Videos of papers from the CILIP Metadata & Discovery Group conference held earlier in September are available on YouTube. One of the papers is on "The reclassification of non-Western art at UCL Library" by Thomas Meehan.

CILIP is the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, the principal professional library association in the U.K.

Meehan discusses the Garside classification that they use for art at the University College of London Library. M is the letter for modern art and there are numbers for a dozen or so countries (MF for France, MG for German-speaking countries) and then MX is for everything else, e.g., Africa, Brazil, Latin America, Nigeria, Norway. He and his cataloging and art specialist colleagues developed numbers for the individual countries and continents and added further breakdown for special artists. They used various capabilities of Alma along with Excel and MarcEdit to create class numbers for the 1800 books in the MX portion of the scheme.

I found it interesting even though the Garside scheme is unique to UCL. The issues are not unique however. Meehan admits that subject cataloging issues like "Illegal aliens" present more complications.

Once you get to this video, you can go on to other videos from the CILIP MDG conference by following YouTube prompts.

Sherman Clarke

Alfred, NY