Panel Session 3
Serving Diverse Communities/Building Diverse Collections
Sunday p.m., 7 March 1998

Co-Moderators: Ross Day, Associate Museum Librarian, Robert Goldwater
Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Andr<a'>s Riedlmayer,
Bibliographer/Islamic Art, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University

Panelists:
Ray Anne Lockard, Head Librarian, Frick Fine Arts Library, University of
Pittsburgh
Andr<a'>s Riedlmayer, Bibliographer/Islamic Art, Fine Arts Library,
Harvard
University
Claudia Hill, Original and Special Materials Cataloger for Avery Librarys
Art and Architecture Collections, Columbia University
Alfred E. Willis, Head, Art and Architecture Library, University of
California, Los Angeles

While the issue of "diversity" has most often been addressed in the
professional community in terms of staffing, the panelists were asked to
address how the marginalization of certain kinds of materials, certain
forms of access, or certain kinds of users through the practices of daily
library operations militates against cultural and linguistic diversity.

Ray Anne Lockard began the inquiry with an investigation of the reference
tools and sources commonly available in our libraries. As the focus of art
and architectural historical studies has expanded in scope to include
cultural studies, gay studies, womens studies, and cultural production
worldwide, the inadequacies of current reference tools to address these
areas has become more pronounced. Ray Anne selected three geocultural
areas  Africa, Asia, and Canada  for illustration. In each instance the
tool, either by design or by oversight, fails to cover one of these three
major scholarly foci  be it the <UL>Bibliography of the History of Art<ul>
(BHA), <UL> ArtBibliographies Modern<ul>, <UL>Art Index<ul> or <UL>The
Encyclopedia of World Art<ul>.

The recently published <UL>Dictionary of Art<ul> (1986) performed better
than its earlier counterparts, devoting extensive paging to the arts of
Africa and China, yet still fell short in representing African-American
artists or women artists. <UL>The Bibliography of Gay and Lesbian Art<ul>,
which will appear in a revised edition in 2000, remains a more definitive
resource for gay and lesbian artists. Specific reference sources for
Canadian, African, and Asian arts were identified and critiqued. The value
inherent in library catalogs and monographic series, as well as titles
outside the disciplines of art and architecture history (such as
anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology) was emphasized.  

Ray Anne outlined several means by which art information managers can
"internationalize" the list of available reference sources: Inform
publishers of the relevant resources we lack and need; lobby for
specialized indexes derived from the DOA index volume; create library
guides and web sites to keep our users educated and updated; create
additional resources ourselves, as Mary Williamson did in compiling
<UL>Art and Architecture in Canada<ul> (1991); and encourage our
colleagues in countries around the world to become a part of ARLIS/NA.

Andr<a'>s Riedlmayer began his investigation with an anecdote concerning
the
backlog in his own library. Materials found there had not been represented
by available pre-existing LC or RLIN member copy cataloging when
originally received. As Islamic bibliographer Andrs soon discovered that
while much of the backlogged material was now represented, few Islamic art
titles had been subsequently cataloged by other agencies. A project to
pull titles from the backlog and catalog them netted 345 titles, 77 per
cent of which required full original cataloging: 80 per cent of the total
were non-English titles, and about half of these were in non-Roman
scripts. While these titles began actively circulating once they had
cataloged, their prior absence from the catalog had never been questioned
or addressed.

Yet even when cataloged, Andr<a'>s asserted, they may still prove
inaccessible
because of the constraints in the electronic representation of non-English
languages and non-Roman scripts. For Roman script languages, this was
often attributable to the absence of diacritical marks, which renders the
result either ambiguous or meaningless. For languages in transliteration,
the absence of diacritics compounds the confusion, particularly for the
library user, inherent in the multiple methods of transliteration applied
to any given language. He offered pointed examples for Russian and Arabic.
And while catalogers have been assiduously adding the diacritical marks,
OPACs and their distributing agents, Telnet and the web, have been
stripping them off. The record on automated cataloging, Andrs concludes,
is decidedly mixed. In defense of those minority and underrepresented
constituencies which might be served by access to these diminishingly
accessible data, he suggests that librarians advocate for user-friendly
interfaces; sacrifice some productivity in favor of selected original
cataloging; not only make transliteration documentation available to our
users but also to instruct them in it; and do more research in the
effectiveness of precision and recall of patron searches on automated
databases with romanized Hebrew- and Arabic-script data.

Claudia Hill brought to bear her experiences in developing specialized
vocabulary, in her case for conservation and preservation.

Terms such as <IT>orpiment, scumbled, twill, gesso, imprimatura<it>, and
more in-depth terminology pertaining to scientific examination of
paintings and conservation terms like <IT>x-ray diffraction,
cross-sections<it> (as in paint), <IT>backing (textile)<it>  and
<IT>inpainting<it> were added to the <UL>Art and Architecture
Thesaurus<ul> (AAT) during a special conservation terminology project. The
project, a collaboration between the Getty Information and Conservation
institutes, stemmed from a recognition in the early 1980s that the art
conservation community could also benefit from the use of a thesaurus. The
outcome has been a restructuring of the AAT to accommodate new
conservation terms and an expansion of terminology in specific areas of
conservation. One of the observations made during the project was the
duplication of effort in putting these scientific terms into the AAT in
light of the existence of other specialized thesauri. The solution might
lay in a mapped or cross-linked thesaurus, such as the test project to
link LCSH and MeSH vocabularies.

The effort to compile conservation and preservation vocabularies has lead
to the identification of other areas where adequate topic terminology was
still wanting, including textiles, contemporary art, gay and lesbian art,
African, Asian, and those forms of art existing outside current art and
architecture paradigms. The success of the AAT resides with the currency
of its terminology and with its applicability in the field, both as a
stand-alone product and in a linked, metadata environment.

In the late 1980s, reported Al Willis, the libraries of the University of
California at Los Angeles began a series of initiatives to create a work
and public environment reflective of the ethic and racial diversity of Los
Angeles itself. Reference desk statistics already suggest that the
university libraries in general, and the Arts Library and particular, are
already serving a majority clientele either from the student and faculty
community outside the traditional departmental audience or from outside
the university altogether.

The Arts Library provides resources to support a number of culturally-rich
courses offered through various ethnic-, constituency-, or area-studies
departments and centers. Coupled with curricular shifts and enrollment
trends in the primary-audience departments, the Library has shifted its
collection development focus. As the collection development policy has
undergone revision, job assignments, funding allocations and vendor
relations have similarly undergone changes. The Arts Library staff has
been attentive, in some cases prescient, in identifying curricular trends
and shaping the collection policy accordingly. Three years ago the "art
and art history" funding allocation was split into "general and
western-art" and "non-western-art" categories. Further refinements have
included the designation of portions of allocations toward subject
development. 

Yet with an expansion in collection development has come the concomitant
reduction in expenditures for any given and established collection area.
In some cases radical reduction of purchasing in selected fields or
formats has been undertaken with little or unremarkable loss of strength.
Selectors must be increasingly careful to avoid irremediable gaps in the
collection that could jeopardize the institutions strategic instructional
and research standing.

Taking gay and lesbian studies literature as his model, Al outlined shifts
in vendor and materials sourcing, including innovative sources such as web
sites, self-publishers, specialty bookstores, art fairs, and even sex
shops, as well as the potentially "objectionable" nature of the materials
received  all of which necessitate an adjustment on the part of library
staff. It has also required the library to devise special procedures both
to retrieve these materials bibliographically and to protect them
physically  the latter also entailing a bibliographic instruction paradigm
to help users to "conceptualize minor inconveniences to themselves as
major contribution to the librarys ability to serve future users as well
as todays."

Ross Day
The Robert Goldwater Library
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
rglib2@metgate.metro.org