Common Ground: A Mini-Institute

Common Ground: Standards for Cataloging Images and Objects

Session / Seminar / Workshop

Introductory Remarks for the Session, Seminar, and Workshop by Moderators

At the conference, the workshop was given first, followed by the session, and then the seminar.

Session Introduction:

Lynda White:

Welcome to the second part of the 3-part mini-institute on Common Ground: standards for cataloging images and objects. Than you for sharing your Friday evening with us. We hope we will make it worth your while to give up date night. Our sponsor this evening is Library Associates who specialize in staffing, recruiting, placement, and outsourcing for the information industry. We thank them for their generous support of this program.

Back in the late 1980's, image collections began in earnest to automate the slide labeling process. Many collections did just that: transferred the production of labels from the typewriter to the computer. It was, nonetheless, a laborious process requiring that the curator learn to program using off-the-shelf database programs (do you remember dBase?)-none of which was intended for the complicated records necessary to provide access to the content of images. The database, plus the time and effort, were more than many of us could afford. For those of us who were already cataloging images, in addition to simply labeling them, the prospect of having to program in some obscure computer language, in order to build an online catalog, was daunting. There were many categories of information that would need to be set up-more categories and intricacy than labels required. It was easier to continue to have students type cards sets. It was not so relatively easy as it is today when one can set up tables and VRA Core field names using Filemaker Pro or MS Access and, voila, you have a relational database in a standard framework.

Concurrently, in the mid to late '80s, more and more book libraries abandoned their card catalogs, instead providing access to the content of their collections on giant online public access catalogs or OPACs. Many of us are familiar with this sometimes painful transition from paper to digital. But for those VR curators lucky enough to be near one of these monsters, they provided a ready-made answer to the dilemma of easily providing access to the complex content of images-without having to program your own database. If you could tap into your library's OPAC it was both free and very, very powerful in terms of searching and storage capability. It also provided a pipeline to OCLC or RLIN. If one's dream was to have a national database for images like these utilities have for books, then contributing image records to OCLC directly was certainly a good first step.

However, MARC records were required. And therein lies the rub. At my collection at the Fine Arts Library of the University of Virginia, we figured out a perfectly good way to map data for images of architecture into MARC records-one of many ways to do it. Although MARC lacked the hierarchical structure we needed to catalog an entire building or complex, the strictures of AACR2 proved more dismaying. The point was to provide access to the content of the image. Partly because we refused to have our copy photographer listed as the main entry for all of our slides, rather than the architect of the building depicted, we were unable to contribute records to OCLC. Our records were considered "non-standard." This was truly disappointing. That grand national database of image records would have to wait.

By the early '90s, a group of VR curators began developing a new set of standards for cataloging images, sometimes based on bibliographic concepts like a core record or linking data like the 77x fields, but tailored to the types of information needed to describe cultural objects. The VRA Data Standards Committee has worked diligently for a decade, bringing ideas and concerns from the academic world, the library world, and the museum world, trying to devise something that will work for all of us. While we were originally dealing with slides, the world of digital images came crashing upon us begging to be included. What we would like to talk about here today, and at the accompanying seminar on Monday afternoon, is these issues of whether and how book cataloging standards can be used to describe and provide access to the content of images in all of their formats.

Linda McRae:

And so, you may indeed be asking yourself, "what does common ground have to do with it? Because of the joint nature of this conference, and because we know that libraries and visual resources collections are beginning to share common technologies and common approaches to making their materials accessible, particularly on the web, we wanted to explore those areas that bibliographic and visual resources cataloging might have in common-our common ground.

We know that the mini-institute will appeal to visual resources catalogers, but we think that many of our art library colleagues may also be interested because they may be finding that their libraries are beginning to develop virtual collections-online collections of archival materials, cultural objects, photography of flora and fauna local to the region, lantern slides, postcards, maps, geologic data, and other unique collections of non-text materials that need metadata and descriptive documentation that is either unique to the collection or unique to a particular discipline-collections that need more in depth description than what can be provided with simple EAD finding aids.

Over the last decade, as image curators were looking with some longing at the bibliographic community's ability to create standard records and share them through OCLC and RLIN, the bibliographic community was facing some new and daunting challenges of its own, namely how do we fit into an HTML world and what do we do with all this new, virtual media on the internet?

While art image curators and bibliographic catalogers were looking across this vast divide, those invisible virtual forces were actually pulling us together. Once the technology became powerful enough to capture, store, and disseminate information in all its forms from text to image to music to video, it was inevitable that all those types of media would find their way into that virtual space where everything's digital and nothing's "in hand." The old argument that a book is not a work of art (or an image of a work of art), and that the differences are so great that comparisons are useless is based upon a time when the physicality of the object set the cataloging limits as in Lynda's example where if you used AACR2's rules, the creator is the person who photographed the slide not the person who made the art depicted in the slide. But in a digital world art librarians and visual resources curators are beginning to ask new questions, questions whose answers they can share.

And so, we asked ourselves, are there common tools we can share and common principles we can adapt? Is it possible that some of the principles guiding bibliographic description in an analog world could be adapted to the organization of other types of media in a digital environment? In those instances where old tools are not extensible, can we build new tools and interfaces that will help us to bridge that gap?

Our speakers today will explain why current Internet access to art information is hampered by a lack of descriptive standards. They will take a fresh look at existing standards and principles used in the bibliographic community and consider how they might be extended to include the description of art objects and their visual surrogates. And they will describe newly developed and developing tools and concepts that can act as intermediaries whether they provide a link among various vocabularies, map between metadata, or create a whole new structure for organizing information.

Seminar Introduction:

Welcome everyone to the final part of the three-part mini institute on image cataloging standards. We hope that some of you were able to get into the workshop or to attend the session on Friday. The Friday session took the approach that bibliographic tools and principles could act as a foundation on which to build additional standards that could be used in the description of art objects and images.

Today, we are going to take a somewhat different approach and examine those issues that require more than a simple adaptation of bibliographic rules. These are issues unique to art objects, cultural artifacts, and built works-those objects that must be described and documented by words that are generally derived from sources beyond the object itself. Some of these issues require subjective decision making that can't be quantified. Other issues touch upon a level of complexity that could be resolved in a variety of ways. And most difficult of all, are those issues resulting from the very uniqueness of a one-of-a-kind art object. Every one of these issues poses questions for which there are no easy answers.

Nonetheless, if we are to attempt a modicum of standardization, we can't shy away from hard questions. We are very fortunate today to have a distinguished group of speakers known for their insightful writings and presentations whose combined years of cataloging experience would amount to at least a century of documenting the cultural object.

I wish that each of our speakers had more than the ten minutes they have been allotted but this is a seminar and we want give you the audience a chance to participate. So to insure that we give equal time to everyone and still have time left over for questions, we will keep our introductions short and save about a half an hour at the end for audience questions.

Workshop Introduction:

Welcome to the Workshop -- Common Ground: Building a CORE database structure - the first and most practical part of the Common Ground series consisting of a workshop, a session, and a seminar on cataloging standards for cultural objects and their images. As a forum for cataloging issues, the mini-institute will cover many topics that will be further developed in the Guide to Good Practice. This afternoon we begin with a workshop designed as a practicum, a practical application of principles and standards that will be expanded upon in the Common Ground Session, this evening at 7:00 in room --- and in the Common Ground Seminar on Monday at 4:00 in room --. It is our hope that everyone here will be able to attend the seminar and the session.

What does "common ground" have to do with it you may be asking? Because of the joint nature of this conference, and because we know that libraries and visual resources collections are beginning to share common technologies and common approaches to making their materials accessible, particularly on the web, we wanted to explore those areas that bibliographic and visual resources cataloging might have in common-our common ground.

We asked ourselves, are there common tools we can share and common principles we can adapt? The Common Ground session reviews bibliographic tools and resources to see how they might be used for and/or adapted to image/object cataloging. While the Common Ground seminar will examine those issues that require more than a simple adaptation of bibliographic rules-- issues unique to the description of cultural objects.

This afternoon, we begin the mini-institute with a workshop that will demonstrate a collaborative project between Smith College and Brown University that builds on similar projects at Yale and Harvard; a project that incorporates the CORE categories, hierarchical linking, and controlled vocabularies in a database that uses a commercial software package-Filemaker Pro for the data-entry and back-end utilities and a commercial presentation tool-Luna Insight for the front end, and for image presentation. Your workshop leaders need no introduction as they are the VRA president and president elect, Ann Whiteside, Head of the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library, at the University of Virginia, and, Elisa Lanzi, the Director of Image Collections at Smith College.