Wonderful Weirdness in the Smithsonian Catalogs

Out of a possible 2, 297, 354 records, I am going to look at the following that I find curiosity-piquing.
If it turns out they aren't, I'll cross them off.  If they pan out, they'll get linked.
Searching by TYPE, not subject...
Starting from fewest number of records (1) to highest:

Wheelbarrows-only one, and it's red! 

(I guess because so much depends on it)

Seating Charts

Pillows

Palm Prints (aka dermatoglyphics)

Orderly Books (as opposed to disorderly?)these are really just order books

Miniature Books

(Meh.) (However, this here is a special miniature book exhibition slide show curated by Barbara Zuckerman that I found quite absorbing and inspiring)  

Holograms-One-and it's a KKK image

Wickets-yes, as in Croquet

Report Cards

Accident Reports

Festschriften (learned about these in library school)

Fake Books (these will probably turn out to be music)(yup)

Coloring Books-fun!

Stickers-In Lakota!

Love Letters(not from anyone I know)

Direct Mail

(this has got to be interesting: direct mail cataloged in the Smithsonian?)

Yes! It is very cool!
"Unsolicited mail received by Ellen Wells during two twelve month periods, 1976-1977 and 1980-1981. Ms. Wells kept all materials received during these periods as a sample of the changing use of this mass communication medium. Ms. Wells received the first group in Ithaca, New York, and the latter in Alexandria, Virginia. This collection provides a substantial sample of materials used in direct mail advertising and solicitation. These techniques of mass communication have became increasingly sophisticated and more widely used in recent years and the products of these techniques--commonly called "junk mail"--are ubquitious in contemporary society."

Bombs- 4 of them!!!

Yarn Drawings
(of or with?) These are all Huichol artifacts

Apologetics(sorry)(boring)(sorry)

Birthday Cards

Recipes(You'd think this was interesting but it wasn't. However,The Southampton Diet Book is cataloged in the Smithsonian, god knows why)

Placemats???Wow!

Blogs

Cottages(Just photos, I thought there might be the whole building)

Bumper Stickerssadly, boring, nothing too memorable from a layman's perspective)

Wrappers-Really Weird Soap!

Floating Nut!

Big Master!

Sunny Monday!

Minute Books

Underwear-Apollo Spacecraft Cooling Underwear!

Decals

Postal Money Orders- oldest from 1863, and I also found something called encased postage, a token for Ayer's Cathartic Pills with part of a stamp glued (?) on the back.

Three-Dimensional Objects-there were only 7 records listed as this type, so it's not a popular cataloging term. Almost everything is three-dimensional, except for an image, or what is IN the image, since the object the image is on is three-dimensional. And if you took a photo of a photo, then it would be a 3-D image of a 2-D image, but there's still some 3-D going on in there.

Ephemerides(?) (Moon and Stars and Sun charts)

Questionnaires

MenusLunch on a Zeppelin, anyone?

Comic Books-some from 1889

Wind Tunnels (where do they store them?!)(Darn, all are just models)

Rituals-Native American Potlach sound recordings!

Animal Husbandry Equipment-mostly tack, but here is a llama rope

Impellers(apparently a variation on a PROpeller)

Paralectotypes(don't know what this is either) (oh, it's an entomology word)(but there are some nice squashed bug slides)

Noisemakers

One Hundred and Ninety One Unmanned Spacecraft!!!

Souvenirs, Headgear, People

Little Magazines-
this led me to the Museum of Temporary Art, which is right up my alley. "Little" isn't in reference to size, although they may be smaller than the typical literary magazine. The little refers to the scope and the audience, in that it reaches/serves a smaller range and can have a narrower literary focus.

Personalia, Footwear, Food, Specimens

I am compelled to point out the two typos:
Skectchbooks
Baloons

Fantastic Realia on WorldCat

I've created a list on World Cat called Fantastic Realia.  Into it I'm sticking every catalog record that strikes my fancy, all realia, except for a few zines I was actually involved in (they make me feel kind of special).  Unlike these people, Fumiko Coyne,  Judy DeBuse, and Gail Grocott,  I am not actually cataloged.  The second I get a chance, you know I will.  I'm already in Wikipedia.
I particularly enjoyed finding Daniel Webster's socks, a taxidermied bear whom I happen to know is named Luego, and a Literary Lager, it's bottle emptied of its contents by an unnamed, uncataloged collaborator.

Riddle me this:
Why does spell check believe cataloged to be properly spelled without the U, but uncatalogued WITH???  Do only British people uncatalog things?

I am so happy to know that not only do other people catalog very, very strange things, but that out of 1.4 billion items on WorldCat only 27,752 are realia.  Which means there is a place for me in this world.

Catalog record for Daniel Webster's SOCKS!!!!

Socks. (Object/artifact)
[WorldCat.org]

Cataloging the Weird Stuff

Finally! I found something!

Cataloging the Weird Stuff

View more presentations from nanettedonohue.

CDWA and CONA and CCO

Of course, this being an independent study, I have no one off which to bounce things and no guaranted place/person to turn to for answers.
I'm trying to catalog a hiccup with CCO/CDWA now, and in my searching for any models to base mine on I am finding there are no catalog records of things that happened: there are records of the things that recorded the thing happening.  Even under performance art, or events, the record is for a visual recording of the art/event.  NOT the event itself.  And when I search it the Getty vocabularies and such I do find ephemera, but that is stil just recorded things: papers, videosrecordings.  Not the thing itself.
I know you can catalog realia as itself, e.g., a meteorite.  Not a photo of it, or a video or a book, but the thing itself. 
Why can't I find a way to catalog an event...the actual event itself?

Bibliographic Control Alphabet Soup: AACR to RDA and the Evolution of MARC; a webinar report

These are my raw notes and will be updated and cleaned out....

Wednesday. October 14, 2009
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Sponsored by NISO: the National Information Standards Organization
Speakers:
Barbara Tillett, btil@loc.gov
Diane L. Hillmann, metadata.maven@gmail.com
William E Moen,william.moen@int.edu
some acronyms you'll encounter
IFLA: the International Federation of Library Associations
FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
RDA: Resource and Description Access
ISBD: International Standard Bibliographic Description
FRBR was first published in 1998

• users tasks
• new view of universe
• groups and things
• networks
• data elements and attributes

 RDA was born from IFLA's cataloging principles and FRBR
In 2002 the draft for AACR3 was started: this evolved into RDA.
ICP, International Cataloging Principles, was developed between 2002 and 2003.  It was posted in February of 2009 and has been translated into 20 languages.
The world wanted cataloging rules that were defensible, not arbitrary.
Designed to build catalogers judgement of decsription and access.
The metadata for publishers is called ONIX.
Also incolved:
DublinCore and IEEE/LOM
RDA/MARC working group (MARBI)
RDA is web based
FRAD: Functional Requirements for Authority Data
Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item: that's what FRBR works with
Transcription: principle of Representation
No More Abbreviating!!!
no more "et al"
no more "s.l." or "s.n."
No more GMD (General material Description)
instead, Content, Media and Carrier
new MARC fields: 336, 337 and 338
RDA is not a display standard (MARC is)
No more "polyglot"
more data in the authority records
FRAD helped RDA a lot

In the past we had a very small view, now it is broader.  We have an expanded bibliographic universe.  We need to show more connections, relationships and pathways.

RDA is a change in technology, in focus and in view.
Metadata created with RDA can be used beyond the library.
Catalogs will no longer be isolated because they will all be online.  There will be global access to data.
Coding and mapping tables
registered controlled vocabulary
more open source
LCSH uses SKOS as their controlled vocabulary
(Library of Congress Subject Headings use Simple Knowledge Organization Schema)

We are moving beyond MARC into a linked data environment.  We will be able to re-use metadata.
Westarted out with a card catalog, written by had, on paper cards.
We moved to MARC inside buildings, but not online (because there wasn't "online" yet)
Now all data can be linked on the web.

VIAF: Virtual International Authority File
It's a mashup of data from 15 International institutions
gives us a view of published aaes
variants of names
send a comment
uses MARC21 and UNIMARC and OCLC
Diane Hillmann says we are moving away from MARC and towards information ecosystems.  MARC is only used in libraries and no one else wants to use it.
Libraries need to be participating in universal descriptive metadata.
Dbpedia:  a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data
Libraries and our information is not being utilized.
Volunteers helped create the RDA vocabulary.
entity-relationship diagrams


RDF and XML vocabularies are encoding standards.
Semantic Web Community helped with RDA.
NSDL (National Science Digital Library) registry supports metadata interoperability.
Aggregated Statements
The library community can support innovation and change with the rest of the world.
RDA elements and vocabularies will help in the migration from MARC.
MARC is a "lossy output format" and can't convey as rich a description.
metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm


William Moen did an analysis of record use from 2005 to 2007.  
MARC was supposed to be just a transfer format but it turned into a  metadata scheme.


data driven evidence for a core bibliographic metadata record.  We need to express and represent bibliographic data in XML and RDF.
MARC has 200 fields and 800 subfields.
Only 4% of fields account for 80% of all records.
He examined 56 million records from OCLC World Cat.  Only 62 records of non-Library of Congress-cataloged realia out of the 73,000 realia records.
Only 7 MARC tags were used in all records.  There was only ONE occurrence of 656 field out of 56 million records!!!
In an LC created record typically 7 fields and 10 field/subfields combinations were used.
In a non-LC created record, 10 fields and 18 field/subfield combinations were recorded.
Most used fields were:
8, 10, 43, 245, 246, 260, 300, 500, 650, 700.


empirical evidence indicates catalogers utilization of MARC fields is not directly aligned with the fields prescribed by BIBCO, CONSER and National Bibliographic records.
We need to look at what catalogers are doing before we change what we are telling them to do.
Some questions:
What does the low occurrence of fields suggest?
What is needed from FRBR for a bib record?
Should there be higher value data in fewer fields?
Can we argue persuasively for the cost/benefit of exisiting rpactices?
Do we know the extent of and which content designation structures are needed to support a usre atsk?
What constitutes a core record?


www.mcdu.unt.edu/wp-content
Amy Eklund
core elements analysis 3 May 2006