Between textuality and iconology: insights into the subject indexing of maps

Abstract

In recent decades in the library world maps have gained increasingly greater consideration, partly due to the projects of digitization undertaken. Their special characteristics make them interesting especially from the perspective of integrated catalogs and in relation to the use of descriptive standards and of shared tools, such as, for example, controlled vocabularies. From the point of view of subject indexing, it is important to look at maps taking into account various factors: the period of their creation (old or modern), the medium, the techniques used, the thematic types, and the ‘visual’ components that undoubtedly prevail over the textual ones. In this context, issues such as the type of documentary language to be preferred (pre-coordinated or post-coordinated), the type of conceptual analysis to be applied and the methods for controlling terminology, including toponyms, become of interest. In other countries, multiple ‘tags’ of various types are normally implemented in library catalogs, so as to express the semantic contents of these resources and to enable their exploration. In Italy, our Servizio bibliotecario nazionale (SBN, the National Library Service), thanks to its most recent developments, will play a key role in overcoming a jagged and not always consistent situation. The system of the Nuovo soggettario, the Italian official subject headings and indexing tool, is being more and more widely used in the treatment of non-bibliographic resources, including cartography. Its thesaurus already contains a very rich variety of terms useful in this field. Some of them are already interoperable both with similar indexing tools in other languages (e.g., LCSH, Rameau, GND) and with museum and archival databases that describe maps, albeit with different standards.