Rediscovering prints at the British Library / Felicity Myrone, Mila Athayde and Victoria Morris (British Library)
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•62 views
The British Museum and British Library share origins, and their prints collections overlap and duplicate each other. However, their differing approaches to cataloguing prints have obscured this. As of April 2021, the entire collection of the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings (including around 2 million prints) has been fully catalogued, and the collection is used and celebrated worldwide. In contrast, the vast majority of artworks held at the British Library are either not well, or not at all, described in the BL's catalogues. The nation’s largest collection of prints therefore remains hidden, and consequently unknown, even to Library staff. Over the last 18 months the British Library has developed a collaborative means of re-discovering their prints by interrogating, re-purposing, and expanding upon British Museum print-level metadata, from online and printed sources. Staff are now able to upgrade records for bound volumes held by the British Library, and for the first time are able to create rich metadata for each of the prints contained within those volumes. As well as exploring similarities between the two collections, BL staff have also uncovered important differences, such as series of prints that have been coloured or arranged differently. This encourages a new way of discovering and ‘seeing’ prints in books and more widely in libraries. This paper outlines the aims, progress, and future of this project – how have staff been able to rediscover visual collections, and, looking forward, how can the BL encourage other libraries to do the same? On a technical level, the speakers will outline how the metadata was extracted, cleaned and re-purposed; how the different standards and vocabularies used by the two institutions were aligned; and how the process could be incorporated into workflows which don’t rely upon specialist software or technical knowledge. Collaborating with the British Museum has offered an opportunity to rediscover and reveal the British Library’s collections – from hand-coloured botanical illustrations to 16th-century etchings from a textbook on wrestling technique – at a speed and level of detail and accuracy that would otherwise be impossible. Staff have also been able to ‘rediscover’ the origins and purpose of British Museum materials when their items have been collected and/or catalogued without reference to the volumes they were once part of. Paper presented at the CILIP Metadata and Discovery Group (MDG) Conference & UKCoR RDA Day (6th - 8th Sept 2023 at IET Austin Court, Birmingham).
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Rediscovering prints at the British Library / Felicity Myrone, Mila Athayde and Victoria Morris (British Library)
Similar to Rediscovering prints at the British Library / Felicity Myrone, Mila Athayde and Victoria Morris (British Library) (7)
More from CILIP MDG
More from CILIP MDG (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Rediscovering prints at the British Library / Felicity Myrone, Mila Athayde and Victoria Morris (British Library)
- 1. Rediscovering Prints at the British Library Felicity Myrone Victoria Morris Mila Athayde CILIP Metadata & Discovery Group Conference 2023 #CILIPMDG2023
- 3. 3 bl.uk
- 4. 4 bl.uk
- 6. 6 bl.uk
- 7. 7 bl.uk
- 8. 8 bl.uk Different perspectives : museum vs. library The BM describes each print individually The BL describes this as “1 volume : illustrations” (if we’re lucky)
- 10. 10 bl.uk
- 11. 11 bl.uk
- 12. 12 bl.uk
- 13. 13 bl.uk British Museum data from CSV
- 14. 14 bl.uk British Library data from MARC21
- 15. 15 bl.uk Magic (a.k.a. VBA) - generates records for prints
- 16. 16 bl.uk Public view: Staff view: Citing the British Museum catalogue
- 17. 17 bl.uk From this: To this: Citing the British Library catalogue
- 18. 18 bl.uk • Authority control • Build a look-up table of BM names, ISNI and NACO ids • Wikidata and SPARQL queries • Other controlled terms • Relationship designators • BM Object types FAST form/genre terms • Use FAST API to reconcile subject terms • Reformatting text, especially citations • Exploit the BM URIs and use Python ‘requests’ module to automate this e.g. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIB4801 Challenges
- 20. 20 bl.uk Workflow and spreadsheet • After connecting British Library and British Museum prints: • Not a match • Partial match • It’s a match! • Tidying data • Adding ownership • Checking NACO names
- 25. 25 bl.uk Benefits to the public
- 26. 26 bl.uk • Upgraded volume-level records • NEW print-level records (analytics) • Working at scale: >22,000 prints and >350 volumes • Techniques can be re-used in other projects Outcomes
Editor's Notes
- Although still relatively little-known and under-utilised, the collections of prints and drawings at The British Library are nation’s largest, with particular strengths in 17th to 19th century British and European art. The vast majority of these artworks are held within items in our ‘Western’ book, map, and manuscript collections. They are currently not well described in our catalogues, and several mistaken assumptions still prevail: • that most of the nation’s prints and drawings are and have long been held by the British Museum, • that the Library’s collections differ from the Museum’s in being ‘documentary’ in focus and accordingly lacking in historical and aesthetic interest, and • that the sum total of the Library’s art collections are the in fact relatively small sections which are visible and secure having long been staffed and catalogued well (mainly illuminated manuscripts, topographical views and Visual Arts). .
- Poor metadata leads to vulnerable collections and validates and perpetuates lack of staffing. We are at an early stage of a project which aims to break this cycle. it questions, blends and improves on existing methods of describing prints (traditionally limited to extent - x no pf plates - in libraries, and in museums iconographically at print level but with little/no reference to original context or use). We have developed a means of successful sharing of metadata between the British Library and British Museum. Through this project we hope to create a simple system which will encourage others to see cataloguing prints in libraries as possible, plausible, and worthwhile. .
- I recently received a £61,000 Getty Paper Project Publications grant to write the first handbook to the Library’s prints and drawings. The funding covers both the photography for this book and the salary of an 18-month grade c curator on a parallel cataloguing project. I chose to concentrate on cataloguing prints in books which match those also held by the British Museum. This is for a number of reasons but mainly it allows us to work at scale and speed, reveal our holdings for the first time, test the assumption that our collections are inferior to the Museum’s, and create new systems and data sets which can be used in other projects at the Library and beyond. We have developed a new spreadsheet method for cataloguing prints bound into volumes, working in collaboration with the British Museum to derive and covert their metadata to describe impressions in the Library for the first time. We have been able to identify 85,000 potential matches between the collections, downloading records for every item the Museum identifies as a book illustration, set of prints or a series. When we can identify our copies of the same works we both upgrade the records for the bound volumes held by the British Library and create separate records for each of the prints contained within these bound volumes. Records for individual prints are then loaded to the British Library catalogue as analytic records. [seen on the right] [We add a citation to our own printed catalogue. This was previously coded within the record and not accessible to the general user. Our upgrades can substantially change the way books are recorded, and this provides a crucial link back to previous metadata for researchers and staff.]
- We use a spreadsheet as it is easier to edit records en masse in a spreadsheet than in Aleph, it avoids the need for short-term externally funded staff recruited for their prints expertise to spend time familiarising themselves with Aleph and/or attending training courses; and understanding of MARC1 coding is not required. So far we have concentrated on books which are 80% to fully held by the Museum as separately catalogued prints, only creating rather than deriving records where necessary. Once a print is catalogued, the user or member of staff is able to search by maker, subject, medium, date, provenance, binding, signs of use, citation etc. The project has quick and meaningful impact online at the British Library and beyond as we contribute our records for worldwide library-use via OCLC WorldCat We can also then liaise with conservation to arrange any necessary actions such as stamping plates, rebinding or boxing.
- There is clearly also a benefit to collection security (we can’t know what we’ve lost if we don’t know what we have). While there is a risk that our identification of items can expose them to more risk through use, theft or mutilation., accounting for what we have and managing and storing it appropriately are important attributes of custodianship.
- So the new system breaks down perceived barriers between museum and library collections and provides a means of stock-taking, condition-checking, and simultaneously providing high-quality publicly accessible copy-specific description of items which we have held in many cases since the 18th century but have never described at plate level. Some, like this example, do have existing brief notes regarding their prints, and, again as here, some shelfmarks reveal provenance and/or placings. Here Sloane’s provenance is identified by the British Museum stamp used. The British Museum uses the same working hypothesis so once we have catalogued both collections it will be possible to test and question assumptions like this. C shelfmarks refer to works placed as Casebooks, locked pens used to stored works of particular value or rarity. But one needs more detail, better, richer metadata to know what we actually have. Our prints have unfortunately in the past been targeted for theft, and if we don’t know what we have, we can’t look after it, our users can’t use it, and we cannot measure its use. We also can’t monetise collections (eg. by attracting digitisation partners) if we don’t yet understand them.
- [This project is part of a shift in thinking in recent years – working with Alan Danskin and Victoria Morris, Blake, satires, oversized rolls, Charles I’s album of view of Rome…??] Progress… Over to Victoria who will explain how she has made this possible
- We understand that museums and libraries view objects differently. Historically, libraries have tended to prioritise text over print. A series of prints bound together can only be borrowed or consulted as a volume, so we have tended to catalogue it as such. We might see a description such as “1 volume, without letterpress” in our legacy metadata. A museum, on the other hand, is more likely to view the individual prints as separate art objects, and therefore to catalogue or describe those prints individually. Specifically, in the context of this project, we’ve been able to benefit from the British Museum’s efforts to catalogue their prints and drawings.
- Some examples of less-than-ideal BL cataloguing which we records the fact that we have something (inventory) but doesn’t help people access stuff. We can use phrases such as “without letterpress” or “collection of plates” to identify items within our collections that are inadequately described.
- Here is a screenshot of the British Museum catalogue. We know there’s a huge overlap between our collections, so the challenge is to think of ways of finding things in the British Museum catalogue, that we have, but don’t know that we have.
- We’ve found that one way of doing this is to search by title. We may know the title of a volume that contains prints. In this example, we hold a copy of something called “Vedute di Roma” – ‘Views of Rome’. When we search the British Museum catalogue, we see all the prints that they have catalogued under this series title, and straight away we have a ‘checklist’ of the prints that we’d expect to find in that volume. Our expert cataloguer – Mila – then needs to compare our volume with the British Museum metadata, rather than having to catalogue from scratch.
- Once we’ve found a series of potential interest, we can download the metadata from the British Museum catalogue in CSV format. I should point out at this point that we have permission from the British Museum to do this – we’re not taking their metadata behind their back.
- The British Museum metadata is imported into a spreadsheet. Our cataloguer then needs to edit the metadata to take into account any differences between what we and the British Museum hold. This might involve deleting one or more prints, or adding additional ones. Or adding provenance information that relates to our copies.
- We want to combine the British Museum metadata with our own volume-level metadata. We’ve designed the spreadsheet so that the cataloguer can copy and paste the text version of the MARC record for the volume into the spreadsheet. We’ve then written some VBA code (this is the programming language that comes built-in to Excel, if you’re not familiar with it) to split the MARC data up into columns. There are probably many ways this could be achieved. We’ve chosen this method because it avoids the need for cataloguer to understand MARC 21 and BL systems – allows us to benefit from Mila’s museum expertise. She can familiarise herself with MARC slowly, and we don’t ‘waste’ time with a lot of training before she can start.
- More VBA code takes the BM data and uses it to generate individual print-level records for each of the relevant BL volume-level records. For each relevant volume, we generate a complete series of print records. This can be a real time-saving if we have many copies of the same set of prints (perhaps in different editions). Cataloguer can make manual amendments, then records are exported from spreadsheet, transformed to MARC XML using XSLT, and loaded back into the catalogue.
- The records that we create all cite the British Museum records which they use metadata from.
- With the help of a colleague in another department, we also learnt to parse the legacy control numbers hidden in the background of our data. This is useful because the titles used in the printed catalogue may crop up elsewhere – e.g. in the ESTC – but there is a risk that the titles will change over time, as we upgrade the metadata, so it becomes increasingly difficult to match up our records with records in other repositories.
- Authority control: BM uses in-house name and subject headings. We want to use NACO for names, with ISNI if possible, and FAST for subject headings. A lot of BM names are in wikidata, so we could use a SPARQL query to find BM identifiers and ISNI. Create a lookup table of BM names and NACO headings so that we don’t have to keep looking up the same names. BM subject terms were matched to FAST using API. Needed manual checking. Similarly BM relationship designators needed to be matched manually. BM authorities have IDs of a standard format, so can query programmatically using Python and automate conversion as far as possible.
- Wikidata query. As you can see, hard to limit to relevant names. Mila’s now going to talk more about the more exciting outcomes – provide examples of the prints that we found.
- Victoria has explained very well how matches are made between the British Library and British Museum prints, and how the spreadsheet works, so I wanted to talk about what I do and show you some pretty images. Once I find what I think may be a match, I order the Library’s book and very simply look at it. Sometimes the book I order doesn’t have any prints at all, sometimes it has prints but not the ones that are at the British Museum and it’s classified as not being a match. Sometimes it is a partial match, meaning that not enough match to use this project’s system – there may be 100 prints in the British Library book but only 20 or so at the British Museum. In all these cases these books are marked in a spreadsheet for future reference, so we are not ordering the same books over and over again thinking they might be the same. And lastly, it can be a match, which would be anything that has all or at least 80% of the same prints as the copy at the British Museum. Once the data is in the spreadsheet, I tidy this data by deleting British Museum only data, adding British Library ownership and other copy-specific data such as differences between states, manuscript annotations etc, and check NACO names. We have a spreadsheet with over 200 names to be added to NACO at this point.
- Over 320 volumes have been catalogued so far, and over 20 thousand individual prints that will be added to the British Library website (this does include duplicates). The books I work with have a great range, the earliest one I’ve catalogued so far being from 1516 and the latest from 1881. These include techniques from woodcut to lithograph, and include books are written in English, Dutch, French, German, Latin and Italian.
- We have a huge range of things being catalogued at the British Library, and they include a lot of books that are what we usually call series, so lots of prints on a particular theme. You can see here some of the other books we have. We have drawing books as seem on the left here, these are books used by artists to learn how to draw; and also very traditional books with illustrations amongst the text as seem on the right.
- I also wanted to highlight the size of the prints we are working with, which range from small books to very large sets. The print on the left is from a calendar series, each month illustrated with fruits of the season and it’s a very large image. On the right, you have an image from one of our books of the “Dance of Death” after Holbein. The British Museum doesn’t have nearly as many of prints from this series as I expected, but the British Library does. I’ve so far catalogued 19 of those at the British Library, and even though they are not all the same edition the British Museum has, because the images are either exactly the same or close enough, I can still use the descriptions of the British Museum and quickly edit the parts of the record that are different at the Library.
- I wanted to bring special attention to the ownership marks, as that is something that is not copied from the British Museum. There has been a previous project to catalogue the topographical views attached to the King’s Library, but a lot of what I have been finding also comes from there, just to show how much stuff there’s still to be done. We have a lot of bookplates from previous owners, names written on the books, occasional dedications and notes, and my favourite kind of marking, little drawings behind the prints like the fish on the top left. I didn’t have space to include it here, but another of my favourite marks was on a print of Adam and Eve in Paradise, and someone has scratched over their “indecent” areas. All these reference images and many more are being saved and while they won’t be available to the public yet, it would be possible to share these with researchers.
- Here are some examples of benefits to the public. On top right there is a print that the British Museum has, but they had a little note wondering if it really comes from this book (it is completely different from all the other prints in this volume), and we can now say “yes! It is from this book!”. On the bottom right you can see a gorgeous set of prints that the British Museum also has, but they don’t have the box it came with, so they did not know the title. I know this because I catalogued that at the British Museum when I worked there, and it took me a whole day to find out where the prints came from after much research; now if anyone finds another copy with no box, you will be able to easy to find it at the British Library and you will be able to access a more complete version. [these are prints with piercings to show the constellations] My last example is going back to the Book of Death that I mentioned previously. This print is titled “the Bride” at the British Museum, but I found it at the British Library mostly being called ”The Countess” (and very occasionally called ”The Bride”). Having the book connected to the print makes cataloguing it much easier, and makes the data more accurate and improves the records. Our data is being shared with the British Museum at the end of the project (and I do also email them as and when I find something relevant), so their records will also be improved with the work we are doing.
- So in summary…. And looking forward… We could potentially continue cataloguing and use this experience to extend the methodology to include other institutions, with anticipated benefits to both the Library and the other institutions involved, as well as the wider ‘print community’. This could involve training network members in how to recognise, research and catalogue prints using the spreadsheet method. Relevant books could be chosen based on their being held by multiple network members, and we would expand to works not catalogued at the Library or Museum as members gained confidence. Each member would commit to attending training and cataloguing at least one book's plates. We would then pool all the draft records. This would enable all members to relatively easily consult their own copies of all the works collectively catalogued, adapting the draft records as necessary for their own institution's holdings. Members would be able to quickly see what needed to be changed to make the records copy specific to their copies of the ‘same’ books (are their plates coloured/mutilated etc, what is the provenance, binding, stamping...). Then members would upload their copy-specific records to their own catalogues, and the pooled records would enable a survey of which prints survive in libraries and why. This would be the beginnings of a union catalogue of prints. The benefits would be shared labour and knowledge, with the goal of revealing the nation’s (or world’s!) currently hidden art collections.