversions between local library headings and standard Library of Congress headings for years. I can use that to seamlessly support links between searches in my catalog and searches in catalogs that use Library of Congress headings. (If I know other libraries are also making similar changes, I can also maintain data to support seamless mappings to their catalogs.)

So whatever the Library of Congress or other libraries do, Lake Ontario will stay Lake Ontario in the Online Books catalog. Or at least it will as long as that remains the predominant everyday name for the lake, and there hasn’t been a properly consultative process to change it. I will be making some changes in my systems and policies to accommodate this decision. I can elaborate more on how I’m doing that in a followup post if readers are interested.