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Catalogue methodology
Both in terms of time and cash-flow the major part
of our project budget was devoted to cataloguing. This happened
not only because of the number of images to be catalogued,
but because, as we have indicated in chapter 1, the flanking
information needed to locate a photograph in place and time
was often not easy to obtain. In addition, our function as
a pilot project and our intention to serve a multi-disciplinary
and multi-cultural "readership" demanded innovative transdisciplinary
and transcultural cataloguing.
This is a field in which the project’s missionary society
background perhaps played a certain role. As the record of
an organisation with a long holistic tradition of activity
the Basel Mission’s archive is of interest to scholars in
a wide range of disciplines and not simply those concerned
in a narrow sense with mission and church history. Thus this
pictorial collection attracts people doing research in the
fields of anthropology and art history - and in environmental
sciences. Equally, the Basel Mission has spoken to a broad
spectrum of people in the areas from which it draws support.
To this day, a significant proportion of readers in the Basel
Mission archive are not so much pursuing academic projects,
as people interested in family and local history. At the same
time the Basel Mission is an organisation which has a long
experience of the evils of valuing only a narrow view of the
truth, and exists today as a fellowship with active participants
in four continents, orientated towards dialogical relationships
between people and religious groups. There was no question
but that our cataloguing system should eschew "eurocentrism"
and facilitate the kinds of searches people from China, India,
Indonesia, Ghana and Cameroon would like to undertake.
These local considerations in the Mission House Basel
are of more than parochial significance. In one sense they
can be seen as our Basel struggle with a situation described
globally by Hans Rütimann of the American Commission on Preservation
and Access in relation to digitalised documentation: "the
greatest problem in relation to the archiving of digitalised
information is not technical but organisational. This includes
the … problem of achieving international cataloguing standards,
a field in which we are trailing incredibly far behind the
progress in technology." (Memoriav No. 2 1997, p.
15, our translation). And, indeed, for the record, we wish
to stress that in doing the cataloguing work with this collection
we tried to follow as far as possible the international standards
available. The following two documents were of especial importance
for guiding our work: Minimum information categories for
museum objects - Proposed Guidelines for International Standards,
issued 1994 by CIDOC, International Documentation Committee
of the International Council of Museums. ISO 2788 Documentation
Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual
thesauri. But we found ourselves constantly facing the
problem that international standards were not detailed enough
in their coverage of matters which were crucial to our project.
At one level there are the different aspects of each
image which we were concerned to reflect in our cataloguing
system. An image is in one sense a physical object
of a certain size, the product of a certain photographic technique
and showing a certain state of preservation at the moment
of cataloguing. It is also a carrier of visual information.
It is a product of a particular author, i.e. photographer.
And it is linked to original documentation (captions,
dates in registers) which can provide decisive information
about what is depicted and when the image originated.
At another level our cataloguing was an application
of the familiar scientific demand for accuracy about sources.
We have tried to make it unambiguously and systematically
clear for every field of the database from what type of source
the proffered information comes. There is a clear distinction
between fields which quote original information and those
whose information was generated by the work of the project
team.
At yet another level we are conscious of the post-modern
view of the provisional nature of historical knowledge - and
therefore of the work of cataloguing. Our documentation of
the photographs has been produced by a specific team of European
researchers working with a particular pattern of knowledge
and sources - and with a particular time-budget - in the 1990s.
We have therefore also tried to set up a system in which new
knowledge about an image and its contents can be incorporated
in the database in Basel - in every case, of course, with
information on the source of the proposals made. This is important.
We may confidently expect the images in this collection to
generate a considerable stream of new knowledge and new suggestions
about interpretion, when they become generally available in
the areas where they were taken (see illustration 10).
The work of building up a catalogue which offers "transparency"
to people of different disciplines, different levels of education,
and rooted in different culture, goes beyond these general
postulates, however.
It was clear that if the cataloguing language was to
facilitate maximum access for the largest number of people
interested, it would have to be in English. With one relatively
small exception (the Duala- and Bassa-speaking regions which
became part of French Cameroon after 1918) the pre-1945 Basel
Mission worked in regions where English was and is the main
international language - i.e. in what have been British colonies
and in South China. Using English added, undoubtedly, to the
difficulties and volume of our work. The documentation of
individual images which exists in German, for example - original
picture-captions and other annotations - now exist in the
database not only as quotations of the original German text,
but in English translation.
Transcultural readability made specific demands on
our lists of geographical names, since it was clear that an
individual name should be internationally recognisable, but
also reflect the name actually used by the majority group
of local people. As we have already noted, it is often difficult
to find the modern equivalents of the names of small places
recorded in our archive in the archaic - or even idiosyncretic
- spelling of the missionaries before 1914. Our considerable
investment of effort in this field has resulted in a co-ordinated
thesaurus of 3720 geographical and ethnographical terms, however,
which gives systematic access in both directions - from the
old Basel Mission names to modern forms, and vice versa (see
the specimen information on Chinese place-names in Table 5c).
It is also, incidentally, possible to conduct searches at
local, regional and national levels. And images whose precise
locality cannot be identified are found by searches conducted
at the regional or, if this also cannot be established,
at the national level.
However, the aspect of cataloguing which demanded the
greatest effort in achieving intercultural and interdisciplinary
transparency of organisation and vocabulary was the development
of a list of keywords. As everyone involved in tasks of this
kind knows very well, the problems which arise in this field
can be extremely complex. Two examples may be given here.
We had to decide, for example, whether to use so-called
"local terms" in our keyword system, i.e. terms which
are used in one cultural setting only, like Maharaja
or Omanhene. After long reflection we decided to
avoid this but to instead rely on general terms which can
be applied in searches with a geographical limiter (in this
case "king" and "India", or "king" and "Ghana"). Of course
problems of definition crop up - but this will happen whichever
route we take, and we do avoid by this method getting into
discussions of the applicability of an indigenous term to
a specific object or office. (The question of which chiefs
in Ghana are really to be regarded as Omanhene is,
for example, a subject on which controversy is vivid and persistent.)
Furthermore, by adopting plain English keywords as far as
possible, and defining them in clear but general terms - here:
"king: ceremonial and titular head of a political unit with
a substantial claim to have been independent when it was incorporated
in a colonial state" - we hope both to have facilitated
searches by people who are interested primarily in one cultural
region, and by people interested in comparative questions.
We may take as our second example the much larger problem
presented by religion. In this case we have tried to avoid
building up a system which one might call euro- or church-centric,
or which gives qualitative prominence to the christian
religion. (The quantitative prominence of church and mission
is, of course, inherent in the nature of this collection -
on a rough estimate half of the photographs from overseas
are a direct documentation of the work of mission and/or the
development of indigenous local churches). But qualitatively,
in our system, christianity is treated like any other religion,
and we offer users the opportunity to conduct searches on
the phenomenology of any of the major religious traditions
which the Basel Mission met, exactly as can be done with the
christian churches and christian missions. In other words:
a search for "sacral buildings and settings" leads one inter
al to "church", "mosque", "shrine" and "temple" - and
a search for "sacral objects and symbols" to "Christmas crib",
"mask" and "prayer wheel".
This cataloguing system, applied to the 28,400 images
we have on the video disc (for its vital statistics see Table
5a) has now been in daily use by project staff and researchers
since the new ACCESS database became fully operational
in the spring of 1997, and in general we are satisfied with
it. At a technical level the software has shown itself to
be stable. At an intellectual level the database has proved
its versatility. For the project staff it has clarified and
expedited the work of cataloguing. It has also proved its
practicability for a wide variety of users. In recent months
it has been used by Europeans or Americans with major projects
in sociology, history and anthropology, and by people from
China interested, for a variety of reasons, in documenting
the history of the former Basel Mission Church there. Those
of us who have worked on the project look forward to further
evaluations of this part of our work from people who use the
catalogue - and from people setting up cataloguing systems
of a similar kind in other places.
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