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Will,
We have avoided the LCSH approach for the same reason you mentioned. We have a very large collection, relatively little extant subject cataloging, and I am the only person who both catalogs the art collection and has any experience using LCSH. I don’t have time to enter LCSH terms, and certainly the curators and registrars don’t have time for LCSH training. Our collection management system is also not set up to handle subject terms like a library OPAC. It’s just more efficient to enter keywords like “steel industry” and “Pittsburgh, PA” than to use the "Steel Industry--Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh” subject heading, and get basically the same results. The folksonomy approach could be helpful in our situation too, but it would be a long time before we could get such a project going.
Jana Hill Collection Database Coordinator Amon Carter Museum 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd. Fort Worth, Texas 76107 817-989-5173 817-989-5179 fax
All opinions are my own and not those of my employer.
-----Original Message-----
We are grappling with the question of subject headings at the moment, in several ways. We had not done any subject cataloguing until about 2 years ago, in a collaborative project involving a museum (ours), a digital library, an archive, and a history center. The partners decided to use library-style LCSH headings, as in "Steel Industry--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh." There was a fundamental difference of opinion among the partners regarding what the subject headings represent. Some (coming more out of a library/archives environment) seemed to think of the headings primarily as descriptive metadata about the images, embedded in their permanent records, while others (like us) thought of them primarily as a means of public access and therefore advocated a more liberal standard, including allowing subject headings of what the image is "about" as well as what the image is "of". On the website that resulted from the collaboration, the subject headings are indeed published within the individual records, along with other descriptive metadata like creator, title, date, etc. [It seems that publishing the subject headings online is more common in digital libraries than museums] Certainly the subject headings do provide a means of access to the images, to a point, but the headings were definitely created from the cataloguer's point-of-view, not the end user's. Thus an image depicting a person wearing a plaid suit would not have included "plaid" anywhere in the subject headings because this detail would not have risen to the cataloguer's idea of the image's main subjects. From the end user's point-of-view, however, someone could very well want to find this image by searching under the term "plaid." We are now engaged in another archives project ourselves, and the archivist responsible for the cataloguing has adopted the library-style LCSH approach established in the earlier collaborative project. This new project in particular would lend itself very well to the folksonomy approach, but my initial presentation of this idea has met, not unexpectedly, with resistance and skepticism. What seems to be hard to get accross is that this is not necessarily an either/or proposition. The cataloguer's LC standards can be met, if necessary, but end-user-friendly access terms can also be provided. But the mere fact that the folksonomy tags could become part of the image's database record seems quite disturbing to some. Soon we will be creating subject terms for the museum's online collections access. It is nearly unimaginable that we will ever get there if we have to hire trained cataloguers or curators to provide proper LC-style headings, and the resulting access to the images would not be nearly as rich as it might be if we use the folksonomy approach, so we are keen to try. A few questions: Does anyone have an opinion about the value, in the networked information world, of the hierarchical LC subject format I described above ("Steel Industry--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh.")? Are others using this format (and why) or are you using single terms, more like keywords? For those who have done social tagging projects, do the tags become part of a permanent collections database record of an object, or do they exist outside of that, as part of a strictly web-based implementation? William Real, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
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Title: mcn_mcn-l digest: November 22, 2005
