1. Cataloguing image collections in Intute
Mary Burslem, Intute
ARLIS Picture This!
Wednesday 9th September 2009
Introduction to me
Introduction to Intute:
Intute reviews and catalogues electronic, online resources that are available via the Internet (i.e. websites) that are primarily of interest to students, researchers, lecturers, librarians and others in higher education.

2. A bit of history…
First there was ADAM – art, design, architecture and media…
Then Artifact - architecture, communication and media, design, fashion and beauty, performing arts and visual arts…
Then there was Intute: Arts and Humanities
And now Intute.
ADAM was a subject gateway for art, design, architecture and media. Started in the mid-1990s, it was incorporated (or harvested, is the technical term) in to Artifact in October 2003.
Artifact was the arts hub of the RDN (or Resource Discovery Network) that joined up with Humbul (the humanities hub) in July 2006 to become Intute: Arts and Humanities.
University of the Arts London was a partner of Artifact. This meant that when we were setting Artifact up we liaised with subject librarians from LLR over what to include.
In July 2006 we joined up with humanities and became the Intute: Arts and Humanities subject group of Intute (previously the RDN).
In July 2009 we re-launched, abolishing the four subject groups (from the website at least – I still work for the arts within the A&H team though), and establishing 19 top level subject (or browse) headings based on the JACS subject codes.
In this talk I will looking at the life cycle of an Intute record from the discovery of the original website to the completed record – but first let’s look at some of the different kinds of images in Intute.

3. Images in Intute – museum / gallery collections
V&A’s objects in the ceramics collection
One of the key types of image collections that we hold in Intute is the museum or gallery collection, such as the V&A’s collections of images – here it is objects in the ceramics collection.

4. Images in Intute – artists’ websites
Claude Heath’s drawings
We also have a lot of artists’ websites, which hold images of their work, such as Claude Heath’s drawings, in this example.

5. Images in Intute – website as art project
My boyfriend came back from the war’ created by Art.Teleportacia (Olia Lialina)
We also catalogue a smaller number of sites where the website is an art project in itself, like for example, this one, ‘My boyfriend came back from the war’ created by Art.Teleportacia (Olia Lialina).

6. Discovery of images or collections
or discussion lists, such as JISCmail
Alerting services
Reading lists
Advanced searches of search engines
Following links within trusted sites
Suggestions
Exploring large websites for its distinct parts (granularity)
Therefore, what are is the process that we go through to create a record of an image collection?
We have to start by finding new sites.
There are all kinds of ways of finding new sites to catalogue (VADS, for example, announces their new collections via JISCmail; alerts; advanced searches of search engines; following links pages within trusted sites; suggestions).
One good way is to browse large sites and catalogue individual pages within the resource (if they have nothing in common beyond being accessible from one home page). This narrowing down process is called ‘granularity’.

7. Adding metadata We then add the key metadata fields: Title URL
Description
Keywords
Classifications
Resources types
Resource creator
I will talk a bit more about the field marked up in green.

8. Description
The resource description forms the heart of the Intute record. The purpose of the description is to help users decide whether or not the website will be of interest to them, without themselves having to explore every part of the website. Therefore, the description (I would hope) should be concise, but comprehensive, explaining the important features of the resource in clear, lucid English.
'Key words' are worked in to descriptions where possible to assist searching, as the description is a searchable part of the record.

9. Keywords
The keywords are split into controlled keywords & uncontrolled keywords.
Organisations, people, places, and subjects are added to the controlled keywords.
Freetext keywords, or keywords that are not in the thesauri, are added to the uncontrolled keywords.
For organisations and people we use the Library of Congress subject headings, adding the people in a separate interface, so that they can be entered in a consistent way, using dates and roles, where possible.
For places and subjects we use the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) and Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus.
The keywords are browsable links, so if you click on the link then that would take you to other records with that term in the keywords.

10. Classification
We (as in Artifact – the arts side of Arts and Humanities) created our own classification scheme, but based it on AAT and Dewey to a certain extent. Humanities used JACS for top level headings, and Learn Direct for second level headings. The main difference between arts and humanities is that we narrowed the subjects down – in detail – to up to 5 or 6 levels, whereas humanities stuck to two levels only. We have never resolved this. However, Humanities did not cater for images in any way.
At the top of the screen you will see a clickable subject string to show you where you are…

11. Classification
… If you click on ‘More details’ and scroll down then you will see all the classifications that have been assigned to that record.
You will see that we have ‘Cross-disciplinary’ classification. Although this may be a bit of misnomer, it is where we put resources relating to images and collections.

12. Resource Types
The Resource Types identify the nature of the primary content of the resource. This would be the equivalent of sorting by book, periodical, sound recording etc. in a library catalogue.
It is possible to filter by Resource Type within a particular browse heading.

13. Thank you and keep in touch…
We then add other data, such as the Resource Creator and Period details, and then make the record ‘live’.
On reflection, when cataloguing, we do not treat images or image collections very differently to text-based resources, but I would hope that they are easily retrievable them via the keywords, classifications and resource types.
Thank you for listening – does anyone have any questions?