The "Cataloguing Cartography" (CC) project is aimed at those I know best and am best able to address: novice original cataloguers, student cataloguers, or (in a pinch) experienced cataloguers with little experience with maps and cartographic materials. Whether the prospective user is preparing an academic assignment or preparing to take on a stack of maps and guides in their public library that had hitherto remained uncatalogued and untouched in the pamphlet file, he or she should expect to find a level of expertise little different from his or her own, and thus a gentle, if perhaps unpolished, introduction to the task.
In keeping with the assignment, as well as in accordance with severe constraints of time and energy, the scope of the CC project is limited to the application not only of one very standard standard, AACR2r, and its revisions and interpretations. but also of one chapter in particular, the cartographic materials chapter. This means that other material, even material of cartographic interest such as map-generating software and geographic information systems generally, geographic games, and of course geographic books, has been put aside.
Again in keeping with the requirements of the assignment, the purpose of the CC project is not to provide an online reference work, or list of rules (even a handlist, useful though that might be), much less a comprehensive guide. This is well beyond my ability, and well beyond demonstrated need. There are excellent reference works devoted to cartographic cataloguing, and there was no sense in duplicating them, even had the time and ability been adequate. Instead, it attempts to provide what is harder to find: an aid to actually learning and acquiring the rules through practice and collegial interaction with another's work. Nothing would please me more than to have someone actually look at the data, work through the examples, and find my interpretation of the rules or my application of them to real maps and atlases faulty.
Though I cannot claim that I had thought through all the objectives when I began making choices about approaches and materials, the two have become more closely aligned as my concept of the project developed and it began to take shape.
The design, not yet fully implemented (what web project ever is?), has had to meet two criteria: (1) it has had to be feasible in the time allotted. Several very ingenious and elaborate schemes have had to be jettisoned on these grounds. For example, I worked for a while to create an interactive version of the AACR2 rules: working with a real sample document one would work through the rules, producing each section of the document surrogate, and be able to compare the results at each stage not with a completed record, but with a partial record that had been completed only to that point in the process. I still like the idea, and it suits exactly my notion of what the site should do, but to write that much HTML proved too onerous, at least on top of the 200 files I had already written this week. An attempt to use scanned maps as part of the raw data has also had to be shelved, at least temporarily. Though occasionally feasible, especially if materials were chosen specifically for their suitability for scanning, more often than not, the necessary information on maps turned out to be attached to the physical object (material, size, recto/verso), entailed in the map as a whole (feature representation, theme, subject, color scheme, geographic coverage, coordinate references, etc.), scattered all over the map's borders, often in fine print and requiring high-resolution and well as numerous scans, or similarly unaccommodating. Scanned maps are very attractive, but with a few exceptions (e.g. deciding between "map" and "view" as an SMD, or interpreting a strange representation of scale) not very useful to the cataloguer. I have stuck with textually reported data for now, made as complete as possible.
(2)The design has had to be genuinely usable for tutorial purposes, even if it was capable of serving other purposes as well. For that reason, it was essential to provide not only completed records but raw data as well and an easy way to get back forth between them, notes interpreting the records (and linked to them), and preferably also a quick and dirty approach to the most important and commonly used rules. These I have attempted to provide: the last in the "stroll" section, the rest in the "hike." A more ambitious attempt to link individual bits of raw data to the purposes (or lack of purposes) it might serve ("this title is from accompanying material. You may place it in a note, but don't use it otherwise. Return to object.") evidences my interest in making the tutorial and interactive aspects of the project more prominent, but it too has had to be deferred. As it stands, users can make their way easily through a highlights-only introduction to the rules illustrated by snippets from my sample records, or slog their way through records enlightened or otherwise by my notes and able to return to the raw data at any time for another look. The examples chosen contributed substantially to the decision on which rules to highlight, of course: they created my own sense of which rules need to be used most often, and provided the essential illustrations.
The design, in order to be tutorial in function, has had also to create coherence. No one lost on the site will learn anything from it. Some features contributory to coherence include the use of slightly different background colors on the different kinds of pages, so that the user should be able to tell by color where in the morass of records and data he or she is (these colors may have to be made a little less subtle, admittedly), and of course of the leitmotifs.
Though the somewhat whimsical tone may have originated spontaneously, I have deliberately retained it, enlarged on it, and regularized it to the extent that the governing motifs of the site--hiking, strolling, etc. through cartographic cataloging--now reflect it (as well as echoing the cartographic subject matter). It is a fine balance to keep, but my hope is that the project can remain a little playful while remaining also precise in its statements, and that this playfulness can contribute to the making the site more attractive and congenial, so that those who visit might stay and learn.
The eight examples chosen (four was simply too few), all from my own map box, were picked with a view toward illustrating a diversity of materials that were nevertheless at the core of the materials addressed by AACR2 Chapter 3. I wished to avoid fringe materials (materials that Chapter 3 could be stretched to cover, but which did not really illuminate its everyday intended use) in favor of core materials, while also representing several types of common materials and raising several kinds of typical cataloging situations. Thus I chose one view (that also lacked virtually every kind of information, from scale to publisher and date), one historical map (that also happened to have an entire book attached to it), one atlas, one item with two distinct maps on it, one scaleless handdrawn map, several government maps plus some private ones and commercial ones, one topgraphic, one schematic route guide, some European some American, etc. Had time not run out, an historical atlas, a walker's path card, and an aeronautical and navigational chart were the next items to be included. The one situation that I wish most that I had more fully addressed is the map series and collection. Instead, I concentrated on individual-item cataloguing. The latter is admittedly more likely to be the concern of my audience of small-library occasional map cataloguers; the latter that of large library professional map cataloguers.
In bare list format, the portions so far completed included:
The linking of the data to responses indicating its possible usefulness to the creation of catalogue records (discussed above) is barely underway.
It is another project entirely to assess AACR2, even if I were presumptuous enough to try. Nevertheless, a few impressions have struck me.
Assessing the project itself, I cannot help feeling that the linking facilities of the web, handy though they are, and however susceptible to ingenious use, remain a very static and cumbersome tool. In doing, and learning, my own cataloguing, from books, with AACR balanced on one knee, the rule interpretations and guides scattered around me, the object itself in my hands to be examinened and reexamined again and again as again and again I realize that I need some additional piece of information the importance of which I had overlooked-- I am sure that no web tutorial can adequately substitute. I have tried to build something of this back and forth motion into the site, allowing users to go back repeatedly to the data, out to the interpretations, back to the record, but even if I were able to do it perfectly, with all the actual online rules linked in, it would still fall short of the book on the knee and repeated recourse to the object itself. My web site offers something else, of course, above all interaction with its author's mind and his way of regarding and interpreting the materials. But for serious acquisition of cataloguing skills using standard tools, it would take substantially more sophisticated software, not just a more sophisticated implementation, to mimic a process that we already accomplish well enough without any software at all.
Paul F. Schaffner : 3 May 1996