Cataloguing is my favorite way to discover and connect with ideas, objects, and places. Catalogues are the communal version of Personal Archives; a gift that the cataloguer gives their community and the infrastructure that holds them. I’m most interested in the active components of the cataloguing process than the “stuff” that is found—how cataloguing feels like a labyrinth meditation, a tracking of space, a greeting between past and future cataloguers.
Readings: Optional readings are described so that you might find texts in the context of your own life. No purchases necessary, but please support local should you choose to do so.
1. Shared Definitions
What are catalogues? What does cataloguing mean to you?
Here’s a collaborative Jamboard for our class to developed shared understanding of the terms catalogue, inventory, cataloguer, and cataloguing. Enter the activity here to contribute your own thoughts.
The term ‘catalogue’ might remind you of the Dewey decimal system, or your favorite librarian. Librarians are professionals—their work is vital, extensive, and highly organized. We, however, are going to practice cataloguing on our own terms. Forget OCLC, ANSI, LCCN, MARC, and all other official sounding acronyms that you might be familiar with.
Instead, think about collections. Lists. Groups of things in your home (all the cleaning supplies under the sink. The towels on the top shelf not quite good enough for guests. The gallon Ziplock bag of pens you’ve accidentally stolen from the bank.) How do you know which items are part of the set?
Implicit cataloging! Catalogue = a complete, systemic list of items and their relevant characteristics.
To catalog is human nature. Or is it? According to American Libraries Magazine, as recently as the 1800s, “some libraries had no actual record of their holdings or relied on a brief author list. Much “finding” done in libraries at the time relied on the memory of the librarian.”
Are mental lists catalogs? Must a catalog be available to all? What is memory?
Cataloging allows a bird’s eye view of information to and about, or deemed valuable by, a given community. As such, it has its own limitations shaped by the community from which it stems. Catalogues are not objective or value neutral. At best, they respect and care. At worst, they mischaracterize and obscure. Subjective definitions of “relevant” and “complete” will always be at play.
Assignment: Practice the principles identified above.
Readings: Sets within the home. Sets outside of the home. Sets irrelevant to home.
2. Form Factor
What do catalogues look like? Does structure matter?
— visual, written, oral, remembered, lost, hidden, secret —
— neatly organized spreadsheets; dusty papers; proprietary personal systems —
Highly formalized catalogues are often intended as selection aids for specific items. As such, they will include extensive metadata, such as the authorship, name, valuation, geographic markers, perceptible characteristics, and assigned subject headings. Assigned subject headings often fail to respectfully accommodate listings associated with people, and the rigidity of the system is a contributor of epistemic harm in formal contexts. These catalogues will be hosted through the most sophisticated technology available and are made stronger through breadth. Think back to library catalogues, which have transitioned from slips of paper in dusty drawers to high-speed search bars. Or print consumer catalogues, which are likewise disappearing in favor of influencer-based marketing strategies. They are designed to provide all the information necessary to make a selection, purchase, or decision. Ease encourages consumption.
Informal catalogues may or may not be available for public consumption and their purposes extend beyond selection. Non-public catalogues are excellent places to store secrets, ideas, and musings, but they can also be used to sort personal collections and process one’s lived experiences. Informal catalogue listings may encompass ideas, thoughts, quotations, or other intangibles that a formal struggles to accommodate. The amount of meta-data contained fluctuates, and can contain more esoteric factors tailored to the cataloguer’s interest such as dreams or emotions associated with the listing, number of times the listing has been accessed in a given time period, or who generated the listing. Formal catalogues rarely credit the cataloguer, leading to epistemic harm, but here in the world of the informal, we can write our own rules. In informal catalogues, the cataloguer and end user are often one and the same, and depth is prioritized over breadth. When public, informal catalogues are often community driven and born out of desire to contribute to, or edit, a more formalized knowledge bank. They are collaborative, creative, and cross-functional.
From a Western perspective: catalogues are tools. Successful tools are those that serve their intended purpose. Form may support, or hinder, that service. Western catalogues prioritize the author over the object and may struggle to accommodate community produced works.
From an idealist’s perspective: a catalogue can be anything! Intention is moot, form is fleeting. Doctor, friend, teacher, lover.
From your perspective: ______________________________________________________________________________________________
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Informal Assignment #1: Take a lump of moldable material. (clay, shaving cream, a flour/water paste). Close your eyes. Contemplate a familiar catalog. Mold the material in response to your inner experience. Open your eyes. Crush your catalog.
Formal Assignment #2: Open a familiar formal catalogue and attempt to interact with it in a non-traditional manner—utilize the listings as a tarot deck, a family photo album, a mirror. How does form lend itself to these expressions? How does form hinder? Which components of a formal catalogue would you like to incorporate into your personal practice?
Readings: Every number of a measuring tape. The barcode of a hammer. The full collection of dust motes coating an item on the top shelf of your closet.
3. Meditation & Movement
How are catalogues made? How are catalogues then read?
To catalogue is to notice and engage the individual; it is repetitive motion. Scan, input, shift, scan. Photograph, list, shift. It returns dignity to items that might be experiencing the gift of care for the very first time. A cataloguer’s task centers completion connected to purpose without judgment.
Here are a few cataloguing principles:
- Set your parameters. You can’t make a complete list if you don’t know what you want to include!
- Find the pre-existing examples. There is almost always historical background to a given set.
- LEARN from what you’ve found and progress forward in your own endeavors.
- Create what you’d like to see in the world; produce with your community in mind.
What makes something worthy of being catalogued?
A cataloguer’s dedication and interest.
Assignment: sustain attention with a single object or task for 10 minutes.
Readings: the veins of a flower or leaf. Falling water. The slow breath of a sleeping cat.
4. Making Relation: by whom, with whom, for whom?
Who is present? Who is the cataloguer? Who is catalogued?
Catalogues facilitate encounters across space and time and manifest contained potential for connection. Parties join in a variety of ways, as a commissioner, creator, or end-user.
Cataloguers of years past did not consider the end-user of today. Yet even unforeseen end users have a right to access accurate information and utilize catalogues in a manner fulfilling to their individual needs. When outdated ideology is encoded into a system, listings are forced into subjects with dehumanizing headings– or left out of the record entirely, because they don’t “belong” under available headings and the system lacks flexibility or cultural workers to aid in culturally sensitive adaptations. The miscategorization of ones’ identity, or of listings associated with ones’ lived experience, can make those community members feel unseen and unwelcome.
Yet all users are welcome. Many efforts are being taken to rectify biases within the system:
CritCat, or critical cataloguing, is described as, “a movement of cultural heritage workers who work to bring social justice, radical empathy, and outreach work into their everyday practice.”
The Cataloging Lab is “a place for anyone who cares about library cataloging to experiment with making our controlled vocabularies and classification better.”
RadCat, the “Radical Cataloging” listserv, which reports on social and ethical responsibility in cataloging as well as innovative practices.
Assignment: Celebrate the unsung.
Readings: Places of difference. Communion arcs. Alternate lives of everyday encounters.
5. Catalogues in Action
Anything can be catalogued, but books and art are most common. There’s a lot to learn from looking at the catalogues of others. Below, you’ll see snippets from my most recent informal cataloguing project, which lists all the art on display at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law (NLaw). I’ve annotated the snippet to help you understand its structure and develop your own cataloguing system, and broken down our cataloguing principles from Part 3:
The Principles in Action
- Parameters:
For this project, my parameters were ‘items hanging on the walls of NLAW during Oct 2023’ (and a few large sculptures with wall plaques). - Pre-existing:
Through word of mouth, I knew that the NLaw collection had been catalogued at least twice before. After extensive research, I can confirm that the collection was catalogued in 2007, 1984, 1981, 1949, 1934, and 1925. - Progress:
I didn’t add cardinal directions to the 2023 catalogue until seeing the example of the 1984 project. I didn’t add images until seeing the 2007 text. But I was very grateful to the makers of the 1984 and 2007 projects and decided to follow their lead. - Produce:
NLaw Campus Art Walk—I don’t believe a catalogue ends until it’s accessible to the community from which it was made. In this case, the students, staff, faculty, and alumni of the NLaw community weren’t interested in a searchable database or long paper analyzing the catalogue’s composition. Instead, we created a walking tour, audio guide, website, and brochure to share the story contained within the catalogue in a more engaging way.
How can you leverage your skills, resources, and time to create opportunities within your own community?
I embarked on this project out of personal curiosity. Where we spend our time, and the things that surround us in those spaces, have powerful influence over our feelings of belonging and contribution to a space. When I learned that no one knew the full extent of the NLaw collection, I decided to become that person. I’d had prior experience with catalogue development, so I felt equipped to begin the endeavor without approval or official support. For three weeks, I was at the campus day and night photographing works, removing them from the walls, and scanning frames and borders for my metadata entries. I wanted the project to be convertible to a formal catalogue at a later date, so I met with experts at various museums and libraries to discuss various structures.
I opted to utilize Google Sheets, so that it could be collaborative, but am still hunting for its final home.
Alongside my efforts, I continued to hunt for pre-existing catalogues. I learned to enjoy the meditative aspects of the hunt, the all-consuming focus required by each individual object. I built relationships across identity, location, time and space. I began to feel part of the continuum of history, and I learned how and why my surrounding environment looked the way that it does.
If you’d like to learn for yourself, the full audio is available here.
| 1925 | 2023 |
| BY HAND | TYPED INTO THE CLOUD |
| PAPER CARDS | GOOGLE SHEETS |
| WOMAN-MADE | WOMAN-MADE |
Can you see the cataloguer’s fingerprints? Her name was Anne Millar. What traces of self do you leave in your catalogues, intentional or otherwise?
Recall item #324 of the 2023 NLAW art catalogue. She is also known as #1563 in the 1925 catalogue, and ‘Retirement: Minerva’s Favorite Bird‘ in her wall plaque.
Mrs. Millar, Mr. Cagle, and JHW. Together with over 1500 pieces of artwork, they form the 1925 catalogue. They left this note for each of us who read their cards now. What notes will we leave our future readers?
There will be no assignments or readings this week as you prepare for the final exam, a catalogue of your own design.
Catalogue references two other syllabi: Personal Archives & Visual Memoir by Emily Bluedorn and Taylor Zhang; and ART 500 / Senior Thesis: Memories, Mindfulness & Making by Eric Weeks.
