Colleagues:
Fair warning: this is a pretty long message. I've just finished reading both of Layna White's articles on cataloging of museum objects and Maria Oldal's article on alternate vocabularies in the most recent Art Documentation and I wanted to thank them and the Art Doc editors for providing them for us. Layna's article on EAD and Maria's on alternative vocabularies are full of helpful web citations. They are well-written and really interesting to me. I think that as automated catalogs have become commonplace in museum, library, and archive collections and as those catalogs go online on the web, librarians, museum collection managers, and archivists face similar issues. In a nutshell: although (in libraries--and somewhat less so in museums) we have developed standard vocabularies and standard metadata structures, the capabilties and internal searching strategies of our software systems are still quite different from each other--and this is in large part due to economic disparities between institutions. Yet there are obviously important specialized collections in some of the smaller art museums and art libraries and access to their collections would benefit us all. (A related issue is that there are still a lot of libraries that cannot pay to access cataloging utilities such as OCLC or RLIN--or think they can't. This latter issue may be more one of perception than reality. I have no experience with RLIN or any other utility besides OCLC, but OCLC's cost structure is complex and it is difficult for librarians in small libraries, who don't have a lot of time to do the necessary research, to do the cost-benefit analysis.)
As Layna White points out, museums are only beginning to come to grips with the issue of consistency of vocabularies for searching for objects across more than one collection. Although research libraries have adopted standards (generally the Library of Congress Subject Headings) for their library catalogs, they are also struggling more now with issues of consistency as more library catalogs come online and special libraries that have been using non-standard vocabularies are facing the fact that without adequate cross-referencing structures, their specialized vocabularies can cause additional confusion to the user. I have had to face this problem with the alternate subject headings I used in the Craft & Folk Art Museum catalog (where I was the librarian) when it was integrated with that of the L.A. County Museum of Art Library (where I work now). At CAFAM my catalog software was not sophisticated enough to include authority files (which include the cross-references) so in the LACMA catalog you will find works on ceramic art listed under both "Pottery" (the LC standard) and "Ceramic art" (the CAFAM choice). To make matters worse, there is a cross-reference in LC's "Pottery" authority record (which has been downloaded into the LACMA catalog) from "Ceramic art" to "Pottery." This is only one of many alternative CAFAM terms I am now having to reckon with, going through all the CAFAM records and, in most cases, changing them to conform to LC or making sure that each record includes at least one LC term. As I go about changing my "Native North Americans" back to "Indians of North America" and "Craft" back to "Handicraft," this seems like a retrograde process, but I had to come to grips with the fact that patrons were more likely to find the records they wanted if subject headings were entered consistently, albeit with terminology that may be inappropriate.
In our online world, searchers have to be ever more aware that catalogs are not consistent--even within the same library or museum catalog--and that cross-referencing structures may not be adequate. CAFAM's records are not the only ones in the LACMA catalog that are not consistent. Over time, even within the same catalog, inconsistencies arise. And when LC makes changes to its subject headings (e.g., Afro American was recently changed to African American and Handicapped to Disabled) it is not always practical for catalogers to go through the whole catalog and make those changes retrospectively to all of a library's records. Because a subject heading may have many subheadings, arranged in different ways depending on the particular record, the "global change" computer function is of only limited usefulness. Nevertheless, some catalogers are making the effort in some cases.
Maria Oldal's article on alternative vocabularies in the same issue of Art Doc is a very good (and hopeful) overview. As she clearly points out, in spite of the above problems of consistency, alternative vocabularies are being used more often, rather than less. As someone who has dealt with hundreds of problematic terms in the fields of craft and folk art, this makes me happy. But the fact is that our software systems still do not adequately compensate. Keyword searching is a tremendous help, but if the words you are looking for do not exist somewhere in a record, a keyword search will not find it.
I think that most serious researchers know that in order to locate everything they want, they have to be persistent and enter many different kinds of searches for the same thing, but many casual users (and even librarians who are not catalogers or museum staff who are not collections managers) don't fully grasp this concept and give up in confusion. I don't have an answer for this other than good, consistent, reality-based instruction to users of our catalogs. Some web search engines now provide "cross-walks" and transparent cross-referencing of which the searcher may not even be aware. I believe that this kind of function may already be available in the more recent versions of larger catalog software systems. But it will be a very long time, perhaps never, before it is available to smaller libraries. And yet, even small library catalogs are now available on the web as the cost of some very basic systems becomes affordable.
In doing a survey recently of small art museum libraries, I became aware that many librarians who also function as catalogers in small libraries (with small budgets) are using their ability to access online catalogs for free as an alternative to paying to belong to a cataloging utility such as OCLC or RLIN. Since these librarians are not, in many cases, experienced catalogers--and sometimes they do not have access to standard cataloging tools either in print or online--they are sometimes unknowingly copying records into their catalogs that are non-standard. I want to believe that in the long run more access is better, even if flawed, and I hope--and believe--that technology will eventually resolve these glitches in our brave new world. In the meantime, for makers and users of library and museum catalogs, as with "buyers" everywhere: caveat emptor!
Joan M. Benedetti
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