A Thing About Standards

The collected photographs of one of the most meticulous scholars of Islamic art and architecture live at the Rare Books Library. Donated in 1956 while he was a professor at the University, the photographs document buildings from all over the Middle East. I am writing a record for this collection for the library's database so that when people search for photographs of Islamic architecture in the Middle East, they'll know that the Rare Books library has close to 8,000 awaiting their perusal.

When searching for things like this, chances are that the names and subject headings you use to look up such information have been standardized by the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has a database from where you can find standard usage of names and their spelling of people, places and organizations. For instance, you would think the official name of Cairo is Cairo, but in fact the Name Authority, as it is called, used by the Library of Congress (and hence, the rest of the world) is Fustat. Fustat refers to the settlement on the Nile made by one of the first rulers of the medieval Islamic world who also made this place its capital, meaning "tent," as in the place where they pitched their tents. The LOC Authority records contain older names and will also list the sources of for their entry, similar to the OED.

In order to create the record of the Islamic architecture photograph collection, I frequently check what the LOC has in their database. Yesterday, while I was researching a castle built by the Crusaders in Syria between 1000 and 1200 A.D. (not "Islamic" in style but in region), I discovered that the Library of Congress insisted my castle was in Jordan. Searching for the commonly used name on the LOC database brought no returns of any current record. But I did find my castle named in the official record of another site in Jordan, implying that the Crusader castle in Jordan used it as an alternate name. Misleading and disappointing, indeed. The Syrian castle is a major structure built just north of Damascus that survives in great condition and has not been ignored by Syrian, scholars, writers and tourists of the last millenium.

After finding evidence of my castle's existence in Syria with the help of the online photo collection at the Library of Congress (as well as current publications about historical monuments in Syria, of which there are plenty), I emailed the cataloguing department to let them know. On the same day (!) they wrote back to let me know they would correct the Name Authority record for the site in Jordan. Excitemento. A wrong has been righted.

Sometimes I get the question: "What do you do at work?" I thought this might be an interesting example. By the way, Happy Thanksgiving. I hope everyone gets some good time off to enjoy themselves and recoup.