A Brief History of Bookplates

Metadata

Dublin Core

I chose to use Dublin Core as my standard because of its flexibility. At the beginning of this project I was not sure of the range of items I was going to include in my collection, and wanted the ability to choose what was required and use other standards as needed.  

Title

• Required
• Because the majority of the items in my collection were Bookplates, I followed the same title format of "Ex Libris of ______" for my items. This often lined up with what the institutions I got these items from titled the work. 

Creator

• Required
• Getty: The Union List of Artist Names
• LC: Name Authority File
• Most of the artists were pretty obscure, and only a few ended up being in either Getty of LC, so I chose to use both authorities to have a wider range of results. 

Identifier

• Required
• I followed the format of: my initials_date_
• Especially in the 19th/20th centuries, people could have multiple bookplate designs throughout their collection. Having unique identifiers provides a way to find designs even if the title happens to be the same for multiple items. 

Date

• The majority of my items had specific dates, bu for those that were only known to have been made in the 1900s I wrote the date as "20th century" for those items.  

Description

• I included a brief description for each item, usually outlining the visual elements included in each image.

Subject

• Getty: The Art and Architecture Thesaurus
• LC: Subject Headings
• I used this field to list the different elements pictured in each image in order to increase searchability of the collection. I chose to use both Getty and LC in order to broaden the thesauri used.

Medium

• Getty: The Art and Architecture Thesaurus
• While the majority of my items fell under one type of medium (Prints), I found that the Getty thesauri allowed for a wide range of nuance within that field, which was appreciated when cataloguing specific types of prints link etchings or wood block prints. 

Format

• This title was a bit vauge, so I renamed it Dimensions since that is what I used it for.
• I primarily listed items in metric units, since they all tend to be fairly small and also because that is how the majority of the metadata was presented in the collections I pulled them from, but I also listed the dimensions in inches. 

Has Part

• I chose to include this in case I was able to include the metadata for a book and bookplate in my collection. Unfortunately I was not able to, however if one were to be included the bookplate attached to the book would be included in this section of the book's metadata to show that the book has a part catalogued elsewhere.

Is Part Of

• Similar to "Has Part," this would apply to a bookplate that was a part of another item, like a book. The book would be linked here in the bookplate's metadata. 

Relation

• There are two sets of items in my collection that make use of this label. Both sets contain the printed bookplate and the woodblock and copper plate used to print those bookplates. Each item has been linked to the other to show that these items are related.  See more on the Related Works page. 

Language

• LC: MARC Languages
• I chose the LC: MARC LAnguages because it seemed more broad than ISO.

Spatial Coverage

• Getty: The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
• Because the items in my collection came from a wide variety of areas, I chose to include spatial coverage so that the location of each item could be recorded.

Rights

• Required
• Rights Statement 
• I feel that it is important to include the rights for each item, even if the rights statement is unknown. This provides clarity to those using the collection, and is an important record for those maintaining it.