First Roundtable on Library and Archives Collections and Services of Relevance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People
State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, 4 May 1995
Statement
from the School of Aboriginal & Islander Administration, University of
South Australia
John Tearle
In 1992 the Aboriginal Research Institute of the University of South Australia sought funds under Mechanism B Infrastructure Grants to develop a database identifying library materials relating to South Australian Aboriginal issues.
I was employed by the Aboriginal Research Institute to develop this database. Discussions and workshops were held with academics from the Faculty of Aboriginal and Islander Studies of the University to clarify the way in which the project could proceed and an information system be established. It was decided to proceed with a trial system using the Aboriginal material held in the library of the School of Aboriginal and Islander Administration, part of the Faculty of Aboriginal and Islander Studies.
The project, in part, was influenced by the way in which Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), as used by many libraries, may be seen as exhibiting problems within culturally sensitive subject areas. LCSH headings may contain American bias, dated or even insulting terminology, and can tend to group together diverse concepts which do not lend themselves to such treatment, and whose meanings may be distorted or trivialised.
The initial thinking behind the SAARIS project involved the assignation of culturally appropriate subject headings to materials to allow easier access to them, and an early draft of such headings was put together from various sources to be taken to the workshop, although discussions there came to the conclusion that any term designed to group together diverse concepts under one particular heading had the potential of being problematic. It was found that, in many cases, such headings did little justice to the work involved, and may also have proved to be inappropriate or have the potential to be dated.
After considering optical scanning of the contents and summaries from items, and idea that proved not to be practical, and bearing in mind that the information required from these sources needed to be selected according to its usefulness as access points, I settled upon the solution of manually inputting keywords from these and other sources into one of a number of additional fields designed to enhance access for the end user. In this way suitable terms which were those used by the author, rather than terms decided upon by a cataloguer from a set listing, could be used to provide multiple descriptive access points.
After establishing the criteria the main task of the project was to construct the database using Inmagic .
This database, while originally intending to hold records only of Aboriginal material, has been extended to hold records of all materials held in the School of Aboriginal and Islander Administration Resource Centre, such that it is now used as that collection's catalogue.
The database contains 23 fields, the first 17 of which contain information typical of the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) or OPAC type records, such as author, title, publisher details and so on.
The remaining 6 fields contain additional information to facilitate enhanced access to these materials, the first of these (and most heavily used) being the previously mentioned keywords field.
The amount of assigned keywords can vary from a few to over 100, depending on the nature of the material for which the record is being created. The record may, for example, be for a conference proceeding or other edited works in which multiple contributors which will obviously have a greater number of keywords since not only are the names of each contributor added, but also keywords concerning the subject of their contribution.
In addition, language group names, names of people, series names, translators compilers and the like which do not form part of title, author or other information are added to this field where appropriate.
An additional field records AIATSIS language codes which correspond to language names used in the keyword field. (As many alternate spellings of language names as possible are included in the keyword field rather than attempting to give some standard spelling to further facilitate access.)
A place field records place names relevant to the text, eg. Port Lincoln, South Australia. This field will also show the names of institutions and structures where relevant, eg. missions, gaols etc.
A restriction field is used to flag sensitive or rare materials. This field uses codes based on those used by AIATSIS . The two most commonly used fields are A1 for open access materials, and A2 for materials which may be culturally sensitive to some users. The latter are kept in a locked display case and while access is not restricted to the use of these materials, an opportunity exists for the librarian to inform users of any warnings necessary due to the nature or content of the materials.
An ATSIC region field was included, but is not used at this stage.
The final field denotes the location of the material, with all records to date carrying the tag SAIA (for School of Aboriginal & Islander Administration) in this field. As and when other collections are added to this database, this field will reflect their location.
As I mentioned at the start of this paper, the intention of this project was to explore the possibility of using access points alternate to Library of Congress Subject headings, and to explore more generally culturally appropriate ways of
treating Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander materials. Subsequent projects by the Aboriginal Research Institute and other institutions have taken this further.
It is, however, worth commenting on how SAARIS has progressed beyond the original project. As I have said, the database formed the catalogue for the School of Aboriginal and Islander Administration's Resource Centre which I now manage. Since the project was completed the database has steadily grown (it now holds approximately 5,300 records) and is crucial to accessing the collection's resources.
I believe that access to materials using this database has been considerably enhanced in comparison to access from other collections, due to the flexibility provided by a combination of a high number of access points per record and the very powerful boolean searching facilities provided by Inmagic.
I also believe that this enhanced access is a great aid to the way that our collection's clients utilise our materials. Apart from the books and videos in our collection we also have an extensive range of pamphlet materials which include letters, journal articles and other ephemera which are keyworded onto the system, the type of material which, if it does exist in other collections, seems less likely to be given much in the way of access points and is therefore less accessible to the end user unless they know 'hard' information about the item, such as title, author, etc.
The types of queries I answer are more frequently based on an idea or concept than knowledge of exact titles or authors; keywording lends itself far more readily to this type of query than do the more traditional types of information recorded in conventional library systems.
My invitation to speak to this Roundtable asked that each participant make recommendations to be adopted; while I realise that what SAARIS has done in the confines of a relatively small collection differs greatly in some areas from normal library practice, and that to expect to institute those changes on a global scale would be difficult given the structures and practices that are already in place, I would nevertheless like to see some of the spirit of what this project has been about filter into mainstream cataloguing practices.
I think that, while a move away from LCSH would probably be asking more than the library world would be willing to concede, there could nevertheless be a possibility to either consider some of the changes to LCSH that organisations such as the AILN are attempting to have recognised, or perhaps to, in the future, consider the inclusion of further access points to increase the searchability of records.
The underlying consideration behind both of these suggestions is that the methods libraries use could, with some thought, be more flexible, and more importantly, that issues of cultural appropriateness and awareness are addressed in the way that materials are described to make their access easier and less problematic than they currently are.
Return to the Aboriginal Roundtable
John Tearle, Aboriginal and Islander Administration, University of
South Australia
Last updated 12 June 1998
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