Your librarian will be on spring break March 23-27, a time to relax and let the bibliographic subconscious process all the images, text, and subject headings experienced so far this semester.
The article I continue to mull over is "The Map of Art History" by Robert S. Nelson
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 28-40. If it available full text in JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3046228
Nelson writes about how the organization of information about art history influences our understanding of art. He demonstrates this through a discussion of three things, "a grid of fields into which new Ph.D. dissertations are set, a library classification of art history, and the structure of basic survey books" (28).
His discussion about the categorization of dissertations focuses on the categories employed by the journal Art Bulletin (29-30). I wonder what Nelson would make of the broad, broad categories employed by Dissertation Abstracts International? As a librarian, if I wanted to know what dissertations were available, I would be searching the database rather than just looking at a particular periodical, but that is also because I am a generalist. However, the "organization" of knowledge in DAI (fellow librarians, join me now in a dissatisfied guffaw) makes the categories in Art Bulletin look pretty handy. But I get Nelson's point about the geo-centricism evident in the AB headings.
I am quite interested in what Nelson has to say about the Library of Congress Subject Headings for Art. He gives quite a nice explanation about the history of LCSH, including how many libraries are using this classification, as well as some of its growing pains as the controlled vocabulary has struggled with adequate representation of topics in a bias free way.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment