description

• is the art exhibition catalog a special type of publication, and should it be treated as such? - include dates and exhibition in title paragraph for expediency - avoiding “1 v. (unpaged)” though LC practice followed by most libraries - ARLIS/NA working on core and suggests including information like listing of artists and exhibition venue(s)
• LCRI calls for just “ill.” if the illustrative matter is expectable from title, etc. - not considered adequate by some art and architecture libraries
• artists books - be flexible

access

• artist as author, artist as subject - AACR2R 21.17 calls for entry under artist when there is no text or when the author of text is not given on the chief source - some art libraries try to only give main or added entry to artist when he or she has actually been involved in the production of the item (resulting in many more title main entries) - LC/standard practice leads to main AND subject access for the majority of items, leading to need to search for both in the catalog
• vertical files for small exhibition notices, etc. - classification of museum vertical files in early N numbers at MFA Houston
• InDoMat (invisible domain) and core record for collections
• “school of” headings - $j approved by MARBI
• NAF/SAF - currently, buildings and ancient sites are entered in Subject Authority File; named works of art in Name Authority File - ARLIS/NA working on proposal for buildings in NAF - LC uses current name for place
• AAT - in theory and practice - mixing vocabularies & access gateways
• subdivision order in LCSH - moving toward --topical--geographic--chronological--form - art subject headings have been contrary, but LC has proposed regularizing - currently, basic art forms like Art, Painting, Sculpture do not use --History in combination with geographic subdivision

classification

• NH vs. TR - LC class TR is mainly technical, alternate NH is mainly art - either needs additional classes or adjustment for the other aspect - TR140 used by some libraries for all items on individual photographers
• class by artist or by media, etc. - LC classes by media - some art libraries want to keep everything by an artist together - artist is “easy” access point in catalog - browsing in the stacks or call-number browse - some special schemes: National Gallery’s N44, Yale’s NJ18, UC Santa Barbara's AEC, Whitney’s primary medium
• A4 - LC class N uses table N6 for division under cutter-number artists, and overuses A4 for all exhibition catalogs

visual resources

• cataloging the work vs. the surrogate - Categories for the description of works of art, VRA Core, slide labels, metadata (descriptive, technical, administrative) - digital environment
• finding aid and database for item-level access to collections - MARC solution in 774 (initially RLIN 789 for Avery project of architectural drawings)

Documentation on many of these issues may be found on http://artcataloging.net.

Sherman Clarke
sherman.clarke@gmail.com

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N.B. This outline of issues in art cataloging was first prepared for a class in Joy Kestenbaum's course in art librarianship at Queens College, July 2000. It has evolved since.