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These instructions will guide you when you use our image collection management system, PiCtor, which
was jointly developed by Princeton and Cornell Universities. It is written in Access? and is based on IRIS,
an image management system which was developed by a consortium of New England educational
institutions. Basic data entry instructions are outlined in this manual. For more focused and detailed
cataloging guidance, you should always consult Cataloguing Cultural Objects: a Guide to Describing
Cultural Works and Their Images (CCO). A draft of this publication is available online at
http://www.vraweb.org/CCOweb/ and as printouts in the Knight Visual Resources Facility (KVRF).
Open the current version of PiCtor. This reveals the Switchboard; choose your initials from the cataloger
drop down list at the lower right corner. If you fail to enter your initials, the system will prompt you to do
so. Next click on the area of the database that you wish to open: Works, Images, Orders, Creators,
Authorities, or Tools.
What is a Work?
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Authority Files in PiCtor
PiCtor incorporates two types of tables within its structure: records and authority files. Records contain
information about the works and images contained in our implementation of PiCtor as well as information
about how we acquired them. The information contained in PiCtor records together with digital image files
linked to these records comprise the visual collection which we maintain for the use of the Cornell
University community. The authority tables provide the consistent and controlled vocabulary or
terminology used in many of the fields in PiCtor records.
Cataloguing Cultural Objects, Part 1, General Guidelines, VII "Authority Files and Controlled Vocabularies"
provides an excellent description of and rationalization for the use of authority files. A series of excerpts
from this publication follows, but you should consult the CCO itself for more complete information.
"Authority control is critical in the online environment. Authority control is a system of procedures that
ensures the consistent use and maintenance of information in database records. Procedures include the
recording and validation of terminology using controlled vocabulary and authority files."
"Authority files contain the terminology used in cataloging Work and Image Records. In the context of
CCO, an authority file contains records for persons, places, things, and other concepts related to the
works and images being cataloged. Such information is important for retrieval of the Work and Image
Record, but it is more efficiently recorded in separate authority files rather than in the Work or Image
Records. The advantage of storing such ancillary information in an authority file is that this information
need be recorded only once, and it may then be linked to all appropriate Work and Image Records, rather
Document generated by Confluence on Jan 16, 2007 10:31 Page 10
than being repeated in each pertinent Work or Image Record."
"In an authority file, records for persons, places, and other concepts may contain terms and names for
the concept, with one term or name identified as the preferred term and the others considered variant
terms. The record may contain other information as well: for example in a Personal and Corporate Name
Authority, the birth and death dates of a person would be included."
"A controlled vocabulary is an organized arrangement of words and phrases that are used to index
content and/or to retrieve content through browsing or searching. It typically includes preferred and
variant terms and has a limited scope or describes a specific domain. Controlled vocabulary is a broader
concept than authority file, encompassing authority files as well as other controlled lists of terminology.
For some elements or fields in the database, a controlled list may be sufficient to control terminology,
particularly where the terminology for that field is limited and unlikely to have synonyms or ancillary
information. Controlled vocabularies can be such simple list of unique preferred terms; they can be sets
of equivalent terms for the same concept (synonym rings); they can include preferred and non-preferred
terms; they can identify hierarchies of terms (taxonomies): and they can include all of these
characteristics in addition to having semantic relationships among terms and other concepts (thesauri)."
The authority files in PiCtor are divided into two basic groups: those that appear on the Switchboard and
those that don't. The authority files that appear on the Switchboard are those that are used and modified
most frequently. They include: Creators, Publications, Repository, and Site. You should always enter
them from the Switchboard.
The remaining authority files are accessible from the "Authority Tables" file on the Switchboard. This
schedule lists all authority tables including those that appear directly in the Switchboard.
It includes those
authority tables that are shared in other PiCtor implementations and as well as those that apply only to
our local implementation. The shared authority tables include: agents, authority tables (a complete listing
of all authority tables), country, culture, institutions, material, region, subject, technique, vendor/donor,
view type, and work type. These tables are used to create work and image description or cataloging
metadata. Those tables that apply only to Cornell are: building codes, building divisions, culturecodes,
geocodes, labeltypes, media, and subject codes. Most of these table names include an indication that
they are Cornell files (e.g., CU); they are generally used to provide classification codes for local slide
classification.
You should be aware of several conventions that are used in many of the authority tables. ?
- Terms entered in CAPS are alternate terms which are provided for reference and should not
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- beused. You must identify the preferred term and use it instead. The preferred term should be easily
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- located in the record of the non-preferred variant.
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- When more than one term is entered into a single field in a record, the default delimiter is
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- asemicolon (
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- Some fields are not used by Cornell University. In some, but not all cases, these fields are populated
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- by information. The KVRF at Cornell does not maintain this information as new records are added.
Check the PiCtor manual for more guidance.
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