Tag: authority control

FLASHback: Reimagining the Australian Extension to LCSH

Posted on by Alissa

Australian library catalogues speak American English. This has pissed me off for as long as I can remember (long before I started working in libraries). I want to do something about it.

Pink and grey Polaroid camera

Thing is, Australian librarians have wanted to do—and have done—something about this for decades. The venerable John Metcalfe thundered about the increasing use of American language, by way of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, in Australian libraries in the late 1960s (‘I have a rooted objection to consulting foreign language catalogues; my language is Australian English’)1. Successive groups of cataloguers and other interested librarians edited and produced two editions of the List of Australian Subject Headings, intended to supplement LCSH, in the 1980s (First Edition of the List of Australian Subject Headings, or FLASH) and early 1990s (Second Edition, or SLASH). Sadly, the ANBD Standards Committee resolved to move away from most of this work in 1998 with the impending move to Kinetica2; Ross Harvey lamented the decline of Australian subject access the following year3.

These days it’s fair to say the Americanisation of our public and academic library catalogues is not a priority for library managers. School libraries, of course, largely use the in-house SCIS thesaurus, designed by Australians for Australians, and certain special libraries such as AIATSIS, ACER and the federal Parliamentary Library maintain their own thesauri. But the publics and academics, where the vast majority of cataloguing is outsourced, cling to LCSH as their primary subject controlled vocabulary. I suspect it’s more out of apathy than loyalty.

Today the Australian extension to LCSH sits on a forgotten corner of the Trove website, quietly gathering dust, the content copy-pasted from the former Libraries Australia website. It has looked like this for at least a decade. Development policy? What development policy?! From experience, the only parts of the extension still in common use are the compound ethnic descriptors (Vietnamese Australians, Italian Australians, etc) and the ability to subdivide geographically directly by state (eg Ducks—Victoria—Geelong, rather than Ducks—Australia—Victoria—Geelong). These local terms are coded as LCSH (ie, 650 #0) even though they’re not.

I couldn’t understand why this crucial aspect of Australian bibliographic culture was (is) being completely ignored. I thought a lot last year about what a solution could look like. I was deeply torn between doing free work for the Americans—that is, pushing for an Australian SACO funnel, which would make contributing to LCSH easier and more accessible for Australian libraries4—and building local vocabulary infrastructure here at home to enable libraries to describe resources for Australian users in Australian English. Neither option is perfect, and each would require a fair bit of work and maintenance.

What swayed me towards the latter was remembering that an Australian SACO funnel wouldn’t actually solve the core issue as I see it: LCSH will always use American spellings and American words as preferred subject headings. It might include alternate spellings or words as ‘use for’ or non-preferred terms, but ultimately it will always call things ‘Railroads’ and ‘Airplanes’ and ‘Automobiles’ and ‘Turnpikes’. It will always be compiled for the primary benefit of the US Library of Congress. The status of LCSH as the de facto standard subject vocabulary for Anglophone libraries worldwide is a secondary consideration.

So I thought—what if we brought the FLASH back? What could a revived Australian extension to LCSH look like? I wanted to know where we got up to in the 1990s, how many uniquely Australian terms might be used today, whether it would be worth re-compiling these into a new supplementary vocabulary, and how to encode, host, maintain and govern such a vocabulary for maximum benefit and impact.

One week, fifty-one dollars and 177 scanned pages later, I had a PDF copy of the unpublished second edition of the List of Australian Subject Headings (SLASH) from 1993, thanks to the State Library of New South Wales (the only holding library) and a tip from ALIA. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the early nineties, a time I am too young to remember, with thesaurus terms reflecting Australian society, culture, politics, and bibliographic anxiety about particular Americanisms.

Analysing this document will be quite a task. I am fortunate to have institutional access to NVivo, a ‘qualitative data analysis computer software package’ (thanks Wikipedia) that researchers use for things like literature reviews and analysing interviews. I am not an academic, but I suppose I am now a researcher.

I’m currently tagging (what NVivo adorably calls ‘coding’) thesaurus entries by theme, where there is some overlap:

  • First Nations people and culture
  • Australian plants and animals
  • Australian English re-spellings of LCSH terms
  • Uniquely Australian terms and concepts not found in LCSH
  • Outdated or offensive terms
  • Interesting terms for further discussion (this category won’t be included in the final analysis)

First Nations terms would these days be drawn from the AIATSIS thesauri and AUSTLANG. Many terms for Australian nature and culture (such as ‘Mateship’) have since made their way into LCSH proper, and many offensive terms have recently been, or will shortly be, addressed by LC. I want to know what’s left over: how many terms, in which thematic areas, whether it’s worth exploring further. It’s entirely possible that after I’ve narrowed down the list to Australian concepts not yet in LCSH, and Australian spellings that will never be in LCSH, it might not be worth doing anything. I don’t know yet, and I’ve decided I’d like to find out.

So far I’ve only finished coding the As, but it’s a fascinating exercise. Some choices made in SLASH are still ahead of where LCSH is today, such as the reclamation of ‘Indians’ to refer to people from India5 (the SLASH term for Native Americans has, uh, not aged well). Other choices reflect divergences between Australian and American English that I suspect have since narrowed, such as preferring ‘Flats’ over ‘Apartments’.

Over the next few weeks or so I’ll hopefully code the rest of the SLASH headings and assemble a corpus of data to guide my next moves. I’d love to hear from anyone who likes the idea of a revived Australian extension to LCSH, even if they might not be so sure how their library could practically implement it. Catalogue and vocabulary maintenance is a lot easier now than it used to be (depending on your ILS—some exclusions apply!!) and I’m reasonably confident that we could make something cool happen. We’ll see what the data says…

  1. Metcalfe, J. (1969). Notes of a contribution by Mr. J. Metcalfe on LC Subject Cataloguing as Central Cataloguing Used in Australian Libraries. Seminar on the Use of Library of Congress Cataloguing in Australian Libraries, Adelaide. Cited in McKinlay, J. (1982). Australia, LCSH and FLASH. Library Resources & Technical Services, 26(2), 100–109. ↩
  2. Trainor, J. (1998). The future direction for Australian subject access. 45th Meeting of the ANBD Standards Committee. Retrieved January 12, 2023. ↩
  3. Harvey, R. (1999). Hens or chooks? Internationalisation of a distinctive Australian bibliographic organisation practice. Cataloguing Australia, 25(1/4), 244–260. ↩
  4. You don’t have to be a member of SACO to propose new or changed LCSH, but I understand that it helps—the form for non-SACO members is missing some crucial detail, such as the correct email address to send it to, and proposers are often not notified about the progress of their submissions. ↩
  5. For more on this heading, see Biswas, P. (2018). Rooted in the Past: Use of “East Indians” in Library of Congress Subject Headings. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 56(1), 1–18. ↩

Indigenous names in authority records: the case of Jandamarra

Posted on by Alissa

UPDATE (20 June 2018): This has now been addressed! I noticed a couple of days ago that the NLA have updated this authority record, such that it now follows the AIATSIS example, “Jandamarra, approximately 1870-1897.” (The Libraries Australia heading and Trove duplicate issue both remain, but I understand they are managed by different areas within NLA.) While I was not directly informed of the NLA’s decision to update Jandamarra’s authority record, I am thrilled that they have done so. Thank you, NLA cataloguers, for making this necessary change.

A selection of books about Jandamarra. (Picture courtesy AIATSIS)

It’s all well and good for librarians to talk about decolonisation, but we need to put our money where our mouths are. Cataloguers are no exception—we decide how resources are described and accessed. We dictate the effectiveness of a search strategy. We alone have the power to name.1

Being the sort of person who browses library catalogues for fun, I wound up on a NLA record for a play about Jandamarra, the Bunuba resistance fighter. Except the subject headings in this record didn’t name him at all. Instead they named some bloke called ‘Pigeon’.

100 0# $a Pigeon, $d -1897
400 #0 $a Jandamarra

Pigeon?!

Apparently ‘Pigeon’ was a name given to Jandamarra by a white pastoralist.2 The 15 books held by the NLA with this subject heading overwhelmingly refer to a man named Jandamarra. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography is under this name. The Canberra street named in his honour uses this name. Why doesn’t the NLA use this name?

The whole thing couldn’t be more colonial if it tried.3 A colonial institution (the library) referring to an Indigenous man by a colonial name (‘Pigeon’) and qualifying it with his year of death in a colonial calendar (1897). Jandamarra’s authority record represents his name and life as it was known to white people. How would the Bunuba describe him? Would they use the name ‘Jandamarra’ at all? What could a more culturally appropriate authority record look like? How might we disambiguate people without reference to colonial names, occupations or calendars?4

100 0# $a Jandamarra $c (Bunuba man)
400 #0 $a Pigeon, $d -1897

As a white cataloguer I firmly believe a change needs to be made. Such a change would have greater impact if it were also made in Libraries Australia, the national union catalogue (on which more later). The name ‘Pigeon’ is also used there, identically to its use in the NLA’s catalogue.

Let’s fix that

The issue then becomes: how might I make this change? More importantly, how might the community suggest a change? There is a way to suggest changes to name headings on the ANBD, but it’s very difficult to find—the Libraries Australia reftracker includes two options for ‘Propose a LCSH change’ and ‘Propose a new LCSH’ (where ‘LCSH’, apparently, includes all headings, name and subject alike). The form states that the info you provide goes straight to LC (that is, it’s not evaluated locally). It also immediately starts demanding my name, my NUC code, tells me to choose my 1XX heading, include 670 source citations, LC pattern or SCM memo, use for, broader term, related term??

I am a fluent MARC speaker and I know a 680 when I see one, but I have never dared fill out that form. I can’t see how an ordinary person would ever be able to suggest a formal change for Australian usage. Crowdsourcing initiatives like Violet Fox’s Cataloging Lab (which, for the record, I love), are necessarily US-centric and wouldn’t immediately address a local problem. Besides, the guidelines for establishing name authorities in the ANBD expressly state that Australian entities are exempt from the ‘let LC decide’ policy.

Besides, even if we were able to navigate the form and suggest a change, what would the change be? For guidance, I looked to AIATSIS’ catalogue. Sensibly, and in delightful accordance with RDA, they have opted to use 100 0# $a Jandamarra, $d approximately 1870-1897 as the preferred form. I figure if it’s good enough for AIATSIS, it’s good enough for me.

Wondering what other libraries used, I then looked at the Library of Congress’ NAF (Name Authority File) record. To my surprise, they used a different spelling:

100 0# $a Sandamarra, $d -1897
400 #0 $a Jandamarra, $d -1897
400 #0 $a Pigeon, $d -1897
400 #0 $a Tjandamara, $d -1897

This record was created in 1989 and revised in 2013. A search of both LC’s catalogue and WorldCat (via the Libraries Australia Z39.50 interface, in case that makes a difference) brought up no results with this spelling, so I couldn’t determine if a particular work was used as its basis. Usually these works would be recorded in a 670 field, but these had nothing.

It would not be beyond LC to update its heading to the more commonly-used spelling. Pleasingly, they have form in this area: in 2003, LC changed several dozen subject headings relating to $a Aboriginal Australians (or $a Australian aborigines, as they were then described) in consultation with the NLA.

What’s in Trove?

I then found myself browsing the Trove People and organisations zone, where authority records are given a new life as sources of biographical data. Like other parts of Trove, the P&O zone aggregates and incorporates data from a variety of sources. I was therefore surprised to find Jandamarra listed under this name, using data from AIATSIS and the Australian Dictionary of Biography; as established above, both sources used the most commonly-known spelling. Notably, this did not include data from Libraries Australia:

Record for Jandamarra within Trove’s People and organisations zone.

The great thing about Trove identity records is that they display the ‘Also known as’ data (or UFs, or non-preferred terms, or 4XX fields, or whatever). It’s really hard to get an ILS to display this info, especially in an easy-to-read format like Trove has done. I’m really pleased to see this data out in the open and not hidden down the back of the authority file sofa.

Now, what happens if I search the P&O zone for ‘Pigeon’?

Jandamarra appears twice, with a slightly different spelling

We see that Jandamarra (-1897) is the first result, but the fifth is for Jundumurra, Pigeon (?!), which features data from AIATSIS and Libraries Australia. (This particular LA record pulls its data from AIATSIS anyway, so strictly speaking this isn’t the NLA’s fault, but it’s still a dupe that LA and/or Trove would have to merge.)

Interestingly, the original authority record from the NLA (‘Pigeon’, remember him?) doesn’t appear to be represented in the P&I zone at all. I wonder if that was a conscious or unconscious decision?

For completeness, here’s the real AIATSIS name authority, which in my view is also the best one:

100 0# $a Jandamarra, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Jundamurra, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Sandamara, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Sandawara, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Tjandamara, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Tjangamarra, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Jandamura, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Pigeon, $d approximately 1870-1897
400 #0 $a Wonimarra, $d approximately 1870-1897

It turns out that Jandamarra has three (!) name authority records in Libraries Australia, one from the NLA and two from AIATSIS. Ordinarily I would consider this a major data integrity issue, and 100 10 $a Jundumurra, Pigeon is a bit of a problem, but for the moment I’m actually okay with the other two full-level records, because they help illustrate the differing approaches and mindsets from the two institutions. In time, I’d like to narrow that down, though.

Recommendations

In short, here’s what I would like to see happen so that Jandamarra is referred to by his rightful name in the ANBD, and in catalogues that use ANBD records:

1) Libraries Australia to modify their name authority record and establish the preferred form as $a Jandamarra, $d approximately 1870-1897, in accordance with that used by AIATSIS, and add non-preferred forms as appropriate. This change could then ripple across to the NLA’s catalogue, and other libraries that use Libraries Australia authorities would eventually follow suit. Maybe a little publicity around the change—after all, it’s being done for the right reasons.

2) Trove to merge the two identity records such that Jandamarra appears only once, that ‘Pigeon’ appears under the ‘Also known as’ list (so those who know him by that name are redirected accordingly), and that the sources of data encompass AIATSIS, Libraries Australia and the National Dictionary of Biography.

Such moves may seem small, but they would represent a sincere and concerted effort to decolonise the authority file. Cataloguers can, and should, restore the power to name to Indigenous communities, especially where colonial names have been used to describe Indigenous people and concepts. A name is not the cataloguer’s to take—it is the community’s to give.

  1. Olson, Hope A. (2001). The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(3), 639-668. doi: 10.1086/495624 ↩
  2. Pedersen, Howard (1990). Jandamarra (1870–1897), Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. http://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/jandamarra-8822/text15475 Accessed 20 May 2018. ↩
  3. For more on the cultural sensitivities around Indigenous subject headings, see Kam, D. V. (2007). Subject Headings for Aboriginals: The Power of Naming. Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society Of North America, 26(2), 18-22. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/adx.26.2.27949465 ↩
  4. See also Frank Exner, Little Bear’s excellent treatise on Native American names in the world’s authority files: Exner, Frank, Little Bear (2008). North American Indian Personal Names in National Bibliographies. In Radical Cataloging: Essays from the Front. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. ↩

Associate, collocate, disambiguate, infuriate

Posted on by Alissa

Regular followers of my twitter account will know that I regularly complain about uniform titles. I know that’s not an RDA-approved term, but I don’t currently have the luxury of a wholly RDA-approved catalogue, and time passes particularly slowly in the tech services department. It’s also the term currently used for the 130 and 240 MARC fields, a format to which we remain shackled, and in which someone will probably write my eulogy.

In my view, uniform titles are some of the most misunderstood and misused fields in cataloguing. I say this not to look down on those who remain baffled (for I was myself baffled right up until last week) but because they don’t really serve the purpose for which they were intended. I’ve seen so many records with uniform titles they didn’t need, inserted by cataloguers who were no doubt simply following someone’s rules.

According to the 2005 revision of AACR2, a uniform title had the following functions:

Uniform title. 1. The particular title by which a work is to be identified for cataloguing purposes. 2. The particular title used to distinguish the heading for a work from the heading for a different work. 3. A conventional collective title used to collocate publications of an author, composer, or corporate body containing several works or extracts, etc., from several works (e.g., complete works, several works in a particular literary or musical form).1

In other words: a cataloguer might choose, create, or otherwise determine a particular title to associate with a given work; to disambiguate from other works of the same name; and to collocate works with different names within a title index. It’s a form of authority control; titles and author/title combinations are often given authority records of their own. (Hence the tie-in to this month’s GLAM Blog Club theme, ‘control’.)

Association, disambiguation, collocation: that’s a lot to ask of one field, and I can grudgingly accept that most of it made sense within a book or card catalogue. Remember, this refers not to collocation of books on a shelf (that’s what classification schemes are for) but for collocation of entries within a catalogue. Until quite recently, a catalogue was simply a collection of indexes: title, author, subject. Librarians wanted these entries arranged in a particular order, and created filing rules to ensure this order was adhered to.

During the development of MARC in the 1960s (led by the incredible Henriette Avram), a format originally designed to automate the production of catalogue cards, the layout of a MARC record mirrored the layout of an AACR-compliant catalogue card.2 The first paragraph, mapped to the 1XX set of tags, included the main entry—an author, corporate body or meeting, but also uniform titles where the work in question had no author, but another, different, title proper. The second paragraph featured the title proper and edition statements, and were recorded in the 2XX set of tags. Because a uniform title could conceivably end up in multiple places on a catalogue card, depending on whether there was an author attached, the developers opted to create two fields.

(In the first example, it’s considered advantageous to have all the Bibles entered directly under title, collocated in the title index, then disambiguated by language, version, year [in that order]. In the second example, we already have an author, but the item in hand has a different title to that by which it is more commonly known.)

130 1# $a Bible. $l English. $s New Revised Standard. $f 2003 
245 14 The new interpreter's study Bible : $b New Revised Standard version 
       with the Apocrypha. 

-------------------

100 1# $a Xenophon $e author.
240 10 $a Hellenica. $l English.
245 12 $a A history of my times / $c Xenophon ; translated by Rex Warner.

Apropos of nothing, this also explains how the title statement, arguably the best-known MARC tag, was assigned the odd number 245:

To represent the second paragraph of the catalog card (title and edition), the MARC developers logically chose the 200 range of tag numbers. Because they had reached 130 in the first paragraph, and were trying to proceed by tens, the first choice for the title tag was 240. Continuing by tens, the 250 for edition and 260 for publication information were also defined. Law librarians, however, asked where the uniform filing title, which they used for filing, should be placed. Since uniform title preceded title proper on catalog cards, it seemed logical to maintain this arrangement in the MARC record, so the 240 was reassigned for uniform title, and the 245 tag (halfway between the filing title and the edition) was created for the title proper.3

Law librarians: warping MARC logic since 1965.

Anyway, back to titles. When I was learning to catalogue, I struggled with the reasoning behind uniform titles, as I had no concept of a title index to base them on. Never having used a card catalogue in my life, I saw no reason why anyone would use a browse function instead of a keyword search. (I stand by this view.) Even the idea of collocation doesn’t work in a keyword-based OPAC setting, because I can dive straight to the record I want, with no reason (or, indeed, ability) to view records on either side in any index. Viewing a list of records in browse mode is so… old-fashioned. (Besides, if there is no reason to do this, there is also no reason to create uniquely identifying main entry headings… (taps noggin))

The main cause of my frequent twitter complaints about uniform titles are the preponderance of unnecessary titles in our catalogue, specifically those relating to online resources. Because MARC-based catalogues entail a flat record structure, we can’t (yet) nest different expressions of a work, to use RDA parlance, within a work-level authority record. Instead we’re stuck with one record per manifestation, whose titles we have to disambiguate. Because so many resources exist in both print and online versions, and often a library has access to both, the obvious differentiating factor is whether it’s online or not. Therefore a resource might be titled: 130 1# $a Economist (Online) to distinguish it from the print version.

The problem is when cataloguers take this to mean that every online resource must be so titled, even when it has no print equivalent. This has the effect of 1) cluttering the catalogue with unnecessary uniform titles and 2) furthering the antiquated narrative that print resources are the norm, and online is the exception. There’s no point in creating 130 1# $a Digital humanities quarterly (Online) if it has only ever existed in an online format.

Associate, collocate, disambiguate, infuriate! (sigh)

Tell you what, I can’t wait for my wholly RDA-compliant, IFLA-LRM-based, fully FRBR-ised catalogue of the future (now with 25% more acronyms!). I look forward to being able to bring expressions together under a work-level authority, and have this tree display intuitively in an OPAC. I look forward to not having to use titles as disambiguators for indexing purposes. I look forward to relinquishing some of my control over the form and display of titles within a catalogue.4

I look forward to dispensing with uniform titles, for they have well and truly reached their use-by date.

  1. As reproduced in the RDA Toolkit, accessed 29 April 2018. ↩
  2. For more on this fascinating topic, see Jo Calk & Bob Persing (2000). From Catalog Card to MARC, The Serials Librarian, 38:3-4, 349-355. DOI: 10.1300/J123v38n03_20 ↩
  3. Ibid, p. 351. ↩
  4. For more on the history of uniform titles, see Jean Weihs & Lynne C. Howarth (2008). Uniform Titles From AACR to RDA, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 46:4, 362-384, DOI: 10.1080/01639370802322853 ↩