A catalogue record is a description of a thing, written once, by a person, in
an afternoon, twenty years ago.
What gets lost
- Anything the cataloguer did not think was the point
- Anything in a language they did not read
- Everything on the back of everything
Why the search fails
You search for a word. The record contains a description of the word. If the
cataloguer wrote correspondence and you searched for letters, the
collection is invisible to you and neither of you did anything wrong.
The fix is controlled vocabulary, which is why
Library of Congress Subject Headings
exist and why nobody enjoys them.
Searching around the record
- Find one item you know is in the collection
- Look at the subject headings on its record
- Search those headings, not your own words
- Repeat with whatever new headings turn up
This is citation chaining pointed at metadata instead of bibliography.
The underscore problem
Archive systems love identifiers like MS_1904_series_b and
coll_finding_aid_v2. Written in running prose without code formatting, a
naive emphasis rule eats the middle: MS_1904_series_b would come out with
1904 in italics if underscores delimited emphasis anywhere. They do not,
only at word boundaries, which is why this is emphasis and that is not.
What to do about it
Write to the archivist. Every collection has one, most of them answer, and a
five-line email saves a wasted day in a reading room three hundred miles away.