artists as authors, according to current cataloging practices

Karen Bouchard asked in a recent ARLIS-L message for recommendations of artist's manuals or other writings by contemporaries of Hokusai, the Japanese printmaker who lived from 1760-1849. She is frustrated by current and long-standing cataloging practice. "It's so hard to look up works *written* by artists, since LC puts artists as authors of books even when they are actually subjects of the books."

This has been the common American library practice the whole time I've been cataloging art publications, since 1969 using several generations of cataloging rules (ALA, AACR, Chapter 6, AACR2, RDA) and a variety of institutional policies. The artist as author reflects the illustrative material in the resource, that is, the artist being discussed is the creator of the works illustrated. If you were cataloging any of those illustrations individually, I don't think the artist as author would seem inappropriate. In the context of the monograph however, the illustrations are acting to support the text which generally doesn't include the words of the artist.

Some art libraries have had policies to never include an author entry for an artist unless the resource actually included his or her words. This kind of policy was much easier to do before the wide availability of copy and before multi-institutional consortial arrangements with shared cataloging policies.

The current and recent members of the ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee have had many discussions on the RDA Conventional Collective Title, especially its usefulness on monographs with considerable text as well as significant illustrative material. A uniform title like "Paintings. Selections" under an artist for your standard monograph or exhibition catalog just doesn't seem helpful, especially in a search and discovery environment which privileges word searching.

Current RDA cataloging also has values for the content, media, and carrier. Common values for a printed monograph would be "text" for content, "unmediated" for media, and "volume" for carrier. Some (probably most but not me) also code "still image" for content. These values can be used for narrowing a search. If I want to find a book about paintings by an artist, I can't imagine limiting my search to "still images" because I'd expect that to retrieve reproductions.