LCCN, January 28, 2014
ISSN 2324-6464 The Olympic Games from a Cataloger's Perspective By Melanie Polutta, Librarian Cataloger The Olympics. Every two years now, the world sends athletes to one town in the world, and they compete to decide the best of the best. It's something I enjoy watching: not just the beautiful grace of the ice skaters or acrobatics of the gymnasts, but the fierce speed of the downhill skier, the insane speed of the skeleton racer, the power of the divers, or the intensity of the high jumper. In my position at the Library of Congress, I'm not paid to watch the Olympics, but I am paid to catalog them. So how in the world is a name authority record established for the Olympics? Well, first of all, we have to start with the answer to a question: what is the actual name of the Olympics? Just in case you didn't know, "Olympics" is actually the shorthand term for the more official name of the event: the Olympic Games. (http://www.olympic.org/ancient-olympic-games?tab=history) So when the name authority record is established (http://lccn.loc.gov/n94004448), it uses that name as the authorized access point. Why English? Well, because the official languages of the Olympics are English and French, and English is the official language of cataloging here at the Library of Congress. When choosing between the two, we choose English. However, reflecting the international nature of the games, the name authority record also contains 78 variations on that name in many different languages and different scripts, not just English and French. We want to make sure you can find the authorized form of the name of the Games! Oh, but wait! You may recall that in 1994 the Olympics split into the Summer and Winter Olympics. Well, the names reflect that. The older of the two headings, the Olympic Games, is meant for the Olympic Games overall, and for the Summer Games specifically. The Olympic Winter Games has its own authority record (http://lccn.loc.gov/n2006026303), with its own complement of variant names in multiple languages, but not quite as many as the original record. You may wonder why the basic name of the Games began to refer to the Summer Games and the Winter Games acquired a more specific name. I don't know. And this is one of the important things about cataloging that is important to remember: we don't have to always know the answers to questions that arise as we investigate a heading. It can be helpful, and satisfying to our curiosity, but it is not always necessary to know. We just have to reflect the usage we find in the resources we catalog. Apparently those resources consistently referred to the Winter Games as the Olympic Winter Games, and the Summer Games got the more general heading, Olympic Games. Of course, that is not perfectly consistent in usage, but we reflect the most commonly known form of the name as the top choice. Everything else is a variation. (Here's a personal guess for why it happened that way. I wonder if it is because the original Games -- both the ancient ones and the restarted ones in 1896 -- were strictly a summer phenomenon. The Winter Games didn't start until 1924. But that is strictly a guess on my part, and if someone else knows the answer, I would be fascinated to find out.) So, we have a name authority record for the Olympic Games and the Olympic Winter Games. But that leads to two situations for which these two names alone are insufficient: what if the access point I need is specific to only one occurrence of the Games? Or what if I want to talk about the Games in general? Well, there are solutions to those problems. When I want to be specific, I take the basic authorized name and add extra details to make it unique. Those details include the number -- this year is the 22nd Olympiad in winter -- the year -- obviously for this Olympiad it will be 2014 -- and the place -- Sochi, Russia, that won the honor of hosting for this year. So the authorized name in library catalogs for this year's Olympiad is: Olympic Winter Games (22nd : 2014 : Sochi, Russia) (http://lccn.loc.gov/n2009042303). So now, library users, you will know precisely what name to use when you go to the library catalog to find out anything about the Sochi Olympics that your library owns. (Which, at the moment, is probably nothing. But eventually . I always like the highlights videos.) Now for the other side of that coin, what if I want to talk about the Olympic Games as a general concept over the centuries? Well, when that happens, it is a subject, and we use the subject authority file, which is different from the name authority file. In that file, the name for the Olympics as a concept is, well: Olympics (http://lccn.loc.gov/sh85094647). The subject authority file uses a different set of criteria to establish a name, so it stuck with the simpler name, both because that is how people refer to it, and because that distinguishes the heading from the name authority record. But the subject file did follow the example of the name file in one way: the general Olympics subject heading is for both the Olympics in all its variety, as well as for the more specific Summer Olympics, while the Winter Olympics get its own, more specific, subject authority record (http://lccn.loc.gov/sh85147037). Do we really need all those access points in the library catalog? How many resources do we have that actually use all these names? One quick search in the Library of Congress catalog of all resources with the word Olympics in the subject area produces 1,763 entries. How about in the name area? Well, that produces a considerably smaller 154 records, but that is actually quite a lot! It includes books, periodicals, sound recordings, videos, and maps, with dates from 1972 to 2012. Do you want to see art or hear music inspired by the Games? Or perhaps you might be interested in reading the official report on the Seoul Games - in Korean? Or maybe you would be fascinated by the bid submission of Salt Lake City, Utah? I think I might be more interested in an official history of the Olympics (http://lccn.loc.gov/2008425378). There's always something new to learn! _____ At end of posting: Disclaimer: This message does not represent official Library of Congress communications. Links to external Internet sites on Library of Congress Web pages do not constitute the Library's endorsement of the content of their Web sites or of their policies or products. Please read our Standard Disclaimer. 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