CCO Descriptive Titles

THE BAD:...Dun Dun DUNNN...

Their Title: 1029 

My Constructed Title: Studio portrait of Manuelito Segundo of the Diné (Navajo) people, 1874

 Catalog Entry: 

I found this photograph in the SIRIS (Smithsonian) Image Gallery.  I selected it as my “bad” example of a descriptive title because the title tells us absolutely nothing about what the picture is actually about.  There is nothing “descriptive” about this title at all.  I’m assuming the cataloger chose to entitle the photo “1029” because “1029” is written in small white letters at the bottom of the photo (it took me a few minutes to even notice this by the way!).  On page 61 of CCO they do mention that “Museums and other repositories generally prefer the creator’s title;” however, this “title”—which was perhaps just an old accession number written on there by the photographer or possibly even by a museum at an earlier date—gives us no insight into the subject or context of this photo and therefore is really no use to us.  There is no meaningful metadata to be gathered from this title, and it certainly does not provide great access to the photo.  On page 62 of CCO they state that “If an inscribed or repository title is in a foreign language, is too long for convenient

display, or does not refer to the content of the work, construct a concise descriptive title that refers to the iconographic content of the work.”  I strongly feel that the current title does NOT refer to the content of the work, so I constructed a new one.

My constructed title for this photograph is: “Studio portrait of Manuelito Segundo of the Diné (Navajo) people, 1874.”  The rest of the catalog entry provides a wealth of useful information which I chose to condense into a concise, yet descriptive, title.  My constructed title tells us what the object is (a studio portrait), who it is of ( Manuelito Segundo), even adds a little context by stating that he is a member of the Diné (Navajo) people, and also includes the year in which the photograph was taken (1874).  I believe my constructed title is a much better example of a descriptive title than the original title for this photograph.  If the cataloger really felt that the “1029” was particularly meaningful, or that it does provide some sort of useful metadata, this title could always be kept as an alternate title.  As stated on page 62 of CCO, “The inscribed title need not be the preferred title;” so we can choose to include it, but we can still construct a descriptive, much more useful title that will become our preferred title for this photograph.

THE GOOD: 

Title:

A variety of Edo tubular and tension drums at the House of the Oba, Benin City, Nigeria, [negative]

 Catalog Entry:

My example of a “good” descriptive title also comes from the SIRIS (Smithsonian) Image Gallery.  Their title for this image is “A variety of Edo tubular and tension drums at the House of the Oba, Benin City, Nigeria, [negative].”  If this image had been untitled I would have had no idea what I was looking at—sure, I would have guessed that those were probably some sort of drums hanging on the wall in the back, but I would have had no idea what the object in the center of the image was, or where in the world these objects come from.  The title they constructed for this image does a pretty good job of telling us all the important info we should know about the image in a neat, concise manner.

The catalog entry for this image is quite good all around actually.  In particular, the “summary” includes a great deal of helpful information on the context of this image.  It tells us all about the drums, where they are found, and even narrows down the time frame of when this picture was taken.  While the summary is fairly lengthy, the cataloger narrowed in on the most important parts and constructed a descriptive title that tells us what the photo is of (Edo tubular and tension drums), where it was taken (Benin City, Nigeria)—even more specifically, at the House of the Oba in Benin City, Nigeria—and also that the actual object represented here is a negative.  Rule 1.3.1.2 on page 70 of CCO dictates that “any important information in the title should be indexed in appropriate controlled fields (for example, Subject, Work Type, and Materials)” which this cataloger did in fact do in the Subject, Form/Genre, and Physical Description areas of the catalog entry (recording that the object is a negative, etc).  Perhaps most importantly, in accordance with the description of “Descriptive Titles” on page 62 of CCO, this title is indeed “a concise title in the language of the catalog record (that is, in English) that indicates what the work is or what is depicted in it.”  In my opinion, this title provides great description, important metadata, and sufficient access.