cataloger tools & reference questions

Meredith Hale, metadata librarian at the University of Tennessee, asked on ARLIS-L if anyone could provide an authoritative source for the birth and death dates of the photographer who signed his photos Wasow. She needed the information for rights clearance and authority record creation. She noted that there are several images on Wikimedia Commons, including this portrait of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin from 1924.

Spyros Koulouris, archivist at I Tatti in Florence, responded with the link to Wasow's record in the Deutsches National Bibliothek authority file. The DNB records, as well as those of the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Getty Union List of Artist Names and several dozen other organizations, can be searched together in the Virtual International Authority File or VIAF. This is a really useful tool in name authority work.

Reflecting on this exchange on ARLIS-L, I was reminded of a little reference question I helped a fellow graduate student with, way back going on fifty years ago (early 1970s). Caroline Boyle-Turner (then Caroline Rachlis) was studying the French symbolists and was trying to verify some book by one of them. Paul Gauguin, I think. It had been elusive and she mentioned it to me. I had done plenty of searching in the book catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale when I worked on the reclassification project at Cornell University. She told me the title and we went to look in the BN catalog. I don't remember the details of the book but she was very happy to find that the book did actually exist. Catalogers can be successful reference librarians. Cataloging tools can be good sources of information. Of course, the BN book catalog, which has been supplanted at least for newer items by an online version, was not just a cataloger's resource but it wasn't on Caroline's radar. Fast forward some fifteen years or more, Caroline and I were delighted to coincide at a reception at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

[my photo of the Van Gogh Museum from a later trip, 2016]

birth control and a living wage

So I read the headline "Lack of birth control deepens women's burden in Venezuela" on the front page of the Sunday New York Times and thought why aren't the men taking some responsibility here. (The online title varies from that of the print edition, as quoted.) Then I read the sentence that said a packet of condoms around Caracas costs $4.40 which is three times Venezuela's monthly minimum wage of $1.50. Birth control pills are more than twice the price of a pack of condoms.

(photograph by Meridith Kohut from the article)

LCSH, literary warrant, heading deprecation, today's news

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging held its semi-annual meeting last week. It would normally be held in conjunction with ALA Midwinter or Annual but was virtual again this time around. Judith Cannan, the head of the Policy, Training and Cooperative Programs Division at the Library of Congress, gave a very interesting thought piece called "Emerging thoughts on LCSH" (the link is to my notes on the meeting) which she cautioned was purposefully unpublished (not even lecture slides) but was to encourage thinking about the future of LCSH.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings originated in 1898 though I'm sure LC did subject access in their catalogs before that. It was maintained for LC and by LC. In the century and more since then, it has expanded far beyond LC and many other libraries contribute subject headings, most through the Subject Authority Coooperative Program or SACO.

Cannan's thoughts focused on four areas: the support of LCSH as an international standard is not sustainable with LC resources; the current model is built on literary warrant in published resources and a possible expansion to newspapers, TV, magazines as terminology sources; deprecation of terms which are outdated or offensive; and pre- or post-coordination of terms. How to handle deprecated terms has generally been handled by making a reference from the old term to the new term. There is significant effort going on with revision of headings as the U.S. and the whole world are dealing with systemic racism, social injustice, and other issues. The old terminology is important for some research and may appear in transcribed and descriptive portions of the bibliographic record. Much to think about and the chat box in the iCohere software was very busy.

I was listening to Weekend Edition as I drove to Wegmans for my Sunday morning fix: the Sunday New York Times and the week's groceries. One of the stories was "Newsrooms revisit past coverage as editors offer a fresh start" by David Folkenflik. One phrase he said really stood out in light of thinking about literary warrant from newspapers. He called news reporting "the first draft of history." This so lined up with Judith Cannan's thoughts on the role of history in how we catalog. One of our intentions is that our cataloging can be as objective as possible and therefore last, if not forever, a long time. But words cannot be objective. They are loaded with cultural significance and that changes over time.

armchair traveler: Venice to Palmanova to Sabbioneta

 Mom used to travel vicariously with me. Now, we all can just about only travel vicariously when it comes to European destinations. I was writing up my Venetian adventure as a Pandemic Escape for the Alfred Sun and couldn't remember the name of the artist who did the painting of the Ospedale Civile in Venice that is at Yale now.

Walter Richard Sickert

L'Ospedale Civile 

Yale Center for British Art, Mellon Collection

As I was thinking about Venice, I went to flying over the city and zooming in on Google Maps. I had meandered to the northeast and noticed a name -- Palmanova -- that seemed familiar and probably telling. I zoomed in and there was the 16th century fortified city. Designed by Antonio Scamozzi (but that leads to a different story).

Thinking about Renaissance planned cities led me to think about Sabbioneta, over in Lombardy, north of Parma, where Christie and I stopped in 2001. 

morality/ethics and land vehicles

From the Subject Headings Manual, memo H 1095:

$x Moral and ethical aspects (May Subd Geog) (H 1998) Use under individual land vehicles and type of land vehicles, individual wars, and non-religious or non-ethical topics for works that discuss moral and/or ethical questions regarding the topic.

I was stopped in my tracks by this a few minutes ago. The red text is new. Why the heck would you need to add that this free-floating subdivision was used under individual land vehicles and type of land vehicles if it's valid under most non-religious or non-ethical topics. I guess if you're religious and cultish about your land vehicles, there might be confusion about the non-religious aspect. Or maybe land vehicles don't have a pattern heading so you have to be specific about some free-floaters. Cataloging is fun but sometimes inscrutable.