When the pandemic began and much of our work had to continue remotely, a small group of catalogers in Watson Library decided to shift some of our focus away from creating new bibliographic records and instead look back toward the hundreds of thousands of records we already had in our system. These records represent decades of shifting cataloging practices, so inconsistencies, errors, and the occasional head-scratching strangeness abound. Our small group therefore decided to try to smooth over some of these inconsistencies, to correct what errors we found, and to begin wrapping our heads around some of the stranger, more confusing records we uncovered.
As catalogers, we love the ability to describe what a thing actually is—who knew art libraries had playing cards?! But as the database maintenance team has learned, this capability often requires careful oversight.
One example of shifting cataloging practices that has wrought unintended consequences (both good and bad) is the 2016 introduction of Library of Congress “Genre/Form Terms,” a project that began in 2007. These terms were developed to “describe what a resource is, rather than what it is about, as most subject headings do.” Catalogers have long assigned subject headings to resources to provide a sense of what the thing is about, but these genre/form terms (LCGFT) are a way to brief people about what the resource actually is. So, for instance, a book about sculpture would get the subject heading “Sculptures,” but an actual sculpture could now be assigned the LCGFT term “Sculptures.” This allows people using our catalog to search for books about sculptures, but also use the “material/document type” search to find all the actual sculptures in the library's collection.
The only problem is, we don’t have any actual sculptures in the library's collection, but because catalogers can now assign the LCGFT term “Sculptures” to things, they are occasionally incorrectly assigning it to books that are actually just about sculptures (not sculptures themselves).
A view of the stacks—note the lack of sculptures. All photos by the author
Mistakes like these were easy enough to fix (we all knew that we didn’t have any sculptures in the stacks), but it becomes trickier with LCGFT terms like “Lithographs.” We knew that we had actual lithographs in the library collection, but we also knew that some catalogers had been misassigning the term “Lithographs” to books about lithography, not to actual examples of lithography. This sent us catalogers into some tricky forensic territory, trying to discern from our catalog records alone whether the thing was, in fact, a lithograph, or really just a book about lithography. Currently a search for “material/document type: Lithographs” turns up over 130 records, which means we should have about that many actual lithographs in the collection. But since mistakenly cataloged records continue to creep into our system through copy cataloging and vendor supplied records, this is a term we have to periodically examine for accuracy.
“Les lithographies originales en couleurs ont été tirées par Mourlot Frères” from: Lassaigne, Jacques, Chagall (Paris : Maeght éditeur, [1957])
One LCGFT that turns up some fun results is “Playing cards,” of which there are nine examples of in our catalog—not only in Watson Library, but also in the Costume Institute Library, the Cloisters Library, and the Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library.
Tetenbaum, Barbara, Artist's Book Ideation Cards (Berkeley, California : Flying Fish Press ; Portland, Oregon : Triangular Press, 2013)
As catalogers, we love the ability to describe what a thing actually is—who knew art libraries had playing cards?! But as the database maintenance team has learned, this capability often requires careful oversight. This process of cataloging is further complicated by the preponderance of other vocabularies that help describe what an object is—such as Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the RBMS Controlled Vocabularies to only name a couple—and often share the same terms. For instance, LCGFT, AAT, and RBMS all include the term “Auction catalogs,” so which do you choose? In the end we chose to go with the LCGFT term here (I’ll spare you a breakdown of our reasoning, but suffice it to say there were long Zoom calls about it), so we were able to update all records in our system that used any of these vocabularies to instead all use the LCGFT term. And there is a practical result of this work for people using our catalog: when someone searches for “auction catalogs,” they won’t see myriad different clusters of “Auction catalogs” based on which vocabulary a particular record has been assigned, but instead all the auctions catalogs will group under a single, unified term. You can see the results here—we've managed to group all 32,000 [and counting] of these records together.
(Left): Bonhams (Firm : 2001), Asian 20th Century and Contemporary Art (Hong Kong : Bonhams, [2014]); (Center): Bonhams (Firm : 2001), Islamic and Indian Art (London : Bonhams, [2016]); (Right): Bonhams (Firm : 2001), Prints & Multiples (San Francisco : Bonhams, [2015])
This attention to past cataloging practices has also opened our eyes to ways the language of the past is still very much present in our catalog today. This most dramatically came to light when, in March of 2016, the Library of Congress (LC) announced that it was replacing the heading “Illegal aliens” with two new headings: “Noncitizens” and “Unauthorized immigrants.” This sparked a political backlash from Republicans in Congress and the heading remains unchanged to this day. (There's a great documentary on the controversy, Change the Subject, which can be streamed for free here.) Library catalogs are riddled with such terms, and librarians across the country are proactively engaged in trying to change them, updating their catalog records to include more humanizing language. We have been doing the same, and have made the local decision to move away from the above LC subject heading and instead use “Undocumented immigrants.” We’ve made changes to several other offensive headings as well, and will continue to do so as more come to light.
These are just some of the things our database maintenance team has been up to over the last several months. If you’re looking for similar content about the evolving history of cataloging, check out my colleague (and database maintenance teammate) Tamara Fultz’s post, “The Path to Standardization at Thomas J. Watson Library.”
