Compliant Vs. Non-Compliant

Non-Compliant

Old Title: Unidentified Man

New Title: Man in a Rowboat, Wearing Dark Sleeveless Shirt and White Pants

            This photograph was found on the online database for the photographic collection at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Bowdoin College is located near me in Maine and I visit the art museum a lot, so I was curious to check out the state of their cataloging practices. I discovered that Bowdoin does an alright job with CCO standards, but one recurring issue is that they include the date in the same field as the title, separated by a comma (i.e., “Untitled, 2015) when they should be separate fields. They were also missing several important elements, like a Notes section and Indexing Terms.

 I had a problem immediately with this title because this is not the only image in the collection of this man, yet they are all given this title (Unidentified Man), with no other descriptive elements. The specificity of the title that I gave to this image is necessary to distinguish this image from the other works of this man in different settings and poses. According to rule 1.2.2.2.2, this constructed title refers to the subject of the work, as it is the most easily identifiable aspect. Following Rule 1.2.2.2.5, this constructed title was created using the subject as descriptive material since the purpose of the photograph is unknown to the cataloger.

Compliant

            To search for a title that does comply with CCO standards, I looked through many different museum and university catalogs, but I kept coming back to the Harvard online photographic database (mostly because Martha rags on Harvard so much in class!). The image that I found follows many of the CCO rules for naming objects.

It displays the correct grammar rules listed under Rule 1.2.2.1 in that it capitalized terms correctly (essentially everything but prepositions) and it did not start with an article (ie., “Canyon…”, instead of “The Canyon…”).  Since there was no known author or title inscription, the cataloger constructed a title. Following rule 1.2.2.2.2, the constructed title provides a detailed description of the subject of the work; the specific location, along with the perspective that the image was taken from (since it appears to come from a series with multiple images of that location. Unlike the example above from the Bowdoin Art Museum, the cataloger made sure to specify how it was different from other similar images.

            The record includes an “other title”, which I wasn’t able to capture in the screenshot; “Series/Book Title: Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, Expedition of 1872, Pl. 2. It was entered under the field of “other title”, following Rule 1.2.2.2.4 for multiple titles. Since this work appears as part of a larger Series (as evidenced by this “other title” entry), it was good that the record included both titles (following rule 1.2.2.2.6). However, I was disappointed not to see a link to the larger series in which this work is contained. Finally, the record followed the general rule 1.1.2.2.1 of consistency. Another photograph of the same geographical location exists in the collection but it was taken from a different perspective. The cataloger used the same wording for that title, specifying in which direction the shot was taken to differentiate it (“looking west” vs. “looking north”.)