SAC13-MID/10

Art Libraries Society of North America

Report to the Subject Analysis Committee

ALA Midwinter, 2013, Seattle

Conventional collective title (CCT): artist monographs and exhibition catalogs

The Cataloging Advisory Committee recently held an online meeting about CCTs for our normal materials such as artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. We have been seeing CCTs (formerly known as uniform titles) on RDA records in OCLC. We are concerned that they are ambiguous and ubiquitous which probably means that they are not helpful and do not therefore support FRBR user tasks.

Part of our discussion revolved around whether the artist of an illustrated artist monograph has an author or subject relationship to the monograph. We would expect the "normal" user of such a monograph to use the illustrations as support for the textual discussion. Still, the illustrations are BY the artist and would it therefore make sense to have an added author entry or a subject heading like: Matisse, Henri,  1869-1954. Works. Selections -- Reproductions. This is not a new discussion: we have long added both an author and subject entry to these works; it's the use of a conventional collective title that is new.

We expect to propose a policy statement to PCC and LC PSD that would add these categories to the exceptions in LCPS 25.1. We are working on an explanatory footnote.  Three examples of authority records appear at the end of this report.

Headings for buildings

As the chapters for subject are not written for RDA, it is uncertain what will happen with headings for buildings after the implementation of RDA for authorities on 31 March 2013. After much discussion on the SAC subcommittee on these headings, we have reached a stable environment wherein most buildings that share a name with an institution are established in LC/NAF and buildings that are merely structures are established in SAF. If one of the latter buildings is needed as an author heading, an exception in the list of ambiguous headings in DCM Z1 allows the establishment of that building in LC/NAF with a 667 about using the Subject headings manual. I assume, in the near term, that this instruction will be tweaked for RDA.

The RDA subcommittee of SAC is beginning to look at subject relationships to works. This may bring back 5XX fields in authority records in order to expedite subject analysis of works, expressions, and manifestations. Some art catalogers were sore distressed when broader term 5XXs disappeared from name authority records for institutions such as museums and churches.

Form/genre terms for art

Though there was some interest in (or at least no objection to) working on the art terms that "fell" out of the work of the SAC genre/form subcommittee, we have not done anything about it yet. We do look to the work of the general committee which has "Catalogs" on its plate, a term of much interest to art catalogers.

Examples of authority records with conventional collective titles:

N.B. The Parker example is particularly troubling since the postcard aspect is related to the publication, not to Parker's output of watercolors.

Submitted by Sherman Clarke

freelance and itinerant art cataloger

Alfred, New York

sherman.clarke@gmail.com