ARLIS/NA 43rd Annual Conference

Speakers:

A Controlled Vocabulary to Support Art Documentation — Vánia Mara Alves Lima, Department of Library Science and Documentation, School of Communication and Arts, University of São Paulo
Ivani Di Grazia Costa, Library and Documentation Center Coordinator, São Paulo Museum of Art 

Cracking the Moche Code: Expanding Access to a Scholarly Photographic Archive — Shalimar Fojas White, Manager, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Moderator:
Tamara Lee Fultz, Associate Museum Librarian, Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Controlled vocabularies have been utilized in the library world for so long that it is hard to envision a need for new vocabularies. From the Library of Congress vocabularies, to ALA’s RBMS thesauri, and to the Getty vocabularies, it may seem that every topic under the sun is covered. But that can only be a myopic view in the global digital world: if we want true interoperability for our systems in order to share our data on the Semantic Web, then vocabularies must consider all the world’s languages and their inherent complexities.

The speakers in this session will address how their institutions are dealing with issues of language within their vocabularies: such as how to develop methodologies for describing art in a language other than English and how to describe collections of non-Western art when the iconographic terminology does not exist in English. 

The São Paulo Art Museum and the University of São Paulo are working together to develop a methodology to update, improve, and manage a controlled vocabulary for art information. Representatives Vánia Mara Alves Lima and Ivani Di Grazia Costa will discuss the effort to define terms and establish categories along with the future steps necessary to establish conceptual relationships.

The Christopher Donnan and Donna McClelland Moche Archive visually documents the art and iconography of the Moche people of ancient Peru. Shalimar Fojas White will discuss the issues faced by Dumbarton Oaks in expanding access to a scholarly archive for non-specialist audiences. A particular challenge is the archive’s unique subject classification scheme.