Methodology
I began this project by choosing the basic Dublin Core elements that best described the items chosen. I had to make minor edits to a few elements, such as the Coverage and Subject. The controlled vocabularies used were the Getty Union List of Artist Names, the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus, The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
Identifier: Blue_Artist name
Title: Title of work or novel
Creator: The artist of writer of the described work. When applicable, I consulted the Getty Union List of Artist Names.
Description: A brief description of the work and what it depicts.
Medium: The material in which the object is made. When applicable, I consulted the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus.
Date: The year in which the work was made.
Coverage (Geographic Location): This element described the city or country in which the work was made. I made an alternate term for the Coverage element, as I felt Coverage was not specific enough for the works in this list. I changed it to Geographic Location, so I was also able to add it to the collective map. When applicable, I consulted the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
Subject (Genre): This element describes the art movement and subjects of the works pictured. I changed the Subject element to Genre to more accurately and acutely describe the works. For this element I used the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
Rights: The copyright status for the work described.
I had a few issues with the ULAN thesaurus and the TGN thesaurus. The interface when trying to link terms is not very functional and the search is spotty as well. When typing in a name or location, the matching term would not populate to the top of the dropdown menu, instead it would list related or partial matches in alphabetical order. When the list was too long, the dropdown menu would eventually stop and not go any further. For this reason, I wasn’t always able to auto-complete the controlled vocabularies and had to manually link them instead.
For Content, Scope, and Context: please see Homepage.
Cataloguing Joan Miró's "Bleu I, II, III" :
- Title
- Bleu I, II, III
- Description
- These three paintings are typically regarded and one triptych. The small and sparing figures, a few red and black dots, are composed so that the depth of the blue is overwhelming. The subject of the paintings are not the small figures, but the deep, almost vibrating, blue.
- Source
- Creator
- Miró, Joan
- Date
- 1961
- Coverage
- Palma de Mallorca
- Rights
- (C) Successio Miró / ADAGP
- Item sets
- A Brief History of Blue
- Media
My first step in cataloguing these works was to first see if it is currently in a museum's collection, and whether or not that museum has an online catalog. Luckily, the triptych currently resides in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. They do have an online catalog, however trying to navigate it was a struggle at times. After locating the work after several unsuccessful search attempts, I took into account what metadata they had.
They provided the information for the following Dublin Core elements: Title, Creator, Date, Medium, Coverage (Geographic Location) and Rights. I was able to fill in the Description, the Subject (Genre), and the tags myself. The Pompidou actually also has their own keywords for each individual work, but I decided to choose my own that would best fit the lens in which I was presenting the works.
Most of the objects I chose were already collected by a museum with a digital catalog which was extremely helpful. However, there were a few that were either privately collected or held by a smaller museum with no online metadata. For these cases, more extensive research was necessary. Sometimes this included reading over the Wikipedia article, and in some it mean looking through auction houses’ catalogs.