Moving Image Cataloguing: How to Create and How to Use a Moving Image Catalog

Citation

Hider, P. (2009), "Moving Image Cataloguing: How to Create and How to Use a Moving Image Catalog", The Electronic Library, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 192-193. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470910934911

Martha Yee is a well‐known exponent of moving image cataloguing, and this book is correspondingly authoritative. However, its scope is narrow, and what audience it serves is unclear. It is not very suitable as a general introduction to cataloguing, however, but rather as a textbook for a course on moving image cataloging. It includes useful review questions and exercises. This begs the question: how many such classes exist in the modern LIS curriculum? (No doubt Yee would like to see more.)

The book's secondary market is the librarian who wishes to undertake moving image cataloging. However, it possibly provides too much introductory material for the librarian who is already a proficient cataloguer of other materials, and is also very focused on the way that Yee does things at the UCLA Film & Television Archive – for instance, in terms of its emphasis on particular standards such as MARC21, AACR2 and LCSH. Most disappointingly, its coverage and explanation of the bibliographic features pertaining specifically to moving images is uneven. For example, it makes scant reference to many descriptive elements, such as screen format, picture and sound quality, technical production, etc. Indeed, its coverage of bibliographic description as a whole is slight.

There is a useful glossary, but again, a lack of moving image terminology. There is also a lack of illustrations, given the subject. Those that are included are mostly screen shots of library catalogues, and are hard on the eye. The book is quite well written, though at times the prose trails off into bullet points. The content is structured with an emphasis on authority control, and addresses early on the FRBR work‐expression‐manifestation‐item hierarchy and its application to motion pictures. This may be the most useful aspect of the book for those interested in performing name and title authority control for films. There are also several chapters dealing with subject access, though again there is a lot of material about generic processes and standards; even some of the examples are outside of the moving image domain.

While one might sympathize with Yee's complaints about library administrators and what is perceived to be their lack of appreciation for research‐oriented cataloguing, one wonders if this book is the best platform for some of her comments. The book tries to be a lot of things to different sets of people – students, catalogue users, cataloguers, moving image librarians, authority control experts, even perhaps library administrators. Unfortunately, it may struggle to find a large audience.