FRBR and slug identifiers

300460205 | expressions | multidisciplinary concepts, … Associated Concepts Facet

300460206 | manifestations | multidisciplinary concepts, … Associated Concepts Facet
300460207 | slug identifiers | identification numbers and codes, identifying artifacts, ... Objects Facet

These three terms were in this order in an email announcement of new records in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus. My first attraction was just to the word "slug" so close to two levels of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Then I looked at the slug identifiers record in AAT and now know what to call the "Strings derived from a title or identifier as used in the trailing part of a URL." So I guess it's more like a typesetter's slug than the mollusk.

(orange slug from Wikipedia page)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug

Endeavor and Voyager

NVIDIA's new campus, designed by Gensler, consists of a triangular and a hexagonal building. It is featured in an article in Metropolis that I'm indexing for Avery. The names of the buildings are Endeavor and Voyager. Call out to the library vendor Endeavor and its Voyager system?

funnels

For thirty years and a bit more, I have been involved with the Art NACO funnel of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. It enables us art catalogers to participate in authority control more fully than we might be able to do individually. I coordinate the efforts of a dozen or so art libraries that create or revise name records that are included in the LC/NAF international authority file. There's also an Art SACO funnel that allows us to propose subject headings to add to the Library of Congress Subject Headings file. So "funnels" has been a (good) trigger word for me for a long time.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email announcement from the SS United States Conservancy today that announced that the "second SS United States funnel [was] to be preserved." They use the word "funnel" to describe the smokestacks that were so prominent on the ship.

This illustration is a rendering of the proposed SS United States Museum and Visitor Experience designed by Thinc, LMN Architects, and Buro Happold. More information here.

separated at birth: WEMI

Functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) is a conceptual model of the bibliographic universe to describe entities, relationships, and attributes. The first group of entities are Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item (WEMI). A Work is intellectual or artistic creativity and it is realized in an Expression, which is embodied in a Manifestation and exemplified in an Item. This is easiest to wrap your head around with something like Hamlet. The story was created in the brain of William Shakespeare (or whoever). It was realized in something like The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke which was embodied in an edition printed in 1603 in London for N.L. and John Trundell and exemplified in the copy at the Huntington Library. Lots of print resources only come out in one edition and this is a heck of a lot of infrastructure for the library catalog to carry.

In the library cataloging rules such as Resource description and access, relationships and attributes are linked to particular levels. For example, the creator William Shakespeare is a relationship to the Work. If the Huntington copy has a later binding, this is a relationship to the Item. This all gets more complex for music and visual arts and other resources. There's a concise and helpful discussion of "FRBR, WEMI & music" on the website of Gilmore Library of Music at Yale.

Even more concise is a quotation from Michael Tilson Thomas in an article in last Sunday's Times. The quotation is from a 2017 interview. "I have encouraged people to color outside the lines for lack of a better analogy. We're not trying to reproduce the notation here. We're trying to get back to the inspiration that caused the notation to exist." It is not often that FRBR and WEMI are spoken of so aesthetically.

writing in space

Sometimes my indexing or cataloging takes me to places I really want to go or where I have very happily been. Sometimes it's a bit of both. I really enjoyed my trips to Milan in 2018, including a climb up to the roof of the Duomo. Hanging out with the gargoyles. My indexing a day or two ago included an article about eL Seed in Abitare. His work usually includes some Arabic calligraphy and the work above was on the plaza in front of the Duomo in Milan. He is Franco-Tunisian so I assumed his nom d'art was derived from something like al-Said. But no. One of the bits of biography that I found on the web described his love of El Cid as a child and his appropriation and respelling of that name.

I often check the Library of Congress Name Authority File when I encounter a new person and want to see if their record looks ok. I was amused to note that the record for eL Seed was done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art so I sent them a note of gratitude. William claimed it.

Thanks, William, and thank you, Bassam Makansi on Facebook, for the good picture of the calligraphy on the plaza. The picture from the roof of the Duomo is mine from 2018.

newest trend: architectural office name from tail of personal name?

Twice in the last couple days in my indexing, I have encountered an architectural firm that invented their name from latter portions of their personal names.

This is a project by Miogui Architecture, a collaboration of Sabine Fremiot and Léo Barestegui, in Le Havre, France.

This is a project by elaNández, founded by Manuela Fernández Langenegger, an architect based in Milan.

Naming is an art. Why not do it creatively?

Connecticuters in LCDGT

I am a bit skeptical about the value of the Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms vocabulary (LCDGT). While there are demographic terms like Nebraskans and Californians that are widely used to describe people from those places, some of the terms being proposed for the vocabulary seem like a stretch, for example, Albanians (New York State) for the residents of Albany, New York. And then I saw an article in today's New York Times about Connecticut doing a rebranding. The governor and others are worried that people see Connecticut as a somewhat boring waystation between New York City and Boston. The author of the article opines that residents do not even know what to call themselves. Are they Connecticuters? Connecticutians? Connecticutites? So I checked LCDGT and the preferred term is Connecticut residents. The LCDGT record has references from Connecticuters, Connecticotians, and Connecticutensians, as well as from Nutmeggers, from the state nickname, The Nutmeg State.

Photo taken in Albany, N.Y., by an Alfredian

separated at birth: BIG

VIA 57 West

New York City

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), architect

https://big.dk/

BIBFRAME Implementation Group (BIG)

photo above:

David.Clay.Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

separated at birth: goats and antiquities

The Ortlip Gallery at Houghton University currently has an exhibition of "Lithographs of the Holy Land and Egypt by David Roberts, Royal Academician." I know I recataloged a bunch of large portfolios, including like Roberts if not Roberts himself, when I was in the reclass section at Cornell between 1969 and 1971. Here's one of the lithographs that especially caught my eye in the exhibition.

"Goats at the entrance to the caves of Beni Hassan"

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864)

Part of the reason it really caught my eye is that we had seen sheep and goats at the ruins of Solunto. We heard their bells before we saw them. We were heading along the northern coast of Sicily, about to return our rental car and spend a last couple days in Palermo before heading to Rome and home.

We also have seen goats being used for grass and shrub control in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It's a fairly old park but not antique.

flâneurs are not slackers

Who knows why one's brain goes where it goes? I was reading about Claire Chase's season at Carnegie Hall and decided to check her LC authority record.  Flâneurs came to mind. Probably from Flute players to Flautists which files close to Flaneurs. I segued to wondering if Flâneuses were in the LCSH authority file. No Flâneuses in LCSH. I was horrified, however, to find a see-also reference between Flaneurs and Slackers. At least, all the possibly pejorative references are on Slackers.

150	__ |a Flaneurs
450	__ |a Saunterers
550	__ |w g |a Persons
550	__ |a Slackers
670	__ |a Work cat.: Kjellen, A. Flanören och hans storstadsvärld, 1985.
670	__ |a Web. 3.
670	__ |a Random House.
670	__ |a OED.
670	__ |a Amer. Heritage dict. of the Engl. lang., via WWW, June 13, 2005 |b (flâneur: An aimless idler; a loafer)
670	__ |a Cambridge dictionaries online, June 13, 2005 |b (flaneur: stroller; idler)
670	__ |a Merriam-Web. online dict., June 13, 2005 |b (flaneur: an idle man-about-town)
670	__ |a MSN Encarta dict., via WWW, June 13, 2005 |b (flâneur (plural flâneurs): idler: somebody who is idling or loafing about (literary))

150	__ |a Slackers
450	__ |a Bums (Lazy people)
450	__ |a Idlers (Persons)
450	__ |a Lazy people
450	__ |a Loafers (Persons)
450	__ |a Loungers (Persons)
550	__ |w g |a Persons
550	__ |a Flaneurs
670	__ |a Work cat.: 2005027230: Lutz, T. Doing nothing: a history of loungers, loafers, bums, and slackers in America, c2006.

speculative cataloging

According to the Summary of Decisions, Editorial Meeting 5, May 13, 2022, the Library of Congress vocabulary editors decided not to approve the LCGFT proposal for Speculative fiction.

The reasoning: Sources describing this genre convey a lack of consensus on the meaning of the term. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature provides several definitions for speculative fiction ranging from a specific subgenre of science fiction to a super category encompassing all fiction that departs from "reality". Because the usage is still in flux for this term and consensus has not been reached on its meaning, the term was not approved, but may be resubmitted at a future time when the boundaries of the genre are more concrete.

I very much enjoy that the reasoning matches the term. And while I'm speaking of science fiction (or, rather, they're speaking of science fiction), we went to the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once last night and it's quite amusing and strangely optimistic. It is very nice to be in Cambridge with the Kendall Square Cinema just down the street. It was, however, one of my first visits there where I wasn't ready to rush to each of the previewed movies.

clipping files

Every month, Architectural Record runs a "Guess the Architect" contest. The May issue came in today's mail and the building looked familiar but I couldn't place it. The architect was identified as being known for his interest in brick and the building's shape alludes to its location in a harbor city and its ownership by a shipping company. I googled around with various things and finally put in "hamburg" as a fairly wild guess, and there it was.

By Esther Westerveld from Haarlemmermeer, Nederland - Chilehaus - Hamburg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33420849

The Chilehaus was completed in 1924 and designed by Fritz Höger. His Wikipedia page is linked under his name. One of the sources of information is the newspaper clipping files in the 20th Century Press Archives at the ZBW, aka the German National Library of Economics. The clippings are digitized and easily zoom in and out. We've had lots of sessions and discussions about artist files in ARLIS/NA circles. We finally got Artist files into the LC controlled vocabularies, specifically LCGFT.

The artist files were a very important part of our library resources when I worked at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, in the early 1990s.

By the way, when you look at the Chilehaus in context with the assistance of the little yellow guy in Google, the prow of the building is considerably less pronounced.

Bonus picture, aerial view of Chilehaus:

By Foto: Martina Nolte, Lizenz: Creative Commons by-sa-3.0 de, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26568634

The Modern, Fort Worth

This fine building, housing the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, was across the street from the Amon Carter Museum when I worked there. The building then housed the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth which later moved to a Tadao Ando building not far away. This building was designed by O'Neil Ford & Associates and is connected to the Scott Theater designed by Herbert Bayer.

Today I got to try to disentangle the authority record for Arts Fort Worth which is the new name of the merged Fort Worth Community Arts Center and the Arts Council of Fort Worth. But, more importantly, I got to think about this wonderful building.

Now the Modern looks more like this.

I was quite disappointed when I first visited Fort Worth after this building was open. I approached it from Allen's house and what you were greeted by was the loading dock. Not very pedestrian friendly. It is Sunbelt U.S. of A. Oh, well, you also get loading dock when you approach the Art Institute of Chicago from Monroe Street, a little more disguised.

separated at birth: index / indexing

I was looking at the Times book announcements and reviews yesterday. One of the reviews was of Index, A history of the: a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age by Dennis Duncan (W.W. Norton). Just my kind of book. I love my indexing gig and the book is about books (&c) and the title is inverted like a subject heading string might be. It's got a pretty zippy cover.

When I think of indexes aesthetically, I generally wander over to the work of Alejandro Cesarco who was often on exhibit at Murray Guy, a favorite gallery on West 17th Street. He has done these wonderful pages of index entries where the indicated mentions may be interlocked though many stand alone. He has also done other book-related art and was matched with John Baldessari in the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. 

You can see more of Cesarco's work on his web page, linked under his name.

Wikidata communities of practice

At an LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session this afternoon, Christa Strickler mentioned that Atla (formerly known as the American Theological Library Association) was supporting a new Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice. We art folks have been having sessions of a similar sort for art metadata but have not called it a Community of Practice. I like the term. I googled to see if it was a common name for Wikidata communities of practice. I found the Wikidata page for community of practice. Why be a simple one of those when you can be, as they say in German: praxisbezogene Gemeinschaft von Personen, die informell miteinander verbunden sind und ähnlichen Aufgaben gegenüberstehen

just don't call it critical theory

Critical race theory is getting bashed these days so I don't want to say this post is about critical feminist theory. Nonetheless, I just listened to most of the keynote address by Lauren Klein at the 2021 LD4 Conference on Linked Data. I was thoroughly heartened by her statement that working to change a system is worth it if it has a long history and is widely used. This was said in the context of a question about whether it's worth it to fix outdated and offensive terminology in LCSH and other vocabularies or should you just start over. She applied her theoretical work based on intersectional feminism to say that we should topple the hierarchy, smash the binary, and embrace pluralism. Use LCSH, try to fix it, supplement it in the short term by other vocabulary. Both/and, not either/or.

armchair traveler: Edmunds, Washington/Maine

 

At today's virtual meeting of the VRA Cataloging & Metadata Standards Committee (CaMS), someone mentioned Story Maps software in connection with our discussion of coding the geographic coordinates of a building depicted in an image. I googled "story maps" after the meeting and went for a visit at the Library of Congress. I picked the Roadside America story map from photos by John Margolies who could easily be called the father of roadside Americana. Touring about the story map, I settled on various places I've visited. I clicked on the furthest east pin in far eastern Maine, near the bridge over to Campobello Island (New Brunswick) which I memorably visited with Christie. The pin led to the picture above and the metadata said the sign was located in Edmunds, Washington. Wrong side of the continental United States. My first thought was that the pin had slipped off the West Coast and ended up on the East Coast.

Appropriately enough, I ended up going into a rabbit hole to figure out why the pin got in the wrong place. Did the coordinates get entered wrong? But the coordinates were not in the LC bib record for the image. Then I zoomed into the part of Maine where the pin was stuck. Ah, Edmunds, Maine. The authorized heading for the town in Washington is Edmonds but there's a reference from Edmunds.

The image metadata indicated that the Harvey's Tavern sign was on Route 99. No Route 99 in that part of Maine but there it was in Washington. Got the little yellow man in Google Maps to take me on a tour of Route 99. There was the sign though it now says Harvey's Lounge. The picture of the rabbit appears to be the same. That stretch of Route 99 looks pretty busy nowadays.

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]

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.