The Archival Photograph and Its Meaning: Formalisms for Modeling Images

Abstract

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding schemes and description standards provide enough foundation and structure? The emerging semantic Web 3.0 environment presents new challenges. Ontology, formalizations, semantic annotations, and effective machine processing are of immediate and practical importance. To begin exploring these concepts within the context of archival description, a new semantic archives model is proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• archival description
• archival descriptive standards
• photography
• photographic collections
• knowledge representation
• ontology
• knowledge bases

Notes

1. Victor Burgin, “Photography, Phantasy, Function,” in Thinking Photography, ed. V. Burgin, (London: Macmillan, 1982), 192.

2. An example is Gilda Williams, a critic and curator of contemporary art and photography and former managing editor of Flash Art International. For an example of her work, see Gilda Williams, Boris Michailov (New York: Phaidon, 2001).

3. Jonathan Friday, “Looking at Nature through Photographs,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 33, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 25–33.

4. Dona Schwartz, “Visual Ethnography: Using Photography in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Sociology 12, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 119–154.

5. For one of the most historically significant commentaries on photography by a photographer, see the description of “View of the Boulevards at Paris” in William Henry Fox Talbot, Pencil of Nature (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969).

6. For examples, see pages 81–118 in Helena Zinkham and Elisabeth Betz Parker, eds., Descriptive Terms for Graphic Materials: Genre and Physical Characteristic Headings (Washington, DC: Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service, 1986).

7. Tim Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila, “The Semantic Web,” Scientific American 284, no. 5 (May 2001): 34–43.

8. Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Diane Vogt-O’Connor, with Helena Zinkham, Brett Carnell, and Kit Peterson, Photographs: Archival Care and Management (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).

9. Sue McKemmish, Glenda Acland, Nigel Ward, and Barbara Reed, “Describing Records in Context in the Continuum: The Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema,” Archivaria 48 (Fall 1999): 3–43.

10. David Campany, “A Few Remarks on the Lens, the Shutter, and the Light-Sensitive Surface,” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 206.

11. Luciana Duranti, “Origin and Development of the Concept of Archival Description,” Archivaria 35 (September 1992), 47.

12. Frank B. Evens, Donald F. Harrison, and Edwin A. Thompson, comp., “A Basic Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers,” American Archivist 37, no. 3 (July 1974), s.v. “description,” 421.

13. S. Muller, J. A. Feith, and R. Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, trans. Arthur H. Leavitt (New York: H. W. Wilson Co, 1968).

14. Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, 100.

15. T. R. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965): 111–112.

16. Kenneth W. Duckett, Modern Manuscripts (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local history, 1975), 118–130.

17. Duranti, “Origin and Development of the Concept of Archival Description,” 47.

18. Fredric M. Miller, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1990), 7.

19. Duranti, “Origin and Development of the Concept of Archival Description,” 48.

20. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), 112–113.

21. Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 2005).

22. Miller, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts, 7.

23. Miller, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts, 25.

24. Ernst Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” The American Archivist 3 (1940): 168.

25. Bureau of Canadian Archivists, Rules for Archival Description (Revised version, 2008), xviii, available at http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/RAD/RAD_Frontmatter_July2008.pdf (accessed October 29, 2008).

26. Roe, Arranging and Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 15.

27. Minnesota Historical Society, “3M Company: An Inventory of its Corporate Records at the Minnesota Historical Society,” available at http://www.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00281.xml (accessed October 26, 2008).

28. Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings,” Archival Science 2 (2002), 264. The context in which this statement is being made is historical. The authors are describing some key assumptions made by archivists rooted in the “traditional streams” of archival description. They later outline new questions raised by postmodernists; for example, “Do archivists participate actively in the construction of a record's meanings and its significances?” (p. 265).

29. Richard J. Cox, Jane Greenberg, and Cynthia Porter, “Access Denied: The Discarding of Library History,” American Libraries (April 1998): 57–61.

30. Washington and Jefferson College, “Archives and Special Collections,” available at http://www.washjeff.edu/content.aspx?section=1399&menu_id=399&crumb=398&id=1400 (accessed October 23, 2008).

31. Robert H. Burger, Authority Work (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1985), 4.

32. Helen F. Schmierer, “The Relationship of Authority Control to the Library Catalog,” Illinois Libraries 62, no. 7 (September 1980): 599–603.

33. Hoover Institution, “Library and Archives,” available at http://www.hoover.org/hila/ (accessed October 19, 2008).

34. Joan M. Schwartz, “Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’ and the Margins of Archivy,” Archivaria 54, (Fall 2002): 142–171.

35. Ibid., 142.

36. The MARC for Archival Visual Materials: A Compendium of Practice sets out the rules for creating individual records for photographs. See Maryly Snow, “Visual Depictions and the Use of MARC: A View from the Trenches of Slide Librarianship,” in Beyond the Book: Extending MARC for Subject Access, eds. Toni Petersen and Pat Molholt (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1990). Snow discusses the advantages of shared cataloging. She explains that the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) is approved for use in entering controlled subject vocabulary in MARC's 654 field. By entering item level records in national bibliographic utilities such as OCLC, librarians are able to view other libraries' records and borrow terms they see are appropriate for their collections or, if authorized, can add terms to each other's records. Snow made the observation that where an image is located in a book there is also related textual information. She suggested that creating links for an image item record to its source book would create a de facto subject index to specific persons and places.

37. Ruth B. Bordin and Robert M. Warner, The Modern Manuscript Library (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1966), 55.

38. Richard J. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” Journal of Archival Organization 5, no. 4 (2007): 16.

39. Ibid.

40. Steven L. Hensen, Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts: A Catalog Manual for Archival Repositories, Historical Societies, and Manuscript Libraries, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1989), 5.

41. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” 20.

42. Atul Nekar, “Managing Technological Innovation,” Fathom Knowledge Network, 2002, Available at http://www.fathom.com/feature/35108/ (accessed November 10, 2008).

43. Ibid.

44. To learn more about EAD, see the Encoded Archival Description Version 2002 Official Site, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/ead/ (accessed on December 12, 2008).

45. Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila, “The Semantic Web,” 34–43.

46. This terminology is borrowed from a framework proposed by David Bearman for classifying standards, which was presented at the first meeting of the Working Group on Standards for Archival Description (WGSAD) who in turn developed a three-dimensional matrix that viewed standards in terms of strength of standard, developer of standard, and level of description. The matrix presents four levels of description; however, this paper is concerned with only three, leaving out the broadest level information systems standards. See David Bearman, “Strategy for Development and Implementation of Archival Description Standards,” in Toward International Descriptive Standards for Archives, papers presented at the ICA Invitational Meeting of Experts on Descriptive Standards, National Archives of Canada, October 4–7, 1988 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993), 161–171. The matrix can be viewed at the Society of American Archivists Web site, “Standards for Archival Description,” available at http://www.archivists.org/catalog/stds99/intro.html#6 (accessed November 7, 2008).

47. Edwin Klijn and Yola de Lusenet, “In the Picture: An Overview of European Photographic Collections,” ECPA report 11, European Commission on Preservation and Access (2000) cited in Edwin Klijn and Yola de Lusenet, SEPIADES: Cataloguing Photographic Collections (Amsterdam: European Commission on Preservation and Access, 2004): 8, 13, available at http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/publ/pdf/2719.pdf (accessed November 9, 2008).

48. Web site of the National Library of Spain, available at http://www.bne.es/ (accessed November 10, 2008).

49. Klijn and de Lusenet, SEPIADES, 14.

50. Gigliola Fioravanati, “Present Activities and Future Projects of the Italian Center for Photoreproduction, Binding and Restoration (CFLR) in the Field of Archival Photographic Collections Preservation,” paper presented at SEPIA conference “Changing Images: The Role of Photographic Collections in a Digital Age,” Helsinki, September 2003, available at http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/conferencePapers/Fioravanti.pdf (accessed November 14, 2008).

51. Ibid.

52. For a more thorough examination of archival description standards, see Victoria Irons Walch, comp., Standards for Archival Description: A Handbook (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1994), available at http://www.archivists.org/catalog/stds99/index.html (accessed May 1, 2009).

53. Ron Daniel Jr. and Carl Lagoze, “Extending the Warwick Framework: From Metadata Containers to Active Digital Objects,” D-Lib Magazine (November 1997), available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november97/daniel/11daniel.html (accessed November 8, 2008).

54. Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, “Committee on Cataloging: Description & Access, Task Force on Metadata,” available at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/tf-meta3.html (accessed on November 10, 2008).

55. Daniel Jr. and Lagoze, “Extending the Warwick Framework.”

56. Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, “Committee on Cataloging.” See also Tony Gill and others, Introduction to Metadata (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), available at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/index.html (accessed October 30, 2008).

57. Michael Steidl, IPTC Standards: Photo Metadata White Paper 2007 (Berkshire, United Kingdom: IPTC, 2007), 7.

58. Ibid., 8.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid. Another rights metadata solution is copyrightMD version 0.9 developed by the California Digital Library (CDL). The copyrightMD schema is designed to be incorporated with other XML schemas for descriptive and structural metadata (e.g., CDWA Lite and MARC XML). See http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/rights/schema/. See also Karen Coyle, “Descriptive Metadata for Copyright Status,” First Monday 10, no. 10 (October 2005). Available at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1282/1202.

61. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, “History of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative,” available at http://dublincore.org/about/history/ (accessed November 7, 2008).

62. Leif Andresen, “After MARC—What Then?” Library Hi Tech 22, no. 1 (2004): 47.

63. Daniel Jr. and Lagoze, “Extending the Warwick Framework,” 1997.

64. The Data Standard Committee of the U.S.-based Visual Resources Association developed VRA Core elements in 1996. The standards are currently on Version 4.0, released in 2007 and can be accessed at http://www.vraweb.org/organization/committees/datastandards/.

65. Worthington Memory is a project of Worthington Libraries and Worthington Historical Society in Ohio that utilizes Dublin Core as their encoding scheme. The Dublin Core element used for describing the photograph's format describes a digital image file, not the original photograph for which the online records serves as surrogate. Available online http://www.worthingtonmemory.org/ (accessed April 20, 2009).

66. The Cleveland Museum of Art, available at http://www.clemusart.com/explore/ (accessed April 21, 2009).

67. Murtha Baca and Patricia Harpring, eds., Categories for the Description of Works of Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust), available at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/cdwa/index.html.

68. International Federation of Library Associations and Institution, International Standard Bibliographic Description (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2007).

69. International Council on Archives, ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, 2nd ed. (Ottawa: ICA, 2000), available at http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/isad_g_2e.pdf (accessed November 1, 2008), 7.

70. International Institute of Social History, MARC record search, available at http://search.iisg.nl/search/search?action=transform&xsl=marc_images-form.xsl&col=marc_images&page=1&lang=en (accessed November 1, 2008).

71. International Institute of Social History, “Photo Collections,” available at http://www.iisg.nl/image_sound/photo/ (accessed November 1, 2008).

72. International Council on Archives, ISAD(G), 9.

73. Ibid., 7.

74. Ibid., Appendix B, n.p.

75. Klijn and de Lusenet, SEPIADES, 10.

76. Ibid., 11.

77. MODS does not support “round-tripability” with MARC 21. In other words, a MARC 21 record converted to MODS cannot be converted back to MARC 21 without some loss of data. See Library of Congress, “Limitations of MODS,” available at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ (accessed November 12, 2008).

78. MADS is a development of the Library of Congress available at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/ (accessed November 11, 2008).

79. Library of Congress, Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: Primer and Reference Manual (Washington, DC: Digital Library Federation, September 2007), 6, available at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/METS%20Documentation%20final%20070930%20msw.pdf (accessed April 23, 2009).

80. NISO MIX is a set of technical data elements being developed in partnership by the Library of Congress and the NISO (National Information Standards Organization) Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images Standards Committee. Available at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mix/ (accessed April 15, 2009).

81. National Information Standards Organization, “NISO Standards,” available at http://www.niso.org/kst/reports/standards/ (accessed April 20, 2009).

82. American Library Association, Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed., 2002 revision. (Chicago: American Library Association, 2002)

83. Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, “Strategic Plan for RDA 2005–2009,” (December 7, 2007), available at http://www.rda-jsc.org/stratplan.html (accessed November 10, 2008); Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, “RDA: Resource Description and Access” (October 30, 2008), available at http://www.rda-jsc.org/rda.html (accessed November 10, 2008).

84. Home page of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, available at http://www.aacr2.org/ (accessed November 11, 2008).

85. Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, “RDA FAQ,” available at http://www.rda-jsc.org/rdafaq.html (accessed November 3, 2008).

86. For a more detailed explanation of the FRBR model and the impact of FRBR on cataloging standards, see Pat Riva, “Introducing the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and Related IFLA Developments,” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 33, no. 6 (August/September 2007): 7–11.

87. University of North Carolina University Libraries, “North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives,” available at http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/photos.html (accessed November 3, 2008).

88. Murtha Baca, Patricia Harpring, Elisa Lanzi, Linda McRae, and Ann Baird Whiteside, eds., Cataloging Cultural Objects: Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images. (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006.) Additional material available at http://www.vrafoundation.org/ccoweb/index.htm (accessed November 7, 2008).

89. Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and their Images. (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006). A companion Web site to this manual can be accessed at http://www.vrafoundation.org/ccoweb/cco/selections.html (accessed November 9, 2008).

90. Library of Congress Authorities (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2002–). LCSH can be searched online at http://authorities.loc.gov/ (accessed December 3, 2008).

91. Getty Vocabulary Program, Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, Vocabulary Program, 1988). Available online at Art & Architecture Thesaurus Online, http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/aat/ (accessed October 2, 2008). The Art & Architecture Thesaurus was originally developed for use as a controlled vocabulary for use in text-based materials when making references to objects and images, but it has since evolved to become a tool for describing and cataloging objects and images. Edie M. Rasmussen, “Indexing Multimedia: Images,” in Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, vol. 32, ed. Blaise Cronin (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 1997), 169–196.

92. The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials can be accessed online at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm2/ (accessed September 24, 2008) .

93. Rasmussen, “Indexing Multimedia,”169–196.

94. H. van deWaal, D. Couprie, E. Tholen, and G. Vellekoop, eds., ICONCLASS: An Iconographical Classification System (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1973–1985), available at http://www.iconclass.nl/ (accessed September 24, 2008).

95. Elisabeth W. Betz, Graphic Materials: Rules for Describing Original Items and Historical Collections (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1982). A 1996 version is available online in various formats at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/gm/graphmat.html (accessed November 1, 2008).

96. The concepts of knowledge representation presented in this section could be extended to any number of document forms, but the focus of this paper is on the archival photograph. The reason for this focus becomes more apparent when the discussion shifts to ontology. Reasoning about knowledge associated with the photograph (physical entity) and the image portrayed on its surface raises markedly different ontological questions than does say reasoning about an audio file or textual document.

97. Randall Davis, Howard Shrobe, and Peter Szolovits, “What Is a Knowledge Representation?” AI Magazine 14, no. 1 (1993): 17.

98. Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, 112–113.

99. Davis, Shrobe, and Szolovitz, “What is Knowledge Representation?” 17.

100. Ibid., 18.

101. Ronald J. Brachman and Hector J. Levesque, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (New York: Elsevier, 2004): 3.

102. This card indexing system could be considered a precursor to the modern online photo archives—for example, the British Columbia Archives, whose records include “thumbnail” images and text. British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum, “Visual Records: Overview,” available at http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/sn-278EA8D/visual/visual.htm (accessed November 22, 2008). The British Columbia Archives consists of several collections, including a visual records index that contains over 179,000 textual descriptions and over 84,000 images online.

103. Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila, “The Semantic Web,” 34–43.

104. One possible specification language for representing formal ontologies in the semantic Web is Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF). KIF is an expressive, declarative first-order predicate logic language. A variant of KIF is used for describing the largest public ontology SUMO (Standard Upper Merged Ontology). KIF, along with Ontolingua Frame Ontology, is the representation language used in Stanford University's Ontolingua System. See http://www.ontologyportal.org/ and http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/software/ontolingua/.

105. Thomas R. Gruber, “A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications,” Knowledge Acquisition 5 (1993): 199; Thomas R. Gruber, “Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing,” International Journal Human-Computer Studies 43, no. 5–6 (November 1995): 1.

106. Ibid.

107. Jung-Min Kim, Byoung-Il Choi, Hyo-Phil Shin, and Hyoung-Joo Kim, “A Methodology for Constructing of Philosophy Ontology Based on Philosophical Texts,” Computer Standards and Interfaces 29 (2007): 302.

108. Laura Hollink, Guus Schreiber, Jan Wielemaker, and Bob Wielinga, “Semantic Annotation of Image Collections,” available at http://www.cs.vu.nl/~laurah/1/papers/Hollink03_saic.pdf (accessed September 1, 2008).

109. Graham Clarke, The Photograph (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27.

110. Adam Pease, The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO), “Frequently Asked Questions,” (April 16, 2006), available at http://www.ontologyportal.org/FAQ.html#methodology (accessed November 10, 2008).

111. John McCarthy and Pat Hayes, “Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence,” Machine Intelligence 4 (1969): 1.

112. McCarthy and Hayes, “Some Philosophical Problems,” cited in John F. Sowa, Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 2000), 186–187.

113. R. J. Brachman, “On the Epistemological Status of Semantic Networks,” in Associative Networks: Representation and Use of Knowledge by Computers, ed. N. Findler (New York: Academic Press, 1979).

114. Nicola Guarino, Philosophy and the Cognitive Science (Vienna: Holder-Pivhler-Tempsky, 1994).

115. Nicola Guarino, “Formal Ontology, Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 43 (1995): 632.

116. Ibid.

117. Ibid., 631.

118. In first-order logic, unspecified objects are represented by variables, in this example “x.” If reference was being made to a specific calotype print named “Washington,” then it could have been formalized as: print(Washington) ∧ calotype(Washington).

119. Guarino, “Formal Ontology,” 632.

120. Ibid., 633.

121. John F. Sowa, Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 2000): 51.

122. Hector J. Levesque and Ronald J. Brachman, “Expressiveness and Tractability in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning,” Computational Intelligence 3 (1987): 78–93.

123. Astute readers may wonder why the author has not suggested, for example, the popular ontology editor Protégé and OWL ontology language in the closing paragraphs of this paper. For one reason, this paper is at its close and the topics of languages and editors, as well as reasoners and ontologies, deserve a separate treatment in another, future paper. It's also worthwhile bringing to the forefront two less well known architectures (possibly due to their complexity and absence of user friendly help guides) that are quite powerful for very different reasons. What is most important is to begin hunting for answers to questions about effective ways of representing the meaning of photographs in a Semantic Web environment by letting go of card catalogs and finding aids along with their myriad standards and to begin exploring new approaches.