1 How Disability Studies Scholars Interact with Subject Headings Amelia Koford Texas Lutheran University Although several scholars of information organization have documented limitations in the way subject access standards represent marginalized topics, few have studied how users understand and address these limitations. This qualitative study investigates the information seeking behavior of nine scholars in the field of disability studies, focusing on how they interact with subject headings. The findings suggest that disability studies scholars often encounter and use non-preferred language when doing research and that they respond to this language in a variety of ways. The study also found that many participants prefer multidisciplinary search tools to subject-specific databases. Introduction The way documents are organized in libraries and databases has a profound impact on what information is retrieved and what remains unseen. Information studies writers from various theoretical perspectives, including feminism, i critical race theory, ii and queer theory, iii have argued that subject access standards are politically charged artifacts with implications for social justice. Rather than neutrally reflecting the structure of reality, classification schemes and subject access vocabularies are shaped by the values of the cultures that create them. As a result, some argue, people seeking information about marginalized topics along the axes of gender, race, sexuality, and ability often experience difficulty finding materials or encounter misleading and off-putting labels. This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an Article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 52:4, 2014, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01639374.2014.891288.