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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