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2011-07-17 Archive Fever: A Crowd-Sourced Investigation into Library Catalogue Classification of WikiLeaks as an "Extremist Web Site"

NB: See end of story for updates, now including an official reply by The National Library of Australia & the US Library of Congress. Additional contact details for National Library and Archives Canada as well as the US Library of Congress have been added.

Submitted by @nyxpersephone.

This article would not have been possible without the help of many Twitter users, most notably @Asher_Wolf, @carwinb, @CassPF, @dexter_doggie, @issylvia, @jaraparilla, @JLLLOW, @m_cetera, @NOH8ER.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication (CiP) record is what you usually see on the second page of a book, right after the title page. It is similar to the catalogue record of a book in a library and contains basic information on the book, such as the author's name and the title of the book. It also contains "keywords" ("subject headers") that may be used by librarians and other information professionals to classify the book in their collections.

CiP records are usually provided upon request by national libraries and/or national bibliographic databases, such as the National Library of Australia (NLA) and the Library of Congress (LOC). So the CiP is a useful thing, albeit rather boring and usually only of interest to librarians and information professionals.

However, in the case of WikiLeaks and Andrew Fowler's book "The Most Dangerous Man in the World", the CiP makes for an interesting story. Examining the keyword section headers of the CiP-record on Fowler's book, one cannot help but notice the last one: "Extremist web sites".

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