Sherman Clarke of NYU posted his review of the year in art cataloging to ARLIS/NA as a discussion starter for next week’ s conference in Atlanta. Hope some of you find it interesting as well. Be sure to check out his art cataloging website. The link is: http://artcataloging.net.
Review of the year in art cataloging:
prepared for Cataloging Problems Discussion Group,
ARLIS/NA Annual Conference, Atlanta, Ga., 2007
Opacs, interfaces, social tagging
* The Cleveland Museum of Art is a charter member of PRIMO, the new interface being developed by Ex Libris. http://primo.exlibris-usa.com/content8.html
* Ann Arbor District Library has a social tagging feature that requires a library card (available only to residents) for participation. But (!) they do have a cute visual feature that allows you to scribble on catalog card images. http://aadl.org/catalog For some history of how they came up with it, go to http://www.blyberg.net/2006/01/19/creating-a-virtual-card-catalog
RLG/OCLC combination
* RLG has announced that RLIN21 will be retired on August 31, 2007. Details about the transition may be found at http://www.oclc.org/community/rlg/default.htm with the transition master schedule at http://www.oclc.org/community/rlg/rlg_master_schedule_external.pdf Several Art NACO libraries have already made the transition to OCLC, joining the two libraries (School of Visual Arts and Heard Museum) that were not RLIN21 users. Bibliographic records are being loaded from RLIN and the number of new master records in OCLC is higher than I would have expected. Details about the status of contributions may be found at http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=21039
* Connexion client version 2.0 is targeted for a June release. It will include the availability of institution records and the generation of authority records from local bib records using Z39.50. Availability of earlier versions of authority records has been available since November 2006.
* Because OCLC has master bibliographic records, they can revise the master record by such things as adding MeSH to a record that has only LCSH, changing names when an authority record is updated, or adding summaries and contents. When a personal name is only a $a, the controlling software does not insert the new name in order to avoid replacing an undifferentiated name that is for a different person (per Becky Dean message to PCCLIST on 8 November 2006).
Descriptive cataloging
* The Cataloging Advisory Committee has been working on guidelines for cataloging exhibition publications for many years (perhaps forever). It has been decided to release it in sections. The section on title is now available at http://www.stanford.edu/~kteel/cac/exhtitles.pdf
* The “MARC record recommendations for artist files” document has been revised by the group coordinated by Jon Evans of the MFA Houston. Watch ARLIS-L or other lists for news on its release.
* “cco” is now an established code in the MARC list of descriptive conventions. http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/reladesc.html
* Sol LeWitt died recently. His NACO record was updated to include the death date. The form of his surname “Lewitt” did not represent the common usage including that in ULAN and Grove Art. I requested that LC re-revise the heading to capitalize the W. If you are updating a heading, please think about the whole heading. While I would still be conservative about revisions, take the opportunity if it’s knocking. See next item.
* LC has issued a draft RI which will lessen the reliance on compatibility which has been in effect since AACR2 was implemented but was most strongly felt in the first couple years of building authority records in AACR2. The comment period ended April 23rd. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/AACR2-d.pdf
* Ann Jones of the McNay asked how folks indicate that their museum’s artwork is discussed or reproduced in books. An informal poll at the NYC Catalogers Discussion Group revealed that some do not do it at all, the Morgan and others give notes (and rely on keyword searching to find particular artworks), and others do notes with added entries. Ann replied that she will probably follow the last course.
* There was a round of list discussion on whether unique artist books were published. To read the e-conversation, go to http://forums.nyu.edu and enter “arlis-cpdg” in the box. You can “visit” the list without subscribing.
* For those of you that were frustrated by the “Bodin” example in LCRI 26.1, it got fixed in the latest round of revision even though that revision had nothing to do with Eugène Boudin. I can now sleep at night.
* LCRI 24.4B and 26.1 to allow the use of qualifiers as additions to initialisms and acronyms when there is a conflict between a 4XX and a 1XX.
* Is it a series of exhibitions or a series of publications? Several museums publish “Currents.” I have just heard from Lynda Bunting that they don’t consider “MOCA focus” a series, and they treat it as an added title. The series is funded by a particular nine-exhibition grant from the Irvine Foundation. NAF has series records for both “Focus series (Los Angeles, Calif.)” and “MOCA focus” which do seem to represent two MOCA campaigns of publication and/or exhibition.
* LCRI 2.5C2 says “In records created by other agencies or libraries, generally accept the information already in the record unless it is obviously wrong.”
* Followup on LC series decision: Gary Strawn ran some numbers in the Northwestern database and found that 42% of series appeared only once and 16% more only appeared twice. (message on PCCLIST, 14 November 2006)
Subject cataloging
* “Art fairs” has now passed the test and become a full LCSH term. Thanks to Angela Sidman for continuing the tradition of compiling the list of new and revised LCSH from the weekly lists and sending it to ARLIS-L.
* The NAF/SAF & buildings struggle continues. My least favorite recent example is “Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site (New York, N.Y.)” with a reference from “Lower East Side Tenement Museum (New York, N.Y. : Building).”
* “Indigenous art” has been established and is related in scope notes to “Art, Primitive” and “Ethnic art.” Reminder: “primitive” is not used as an adjective in LCSH when referring to the art of a particular place, only to the overall concept.
* In the notes from the LCSH editorial meeting on Valentine’s Day, LC said they had rejected “Cathedrals, Medieval” and “Church buildings, Medieval” because chronological terms should not be applied to building type terms, only to style terms such as Architecture, Medieval. Reports from the LCSH editorial meeting can be very informative. If you want to subscribe, go to http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/saco/sacolist.html or you can read the 2007 reports at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/saco/cpsoed/cpsoeditorial.html For example, you could have learned about the January 10th rejection of “Spectacular, The, in architecture.”
* These are a few of my favorite things: Unperfekthaus (Essen, Germany) sh2006004386; Cellular telephones in art (new proposal).
Authorities & NACO/SACO
* The second world-wide review of the Functional requirements for authority data is now underway. The review is coordinated by the Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR) of IFLA and the deadline for comments is 15 July 2007. CC:DA is establishing a review task force. I have volunteered to collect responses from my VRa colleagues. http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/wg-franar.htm
* Reminder: if you’re updating the form of name on a name heading (for example, adding a death date), you should also update the form of name on related name/title headings.
* The authority records for Picard Audap … were combined into one for “PIASA” per general agreement among the auction catalogers.
* The recent authority record for Ed McGowin has the full panoply of references for the twelve personas he adopted over 35 years. no2007012812 = McGowin, Ed, 1938-
* A CJK NACO funnel has been established. It is coordinated by Shuyong Jiang at UIUC. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco/CJK.html
* The revised LCRI 25.13 for “Manuscripts and manuscript groups” was issued in fall 2006.
* There is now a web proposal form for LC classification numbers. It is available from within ClassWeb. When proposing a new cutter, you should give both the proposed alpha and numeric portions of the cutter (in spite of SCM F50 which says to give only the alpha portion).
* Subfield $u has been implemented for 670 in authority records. Generally speaking, light use of the subfield is recommended. There was a list discussion on PCCLIST in September 2006, starting with Hugh Taylor’s study of non-linking URLs. He found a few typos, some URLs in parenthesis, and use of $a or $b for URL rather than $u. In my opinion, an explanatory description such as “Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art WWW home page” is more helpful than “http://nelson-atkins.org” but Steve Shadle noted that the old URL can be used in the Internet Archive and can help find when a corporate body (or its serial) changed names.
Getty vocabularies
* The Getty vocabularies — AAT, TGN, ULAN — are now included in the OCLC Terminologies service though the documentation at http://www.oclc.org/terminologies/default.htm doesn’t yet reflect the recent addition.
* Information about downloading records is available at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/download.html. This came up in an e-conversation with Liz O’Keefe, Murtha Baca, and Patricia Harpring on direct vs inverted order of names. On the contribution form for ULAN, there is an LC checkbox but “yes” means only the name portion, not the full authorized heading. For more on that, see FRAD.
Miscellaneous
* Various ALA, VRA, and other reports are available at http://artcataloging.net
* After many years of discussing the need or not of a separate cataloging list, one was established after the Banff conference. If you would like to subscribe, go to http://forums.nyu.edu and enter “arlis-cpdg” in the box. Or send your email address to elizabeth.lilker@nyu.edu
* The LC suite of training courses in cataloging and related areas has been expanded to include 1) Metadata Standards and Applications, and 2) Metadata and Digital Library Development. http://www.loc.gov/cds/training.html
* Shared cataloging efforts are taking off in the VR arena. There was a preliminary VRA-L list discussion last fall and a session at the VRA conference in March. A new webspace is being created as a records commons. Because it’s starting now instead of 25 years ago, it can take advantage of clustering, folksonomies, and other recent developments.
N.B. I hope you have enjoyed this romp through the year and found it informative. For many items, I do have a printout of a message or record that might give you more information. If you would like to see such supporting documentation, do not hesitate to ask.
Compiled by Sherman Clarke
sherman.clarke@nyu.edu
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http://artcataloging.net