Repository #1 (museum): The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Locating photos on the museum’s website: narrative of website navigation
I
started looking for photos by clicking on the Collections link in the menu
running across the top of The Met’s homepage, but, counter intuitively, the
Collections pulldown menu doesn’t list the museum’s collections or its
departments. The options I had within this pulldown menu were to Browse
Highlights (photos included would be the ones The Met thinks are important,
which may not satisfy the user); Search the Collections (which brings up 24,644
records for the search term “photographs”); Galleries, which got me, in effect,
to the museum department headings with a list of numbered galleries to click to
see the art objects in each room. Other links on the Collections pulldown menu
include some whose names do not clearly indicate their function or what they
might lead to. The latter are especially unclear if one is not familiar with
The Met, museum culture, art history, or New York City.
Also in the across-the-top-of-the-page menu is About the
Museum, which turns out to be the link that contains Museum Departments in its
pulldown menu. Clicking on this link gets you to a page with the four major
departmental divisions: Office of
the Director and CEO, Office of the President, Curatorial Departments, and
Conservation and Scientific Research. I was finally able to get to the homepage
for the Department of Photographs by clicking on the Curatorial Departments
link. This seems like too many steps. Once on the homepage for Photographs, the
other departments are listed in a sidebar along the left side of the page: this sidebar feature should have shown
up at least one webpage earlier as a time-saving step.
Is it better to jump right in and begin with the search box
or go to the Department of Photographs homepage? It depends on what kind of
information the user is looking for. If all the user wants to do is start
looking at individual photos, then searching or browsing may be the way to go.
The Department of Photographs homepage, however, offers a history of the
collection and its highlights, mentions several of its named photo collections,
including the Walker Evans Archive, which it singles out, and includes a couple
of paragraphs on recent acquisitions.
The Department of Photographs homepage also highlights three
photos from the collection and contains links (via gallery number) to the digital
images of the works currently on view in three museum galleries devoted to
photography.
Access tool and examples of records
Searching
for photos on The Met’s website connects to a database, which is basically an
online catalog. Populating the search box with one or more terms brings up
individual item records, except in the case of the Duke de Morny album, which I
will discuss in more detail below. I looked at several records: Hill and Adamson’s Newhaven
Fishwives [1997.382.19], Sherrie Levine’s Untitled
(President 4) [1990.1057], a photogenic
drawing of the Laocoön [66.634.32], and the photo album of the Duke de Morny
[2005.100.410 (1-9)]. The Met’s individual records contain the following
top-level fields: Artist, Date, Medium,
Dimensions, Classification, Credit Line, Accession Number, and a single line of
text that states whether or not the object is current on display—all along the
right side of the webpage. Below them are a series of collapsible headers that
contain additional cataloging information: Description; Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings;
Provenance; Notes; and See Also. The title (actual or assigned)—doesn’t occur
as a field but comes at the top of the cataloging information, as a sort of
marquis or banner to the cataloging record. The artist field only occurs if
multiple artists are involved; otherwise, the artist’s name is part of the
banner/marquis and comes right under the title.
The difference between “Medium” and “Classification” wasn’t
entirely clear to me. For example, the medium of Hill and Adamson’s Newhaven
Fishwives is “salted paper print from paper
negative,” and its classification is “Photographs.” While it is true that the
picture is a photograph, “Photographs” in the context of The Met’s records
refers to a much broader classification and seems to be coming from one of the
art cataloging standards. The Description field can address the subject matter
of the photo, contain historical/contextual information about the project that
the photo may be part of, and discuss historically pertinent information about
the photographic process. The information in the Notes field does not seem that
different from that in “description”:
it can contain further information on the medium or identify a photo’s
sitter, for example. The provenance field can trace the ownership chain, but
often simply lists the commercial art gallery from which the photo was
purchased—if no other provenance information is known. The “see also” field
contains tags for the artist’s name, medium, location (where the art was
produced), the time period it falls under, the museum collection it’s part of,
and links to the Heilbrun Timelines of Art History that are relevant to the
work. If the work was published in an exhibition catalog or other museum
publication, there is an additional link at the bottom: “search for related Met
publications.”
On the left side of a record page, underneath the digitized
image, is a section entitled Related Content, which functions more or less as a
cross-referencing tool, although a very general one. For the photogenic drawing
record, approximately five thumbnails with title as links allow the user to
navigate the collections for similar types of artwork.
Critique
The
interface for the item-level records is clear and consistent from record to
record, and the field headings make it easy to scan down the page to find
information about the photos. Sometimes the digital photos accompanying the
record are large format, enlargeable, and the user can move the cursor around
the image to view it in sections, but other times only a thumbnail image is
available, which can be frustrating.
One problem I noticed with the cataloging is inconsistency
of information in the medium field. In the Sherrie Levine example, I arrived at
the item record via the search term “photolithography,” but within the record,
under medium, the work is listed as a “collage on paper,” which does not
necessary mean photography.
The Hill and Adamson record was the most complete and the
photogenic drawing record the least populated. Although it seems clear that
little is known about this work, the record could have nonetheless been more
explicit. For example, there is no mention of the second image on the page of a
gisant figure. As the title of this work is an attribution, it could have just
as easily been “Page with photogenic drawing of the Laocoön (top) and the tomb
figure of . . . “ Furthermore, there is no description, notes, or discussion of
the photographic process.
The larger problem with The Met records has to do with cross
referencing whole-part relationships, and it is here that the Duke de Morny
photo album serves as a useful example. This is a terrible record. What is
being described: the album as
bound codex or the photos within it or both? The Description field is not
included in this record, which would have been very helpful, but the Notes
field is quite lengthy, containing information that in other records (Hill and
Adamson) went into the Description field. Again, the distinction between these
two fields is quite unclear. The user finally finds a clear description of the
album’s contents in the second full paragraph of the Notes section. Nowhere in
this record are any links to the individual photos contained in the album. I
found most of them by searching for “duchesse de morny photograph,” and the
checking that the accession numbers matched up. This is clearly a very poor
system, particularly as the entire album has been digitized: cross referencing the individual
records with that of the entire album should be available.
Repository #2 (digital library): Mountain West Digital Library
Locating photos on the museum’s website: narrative of website navigation
On
the website of this digital library consortium, one can find both individual
item records for the digital photos searchable online, as well as EAD finding
aids for named photo collections.
The path to the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Finding
Aids Portal was fast and easy: I
clicked on Collections on the menu running across the top of the homepage,
which took me to a Digital Library Collections page, which had a link for the
EAD Finding Aids. On the Finding Aids page, I could search by topic, by
material type, and by partner institution. I clicked on Image under Material
Type (the website does not offer the more specific “photograph”), and 35
finding aids for image collections came up, though not all of them have the
word “photograph” in the collection name.
There are different ways to find photo records. One could do
a simple search using the term “photograph,” which brought up 127,388 results,
10 links to records per page, each with a thumbnail.
Examples of records and critique
The
finding aids for the photograph collections in the MWDL are not very specific.
The landing page for each finding aid has the title of the collection at the
top of the page in red, the dates covered, a line or two that describes the
collection, its extent, creator name and life dates, call number, the
repository it comes from (necessary information, as the MWDL is a consortium),
and access restrictions. Underneath are three links that resemble file folder
tabs: Full Details, Creator Info,
and Admin Info [abbreviations in original]. For the J. Wyley Sessions photograph
collection (http://findingaid.lib.byu.edu/viewItem/UA
5410), we learn on the full details tab that the collection is in English,
its arrangement is original order, conditions of use, preferred citation
format, custodial history, acquisition information, related material, subject
terms (there are three: images;
material types; religion—none of which are specific enough to be very helpful),
and genre/form, which is photographs. The creator info provides a short
biography of the photographer, which has nothing to do with his photographic
career, only his life as a Mormon missionary. The Admin Info is about the
creation of the finding aid itself. With the exception of the single sentence
description at the top of the page—about Sessions’ life as a missionary in
South Africa and other religious duties, we learn nothing specific about the
content of the photos. Moreover, based on the finding aid, it is unclear
whether any of the photos in this collection have been scanned and are
available online or whether only the finding aid is available online. If the
photos are available online, it would be helpful if that information were added
to the finding aid in a note or by showing the identifier range of the display
jpgs.
The individual record for a random photograph at http://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/cdm/ref/collection/histphotos/id/17765
has a glaring mistake. The high quality photo shows an older woman and two young
boys posing for a studio portrait. The woman wears an elaborate hat. The
subject field lists the portrait’s sitters by name, but these names never made
it into an assigned title, which would have been helpful in locating the
resource. The other subject term, besides the sitters’ names, is
“Hats--Arizona,” which does not seem at all helpful, unless a user were
researching the narrow topic of hats, but that does not appear to be what this
photo is about: it is a family portrait. Finally, the big mistake comes in the
description field, right under the subject field that contains the correct
information, which makes the error even worse. It reads “Photograph of three men in the Abril family” [emphasis
mine].
The subject field would help me find this photo, as would
the publisher information (Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records,
History and Archives Division) and the unique identifier for the digital image.
Once I had found this record and, for example, wanted to see others in the
collection or visit the repository, the Material Collection and Material Sub
Collection fields would pinpoint these additional photos and perhaps any
accompanying historical documentation. One feature that I do like about this
record is that the fields at the bottom of the record pertain to the digital
surrogate, so information on both the original and the digital material occur
on the same page.
Comments based on assigned reading
When
I compare The Met individual item records with that of the family portrait
photo from the Mountain West Digital Library, it is clear to me that the
museum, despite expectations that its records should be a thorough as possible,
does not have the same kinds of pressure on it as a digital library consortium
such as the MWDL—my train of thought here is prompted by the account of user
communities and the purposes for which they seek images in Norman H. Reid’s
article “The University of St. Andrews Library Digital Photo Archive” (2006)
and Cara Finnegan’s “What Is This a Picture of?: Some Thoughts on Images and
Archives.” The tendency in the museum world is to catalog images and objects
according to its own needs. Although what I am about to say is to some extent
an oversimplification, I think that, generally speaking, most libraries do not
research their own collections beyond what they need for cataloging, collection
maintenance, and small-scale exhibitions; however, a museum, especially one as
large as The Met, has an in-house department of scholars (the curators) who are
the primary audience for the museum’s cataloging records. Beyond them comes the
academic scholarly community, led primarily by art historians. Although a user
searching The Met’s photo collections may want the images for many of the same
reasons as those cited in Reid, in the museum world it tends to be up to the
user to adapt to museum records system:
there is no outreach (or not the same degree of outreach) as in
libraries, archives, or digital repositories.
That said, Finnegan’s article recounts the opposite
experience, where a historical photo archive within the Library of Congress,
the FSA photos, because it retained its original order (which reflected the
purpose of the documentary photo project), required the researcher to imagine
how the creators of the archive understood a certain image in order to locate
it. She concludes that “aboutness” is not obvious and that the boundary between
denotation and connotation are not fixed. In the case of the Abril family
portrait in the Arizona State Archives Historical Photos, I still think the
“aboutness” is a family portrait and that those words should have appeared
somewhere in the subject field, but in rethinking Finnegan’s article, the “hat”
subject term might well help with retrieval of the image as it is such a
distinctive feature—the shape of the hat even visible in the thumbnail image
(it looks like Mickey Mouse ears).
Finally, the Reid article addresses the problem of finding
aids’ being responsive to the St. Andrews user community, which has broadened
since its photo collections have become available online. The finding aids on
the MWDL tended to be very bare bones and not particularly enlightening,
whereas the item records on The Met’s website contained both traditional
cataloging fields and tags, which I imagine might double the likelihood of
retrievability. It seems to me that the finding aids might be amplified by tags
and particularly, thinking about the variety of requests for imagery discussed
in the Reid article, tags based on the types of projects for which users are
seeking the images.
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