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Part A of the report describes findings and contains further discussion of the issues summarised in this overview.
Part B [edited version] describes individual practices and progress in the surveyed institutions and gives examples of the different database and cataloguing styles currently being employed.
There are some stylistic elements in the report designed to try to make it intelligible to a potential audience across the library and museums sectors.
There are some cases where organisations told me of intentions to migrate to or from a particular system and where revelation of such advice would constitute a possible problem with commercial confidence.
In numerical terms, still photographs comprise the overwhelming majority of pictorial items in museums and libraries (possibly 15 million items held by museums and by ABN participants, including local collections). With very few exceptions, participants in the survey showed little interest in art works.
Newspaper firms hold a similar number of photographs and it would be marvellous to get some of them involved in the Towards 2001 program.
There is effectively unanimous support for the view that, resources permitting, image plus text databases are the optimum way of providing access to pictorial materials.
Nearly all institutions surveyed have established working parties or similar mechanisms to explore image technology and networking, sometimes in the context of broader whole of government initiatives to disseminate government information to local communities generally. The report suggests the establishment of information exchange mechanisms for sharing experiences about imaging.
Regardless of the fate of other forms of co-operation between the library, museums and archives sectors, this is one area where it will be important for the foreseeable future to keep dialogue open between the sectors.
The storage requirements, management complexities and ownership issues of a single national database of images are, in my view, formidable. In addition, the ABN model applied to photographs would not offer the same economic benefits for shared cataloguing. Standards for textual and subject description followed in photograph cataloguing, though they bear some similarities, do not conform with each other in the way achieved for "traditional" library material via AACR and LCSH. This in itself would not preclude the establishment of a single database, particularly if
(a) some degree of intra-database linguistic variation was regarded as
acceptable; or
(b) if some automatic standardisation of records (either
analogous to retrospective conversions or via an expert system) were developed.
Though there is minority support for the concept of a single database, there is wider acceptance of a "virtual network" model along the lines of AARNet or the Internet. Under this model, users would either be left to their own devices to navigate through cyberspace or would be supported by the sort of navigation tools now being developed f or the Internet and which can be expected to becoming increasingly sophisticated and useful.
One should not pretend that the virtual network model will not have its drawbacks. A single database would self-evidently be a wonderful boon to users and a drawback only perhaps on occasions where they were overwhelmed by the large amounts of information retrieved. A single database would also provide exceptionally strong support for cataloguers and volunteers trying to identify and caption photographs and for national level identification of collection strengths and weaknesses.
In all institutions surveyed, significant work still remains to be done to achieve the desirable outcome of having informative textual descriptions coupled with image representations of pictorial items.
In my view, working towards this goal represents a higher priority than providing sub-collection bibliographic entries to ABN (which would function under this rubric as a national directory to the distributed national collection.). This is not to say that such a directory concept would not prove useful, only that, in a tight resource environment, priority should be given to documentation and imaging and the question of a national directory be re-visited later in the light of navigation aids available on the virtual network.
The above does not constitute a recommendation that all pictorial items in all collections be documented and imaged and there is considerable scope for representative and selective inclusion of items in databases. These are suggested in Section 6.2 of the Report. I was particularly impressed by the approach taken by the Museum of Victoria in selectively videodiscing images held in the Victorian Public Record Office though this should be construed more as a spur to open up collections held in archives than as a nuisance objection to affordable comprehensive projects.
This should not be under-estimated. It goes a long way to explaining some of the practices in museums (particularly those stemming from the widespread use of early PCs rather than minis/mainframes).
The nexus also means that one can have some useful system features that are unusable because one's software cannot handle them. A widely-known example of this is the use of Geographic Area Codes in MARC which have been coded for years in the as-yet generally unrealised expectation that they will be useful in certain circumstances.
The report deals at some length with the issue of hierarchical search and thesaurus capabilities. The absence of such capabilities in most systems has markedly conditioned the styles of description used.
The approach taken or planned in most organisations is to use their "strategic" system for cataloguing their photographs. This is sensible on the face of it but can result in less than optimal flexibility for linking collections, subcollections and individual photographs or manuscript items. State Library of NSW is the only organisation surveyed which deliberately chose a different large-scale system for its photographs and manuscripts because it wanted the relational structures required for doing this. AIATSIS has a similar data construct and examples of SLNSW and AIATSIS data structures are shown in Part B of the report. The differences between these structures and those of MARC and MARC-like flat-file databases are considerable. Relational databases are not, ipso facto, the best foreseeable approach and still better styles may emerge from object oriented or hyperlinked structures and data warehouse concepts.
It may be unpalatable for organisations committed to MARC and to integrating their collections of unpublished materials and "traditional" materials to accept my view that MARC is more of a burden than a benefit in pictorial cataloguing. I do not want to force this view on organisations with other over-arching IT strategic concerns.
There is, however, no doubt in my view that the War Memorial's formal captioning style for photographs is the best encountered and this is quoted approvingly on several occasions in the report as a style that is simultaneously
(a) richly informative;
(b) simple enough for untrained volunteers
to follow; and
(c) at the search and display end, easy to comprehend.
The report contains some detailed discussion about the subject description of photographs in Part A, Section 6 and, in fact, Sections 6, 8 and 9 of Part A constitute a sort of desiderata list of the more important considerations that might, in my view at least, apply in the well-designed system of tomorrow. There is nothing described that is not readily programmable.
Section 6.1.3 is, in my view, one of the more important in the report because I think it best encapsulates what is not being done in photographic cataloguing at present and suggests a method for really adding richness to the cataloguing of photographs.
I have been disappointed by the intellectual standards of some of the photographic captioning seen in some (though by no means all) institutions. Much of the inadequacy relates to inadequate research and specialist knowledge and, self-evidently, research is a time-consuming and costly endeavour. Some, but not all, Pictorial sections seem to be under-resourced or perceive themselves to be neglected or marginalised or under-resourced and any suggestion that they could write more informative captions is usually greeted with a resigned shrug of the shoulders.
The use of volunteers is widespread and usually though not invariably satisfactory. I personally believe that one of the more important elements in cataloguing social history photographs is to try to get assistance from people with some association with the subjects or era of the photograph before their faculties and memories start fading.
The report also quotes approvingly the provision by State Library of South Australia of a copy of Inmagic to a donor so that he could describe the collection directly onto a database without the need for later re-keying. I am not certain what the Taxation Incentives implications are but there is certainly a lot of sense in proclaiming loud and clear to potential donors (and vendors) that a properly documented collection is worth a lot more than a poorly documented one and just as much sense being as hard-nosed as necessary about the documentation style required.
A key issue in my view is how the research that leads to value-added captioning of the type described in Section 6.1.3 can be shared between institutions. The question does not apply only to pictorial items but applies to the description of museum objects and it applies to elements of "traditional" library cataloguing.
If we take a relatively large leap of the imagination and start speculating: What say if Australian Dictionary of Biography entries were available (on some royalty basis) to libraries and other cultural institutions for pasting or partial pasting into their databases. What say if the Australian War Memorial provided brief histories of the various aircraft in its thesaurus plus a good associated photograph? What say if this data were all directly downloadable from a central database of authorities / images / definitions / thesaurus into local databases?
This incidentally is probably also the way to cope with constructing an Australian thesaurus, a way organisations can create their own standardised but customised thesauri and, if you can achieve this using something like the method described, you've also got a machine-readable value which can be used for navigating the virtual network, ie, a network-wide tag. You've also potentially got an audit trail that tells you across the network who holds information about what.
I suggest this approach as meriting further investigation under the Towards Federation 2001 program. It is certainly an initiative that would benefit both library and museum sectors and is something requiring inputs from both.
I would like to thank everyone interviewed during this consultancy for having given so generously of their time and ideas in what has been one of the most interesting projects I have ever undertaken.
A particular thanks, however, is due to Julia Trainor, Chair of the Steering Committee for her unerringly sensible (and patient) advice and support.
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