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piece called "Emerging thoughts on LCSH" (the link is to my notes on the meeting) which she cautioned was purposefully unpublished (not even lecture slides) but was to encourage thinking about the future of LCSH.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resources and a possible expansion to newspapers, TV, magazines as terminology sources; deprecation of terms which are outdated or offensive; and pre- or post-coordination of terms.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.

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.

boundaries in a time of coronavirus

This month's Tentative List of LC Subject Heading proposals includes a proposal for:

Boundaries (Psychology)

The author of the proposal (an LC cataloger) found six occurrences of the use of Boundaries--Psychological aspects in the LC catalog. Since the scope note makes it clear that Boundaries in LCSH is used for borders between countries, states, etc., those six occurrences would be more relevant for books about being distraught about immigration or border wall issues. The work in question for which the new subject heading is being proposed is entitled Setting boundaries will set you free. These days, setting boundaries might also keep you for catching COVID-19.

Be well, all.

what did we use to say?

I was looking at the January 2020 issue of Art in America which is a theme issue on "Generative art: the history and future of creative machines." I wasn't familiar with the term in art and started investigating. The "Generative art" article in Wikipedia is quite mature and traces the history of the term in the arts back to the 1960s. A keyword search in the Library of Congress catalog yielded about 100 hits and about a dozen of them seemed to be relevant, that is, the phrase "generative art" appeared in the title/subtitle. I looked at some of the records and several had the subject heading "Computer art" along with other headings.

The Wikipedia article starts "Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist." It's a little like social practice with a machine. You give it a situation and it proceeds as it can. Wikipedia also compared it with algorithmic art ("algorithmically determined computer generated work") but generative art doesn't need to be based in an algorithm, I guess.

It definitely seemed like it was time to work on a subject proposal for LCSH. I checked the Art & Architecture Thesaurus and they have a record for generative art. The scope note defines it as "electronic art that incorporates process in the creation of the work. The work itself is usually experienced through time and space, and may include sound, motion, animated graphics, sculptural elements, or any combination of these. Generative art has a performative aspect. For visual art that incorporates algorithms to produce static visual works, use 'algorithmic art.'"

And then the word "generative" started leaping into my life: right, left, and center. Not as part of "generative art" but, for example, to describe the origin of an idea. Sam and I talked around it after an artist talk a couple weeks ago. I was at the College Art conference last week and heard at least a half dozen speakers include the word generative in their paper. I was reading the January 24th New York Times after I got home and this sentence appeared in a review of a book entitled The longing for less by Kyle Chayka: "More generative for him are the examples of artists who became known as Minimalists even as they disavowed the term." What word would have been used a while ago? Not generative, I don't think. Maybe I'm just noticing a word that's been out there all along. Whatever, it's good to have an expanding vocabulary.

President Buchanan

How could I have forgotten official residences when I started using Pinterest a while ago? It goes way back: Judith Holliday was collecting library postcards and I loved finding her exotic (mostly not vintage) cards of libraries as I traveled about. She said I needed a category and I wanted something architectural and picked official residences. I quickly had plenty of postcards of the White House and the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg. I had spent much of my childhood in official residences; my dad was a pastor and we lived in the parsonage. What I mean by official residence is the domicile that comes with a position. I've got postcards of jailer's houses, parsonages, college president's houses, governor's mansions, palaces, and other types. I don't think I have a maid's room or the Downton Abbey lower level, but they'd fit. I include the houses of U.S. presidents other than the White House since many of the presidents used them during their term in a semi-official (or totally official) way. Besides, they're often nice houses.

Yesterday's New York Times had an article about "The other presidents' houses: lesser-known homes can have their own rewards" by Robert Strauss.

This is Wheatland, the Federal-style house of President James Buchanan, in Lancaster, Pa. The picture is by Will Figg for the Times and accompanies the article. Buchanan bought the estate in 1848 (before he became president, 1857-1861) and lived there until he died in 1868. He was the only bachelor president and has been rumored to have been bisexual or homosexual.

Just before the Civil War, Buchanan was upset that Lancaster residents weren't renting rooms to Franklin & Marshall College students when there weren't enough rooms on campus. So he rented out some rooms and got the neighbors upset. My mind, naturally, meandered to the pleasure of having some young men, presumably most of the students were men, around the house. Probably nothing in it since Buchanan was in the White House and they are only rumors but still ...

By the way, the lacuna of "Official residences" in LCSH was remedied about a dozen years ago when I proposed it as a new subject heading. The narrower term is "Parsonages."

learning about sidewalls

We visited the newly reopened Cooper-Hewitt Museum when I was in New York City for a couple days between Christmas and New Year's. I kept seeing the term "sidewalls" and was unfamiliar with the term for what looked to me like wallpaper. Checking the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, I discovered that AAT uses the term "fill papers" for "Wallpapers used to cover the main portions of walls between borders." "Sidewalls" is one of the alternate terms. Who knew? Saying "wallpaper" is just way too ambiguous.

This is an Aesthetic or Japanesque-Style wall paper, ca. 1880, from the Cooper-Hewitt collection.

all things pencil

When I was at the Amon Carter, archivist Paula Stewart and I loved exchanging pencils from our travels. She had picked up the habit from the photography department where she worked before her years as archivist. My pencil-philia extends to sharpeners, erasers, pens, and other related objects. Even art ....

Vija Celmins

Pencil, 1966

(on view at Brooklyn Museum)

or cartoons ....

Hankin, in The New Yorker, May 27, 2014

And of course everything relates back to cataloging. When I was checking for the title of the Vija Celmins work which I saw at the Brooklyn Museum several years ago, I happened on an article that also included her Flying Fortress. Wouldn't you know that yesterday I submitted a SACO proposal for "Fighter planes in art" for the Erik van der Weijde book I was doing for MoMA.

framing the site

As an library cataloger, I try to put things in pigeon-holes or categories to enable the library user to find our resources. Today's Bergren Forum was presented by Chase Angier who teaches dance at Alfred University. Her talk centered around "Shifting Landscapes: Framing Site Specific Performance." She spoke about guided performance, walking site performance, and immersive frame performance, and would have talked about other things she's working on if they'd given her another hour to talk.

The first work Chase talked about -- "Under the Benign Sky" (Texas Woman's University) -- was done in the atrium of a building. Chase said the empty rectangular space with balconies said Spanish soap operas and romance to her. I thought it looked like a prison. Hmm.

So, pigeon-holing: cataloging and vocabulary control help you find things in a catalog or on the web (more with the former) because we try to avoid unnecessary synonyms and try to use the same form for names of persons and organizations. I wrote the Library of Congress some years ago when they started using "Site-specific installations (Art)" in addition to "Installations (Art)." It seemed to me that the former was not significantly enough different from the latter to make it valuable. That is, all installations are inherently site-specific though some have been reinstalled and look very different. My example at that moment was "Deep Purple" by Tom Burr which was shown in the below-street-level well in front of the Whitney in 2002-2003 but had earlier been shown on the lawn of a German museum. It looked very different against concrete than it did on a lawn. But it was still the same work and it was still installed.

LC's response to my query was to add scope notes:
Installations (Art): Here are entered works on a type of art form in which an entire exhibition space is transformed into a three-dimensional work of art by the arrangement of objects and materials within the space.
Site-specific installations (Art): Here are entered works on art installations created for a specific site that use elements of the site as an integral part of the work of art and are intended to be displayed and viewed only at that site.
LCSH also includes Film ..., Multimedia ..., Sound ..., and Video installations (Art).

Of course, installation is also what happens all the time in museums, that is, a painting or sculpture is placed in a certain way in a gallery. Even an old-master painting will look different, depending on its neighboring works, lighting, gallery style, etc. LCSH has "Museum techniques" and "Museum exhibits" to cover that kind of thing.

At the end of Chase's talk, she talked about how framing was critical. It's true and I'm still thinking about the role of framing in visual art installations. The line between visual and performance art is, of course, blurry. Chase also talked about the ways you can control or cede control of the audience. As she talked about the sound and speed, I was thinking about some of the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller pieces I've seen that have a timed soundtrack. I don't think there was a chance to pause them but I may be misremembering. Very much controlled experiences in space and time ... though the "Pandemonium" exhibition at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was not temporally controlled except by the open hours of the museum.

The picture is from Chase's website (linked under her name) and is from the work "Framing Edgewood Farm."

conceptual art and subject headings

SACO can be fun and also frustrating. I submitted a proposal for a new subject heading "Grandparents in art" based on Gia Michael's My bitter immortal, her BFA final project in the School of Art and Design at Alfred. The colophon states that "All images for this publication were collected by the artist while traveling in Lebanon and Syria, December 2009 through February 2010." The Editorial Meeting rejected the proposal because "The work cataloged does not depict grandparents in art, but consists of pictures of the places through which the photographer's maternal grandparents passed." But it's the CONCEPT of grandparents and it's art.

But as I was having those thoughts, I remembered a discussion with Lynn El-Hoshy, LC subject specialist now retired, about "Cellphones in art." She was right in that case: it was "Cellphone calls in art," not "Cellphones in art." I was very glad we had the discussion because it clarified for me that, in LCSH, "in art" is literal. That is, the topic is shown in the art, it's pictures of or text about that topic as it appears in art.

But but conceptual art, naturally, doesn't come in literal packages. I still think it's grandparents in art but the LCSH editors indicated that it was just wrong. Sometimes they suggest that something is misdirected and can be revised and resubmitted. I guess I'll just have to publish a picture book of my grandparents. Then, I can resubmit the proposal and, meanwhile, I haven't changed it on the bibliographic record yet.

carpenter italianate

We drove through Mt. Vision, New York on the way home from the family gathering at the KOA campground in Herkimer. Mt. Vision is along Route 205 on the western side of Otsego Lake, near Cooperstown. I noticed three houses that looked like siblings as we passed through the village. Each was a tripartite Italianate house with six windows on the front. The center section sticks out a foot or so in front of the rest of the facade, making a simple but lovely and classic composition. Perhaps I'd had too rich a diet of Palladianism at Hyde Hall in Glimmerglass State Park, also on Otsego Lake.

The Italianate detailing was fairly light in these houses: flat roof, simple bracketing under roofline, balanced fenestration, no columned porch. I think of my house in Alfred as carpenter Italianate. It was built by my great-great-grandfather, Martin W. Babcock, and my great-grandfather, Alpheus Burdick Kenyon. They may have used a plan book but mostly it's a cube with sheds appended out back: big cube, little cube, littler cube. The front side is basically tripartite though the porch lightens the verticality and the door is on the side rather than central as in the Mt. Vision houses. Nonetheless, they seemed to be carpenter Italianate like my house, just the work of someone building houses in a small town in the years after the American Civil War.

An added treat was a fancier version on the southern edge of town. The scale was slightly bigger but it still didn't have the porch in the example at the top of this entry. All four of the houses had closed louvers on the upper middle window. And, then, as we drove out of town, there was another bigger one. Its roof had been augmented by a hip roof: practical in snow country but it rather ruins the Italianate feel. I saw quite a few Italianate buildings with such augmented roofs as we drove around central New York State.

Since I wasn't in the driver's seat and we were anxious to get home, I didn't request that we turn around and go back so I could take pictures. The house illustrated above, found by googling "italianate houses" for images, is the Coite-Hubbard House (1856) which I thought gave an idea of the houses in Mt. Vision. The picture comes from Historic Buildings of Connecticut where it is described as: The building which now serves as Wesleyan’s President's House was originally built in 1856 for Gabriel Coite, who became a state senator in 1860 and moved to Hartford in 1862, when he became the State Treasurer. In 1863, his Italianate house on High Street in Middletown was sold to Mrs. Jane Miles Hubbard, the widow of Samuel Hubbard, who had been a US Postmaster General. Wesleyan University acquired the Coite-Hubbard House from her heirs in 1904 to become the new President's House, replacing the first building used for that purpose. [It amuses me that this example is an official residence since that is one of my postcard categories. When Judith Holliday was collecting libraries, I decided I needed a building type to collect and picked official residences. I also did an LCSH subject proposal for "Official residences" which was accepted by LC. They improved it by adding a see-also reference: See also |i subdivision |a Dwellings |i under classes of government or other officials, e.g. |a Governors--Dwellings.]

Sunday with the NY Times

My plane left from LaGuardia at 9 a.m. so I was out of the house at about 6 to take the subway and M60 bus. It was snowing beautifully in the City which meant that our plane took off somewhat late but we got to Denver only a little late. I bought a New York Times on the way to the subway and probably had the most glorious reading of the paper in a long time. Captive to the cabin, I just read and read the paper, without any of the distractions of normal life.

The quotation of the day, taken here totally out of context, was "You need subjects, and they're hard to get." For us catalogers, the word "subjects" is laden with meaning. One is very glad that getting new subject headings (in LCSH land) is not so hard as it used to be.

The magazine has a portfolio of photos by Nadav Kander of people who have been selected for various posts by Obama. Great photos too of Washington sites. As we taxied out to the runway, the top of a construction scaffolding over on Riker's Island looked rather like the Lincoln Memorial. I'm sure it was the suggestibility of all of the Obama and Washington stuff I was reading but it was a nice illusion (delusion).

In the review of Jeff Madick's The case for big government by Matt Bai, he mentioned that Obama is the first Northern Democrat elected president since JFK. Bai also quotes Reagan and Clinton about the end of big government but then describes the current financial and automobile industry troubles and one realizes how the lack of solid government regulation is so much a part of the collapse of those two bubbles. How anybody could have thought that big bonuses and big cars were sustainable models is beyond me (or Bai).

And now I'm in Boulder, the day promises sunshine and warmth (supposed to get up to 60 today). Elaine and I will probably go for a drive in the mountains ... in their older Mercedes diesel sedan.

Florida Highwaymen

The most recent SACOLIST report on LCSH additions had a note about the proposal for "Florida Highwaymen (Group of artists)." I don't think I'd heard about them so I checked it out. It refers to a group of African American artists, mostly men, who traveled about selling their paintings from the trunks of their cars. The paintings are somewhat evocative of Hudson River School paintings and/or the seaside views of someone like Martin Johnson Heade. Or perhaps a garish combination. The image above, from the floridahighwaymen.com site, makes a wonderful backdrop for my computer at work. The men used this approach to selling their work because they were not likely to get gallery shows and a black guy couldn't just go around with a stack of paintings. Many of them were trained artists but these trunk sales were a way they were able to get their paintings sold, a way available to them as black Americans. (They probably didn't make as much as Damien Hirst made in his Sotheby's auctions.)

But what about the subject heading proposal? It was refused as a subject heading with the caveat that they could be established as a corporate name. The old NAF/SAF debate. It seems to me that since a critic invented the name, and even though some of the surviving Highwaymen use the name, that it's more like a movement (subject heading) than a corporate body (name).

social art

Last week, Steve and social tagging of art works -- http://steve.museum
Today, crowdsourcing at Apex Art -- http://www.apexart.org

I have been intrigued for some time about the intersection of expert cataloging and social tagging. I've been hearing about Steve at least since the VRA conference this spring in Baltimore. There was a workshop/seminar on the project last week at the Guggenheim. I have now arranged for Michael Jenkins to talk to NYTSL in November. Several of my NYTSL colleagues have expressed strong interest in the topic. http://nytsl.org

This morning, I went to get a ticket for the 9:25 p.m. showing of "Shortbus" at Sunshine and then meandered into SoHo and Tribeca to do a bit of art before coming to Bobst. Both Participant and Canada were closed, probably open at noon. It's frustrating for us gallery goers to have Saturdays such a late, and thereby short, day. Over to Church Street and Apex Art. The card for the new show had been compelling -- simple drawings of animals. The show is curated by Andrea Grover and is called "Phantom captain: art and crowdsourcing." The brochure for the show quotes Jeff Howe from the June 2006 Wired Magazine wherein he "introduced the term crowdsourcing ... to describe a new form of corporate outsourcing to largely amateur pools of volunteer labor that 'create content, solve problems, and even do corporate R & D'." Examples such as EBay where users stock the marketplace and Amazon where users provide the reviews that sell more books. Sounds like social tagging wherein we use untrained catalogers to supply the words that might supply the inroad to a resource.

In a conversation with one of my cataloging colleagues (Diana Greene) last week, we skirted around the value of longterm, constructed subject headings and the sometimes slangy way we describe certain concepts, e.g., Cointelpro, black feminism, coalition building. Sometimes the way we speak of a concept, say "peace activist," conflicts with the way it is dealt with in LCSH. "Peace activist" is a reference from "Pacifist." Diana's concern is that pacifists needn't be peace activists (witness the current writer), and peace activists needn't be pacifists. And LCSH uses "... movements" for groups of activists, e.g., Student movements, Civil rights movements, Antislavery movements.