Trevor
It's easy to see why you don't understand these guys - they haven't
explained!

The process is theoretically simple. When you create a catalogue entry what
is happening is that you are capturing what you know about the item in
question and putting it in a structured form. (It doesn't matter if it's a
book, a manuscript or a museum object because though the detail changes the
principle holds good) This description should be good enough to let an
enquirer decide if s/he wants to refer to the actual item or that it is
irrelevant to his/ her enquiry. So when you have a number of these entries
assembled into a catalogue, your enquirer has in one place a convenient tool
for selecting items of interest which may be physically distributed over a
wide area - or locked away!

Such a catalogue is perfectly valid without any kind of subject information
(just descriptions) but once it gets to any size questions start to arise as
to how it should be arranged: an accession number sequence may be fine for
staff who know the collection but unhelpful to anyone else. So you need to
assign retrieval keys - hooks if you like so that when people go fishing
they get something relevant. These keys are not part of the description but
rather the cataloguer saying "I think this item will be of interest to
people looking for...".

Translate this into the computer domain and very quickly you are drawn into
the world of set theory and Boolean operators for once you move into the
situation where someone is searching the net for information the origin of
the information - whether a library, archive or museum - fades into the
background and first and foremost people want to have "information about
cups" and only later will they decide whether books about cups are more or
less relevant than collections of the actual objects. So when you apply
retrieval keys you are actually declaring affinities not describing the
object so it follows that a jar has something in common with other jars,
that Audley End House has something in common with other country houses but
not that there are other Audley End Houses.

What really muddies the water is that computers make everything searchable
so you can get by without worrying too much about what goes where. And of
course they routinely do string searches/ truncate so that a search for cup
will also find cups....


Roy McKeown
Manager
Petrie Project

tel. 020 7679 2395
e-mail [log in to unmask]
http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk



-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
Trevor Reynolds
Sent: 16 May 2002 2:48 pm
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Some thoughts on why I don't always understand librarians and
archivists


For a long time I have wondered why there are sometimes communications
problems between those documenting collections in Libraries & Archives and
those documenting collections in Museums.

Having been to an Access to Archives (A2A) meeting, largely filled with
archivists, and a Collection Description Focus meeting (mainly librarians)
in recent weeks, I think I have now reached some conclusions.

There are two areas of confusion (well at least two).

The first is essentially that in Libraries and Archives the process of
documentation involves the creation of "Access points" or "finding aids" for
documents which already exist. This is essentially a secondary activity.  In
museums and the heritage world, documentation involves the creation of new,
original, documents which describe objects or sites (e.g. a catalogue
record). These records are not themselves finding aids or access points,
even though they may tell you the physical location of the object.

It is this issue which leads to the difference of opinion over the use
plural and singular forms.  When creating (or reading) a record about an
artefact it makes no sense to describe one jar as "jars" or one house as
"houses". In the same way if you were writing a book about Audley End House
you would not give it the title "Audley End Houses".

However when searching, you are looking for books about houses, or records
of jars (even if some of those books and records are only about one
occurrence).

The second area relates to "subjects".  Most objects don't have an inherent
subject, the "object name" is not equivalent to "subject".  For example a
cup is not about cups. This becomes even clearer when you look at those
objects which do have a subject. The subject of a book called "Audley End
House" is not books but country houses.  However a catalogue record does
have a subject, a record describing a jar is about jars not records.

A collection of objects can have a subject but this is not often derived
directly from the constituent object names, for example the collection of
objects at Brodsworth Hall is about "Life in a Victorian country house" not
curtains, spoons and paintings.

Exhibitions also have subjects, and indeed a curator may use the same object
(e.g. a flint) in several exhibitions (e.g. "building construction", "making
a plate", and "geology of Norfolk").



Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage
Room G01, 23 Savile Row, London, W1S 2ET, UK
tel: +44 (0)20 7973 3482 fax: +44 (0)20 7973 3001 (GTN  3503 3482)

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