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Comparative design image classification schemes

The Fogg Art Museum classification

The Fogg classification was developed at Harvard University and comes closest to a universal organizational model for large slide collections. It somewhat resembles the Dewey Decimal Classification system, in that it uses three digit numbers to express classes and it is somewhat hierarchical in nature. Duke's Department of Aesthetics, Art, and Music uses a modification of Fogg to organize their art history slide collection. There, the first level divides the arts into ten classes:

Each of these broad classes is then subdivided by period and place:

These broad regions are then further divided by country.

The second line of the classification stands for either city (Architecture), artist, school and century (Painting, Sculpture, Prints), or school and century (Minor Arts). The third line represents subject (portraits, landscapes, still lifes) for art, or type of building, sculpture, material or product in architecture, sculpture, and the applied arts.

Other libraries basing their classification on Fogg have taken liberties with the nomenclature and order, often preserving the first level order only. A more traditional approach, similar to Duke's, is offered by Syracuse, with the three-digit numbers and order preserved from Fogg. Their implementation is extremely simple and easy to use, but the resulting extremely broad groupings are probably less satisfactory for research in a large collection than Fogg implementations elsewhere. The UC-Riverside system is a bit more complex, adhering to the three-digit nomenclature, albeit with a few alphabetic additions, but changing the rules of use within each format/genre group several times by period. UC-Berkeley's Department of Architecture collection has evolved a far more complex system, with alphanumeric codes completely replacing the three-digit codes. UC-B simply found the decimal nature of Fogg too constraining and greatly expanded the classification, probably due to the very high percentage of non-European content in their collection. Where other Fogg collections have split the design universe into the ten place/period divisions shown in the three-digit architecture example shown above, Berkeley has created 23 using alphabetic codes.

The use of a decimal system keeps the classification system simple, but also results in some rather omnibus classes (e.g. "Painting, Drawing, Mosaics, Manuscripts") and broad time/area groupings as shown above. It also does not allow for much expansion into new media or formats. In fact, the fastest growing area within the Duke collection is in materials which do not fit into the classification, including examples of industrial design, materials, textures, and simple objects, both natural and man-made. Students needing an image of a buffalo or a cumulo-nimbus cloud, for example, have to search through rows of rather disorganized drawers which do not conform to Fogg. Other collections have solved this problem by expanding the classification, which naturally makes it a little more complicated to apply, but perhaps easier for patrons to browse. The most natural expansion is that undertaken at UC-Berkeley, jettisoning the three digit codes in favor of alphanumeric ones. This is the route we have chosen to take here.

The Library of Congress classification system

The Library of Congress classification (LCC) is a comprehensive system used largely by research libraries in most of the English-speaking world. It is based on the concept of "literary warrant", which basically means that new codes are devised as the literature requires it, in particular the literature collected by one of the world's great libraries. One of the secrets to the success of this classification is that it is maintained by the Library of Congress with the help of many of the largest research libraries in the world. A great deal of work has gone into this tool and, unlike many other classification schemes, it is kept fairly current, even as knowledge continues to expand.

LCC divides knowledge into several dozen large groups which are each assigned an alphabetic code representing a broad discipline. Class "N" has been assigned to the Fine Arts, although some particular branches of the fine arts, such as photography and computer-generated graphics, are to be found in class "TR" (Technology--Photographic arts) and "QA" (Mathematics and Computer Science). Other areas of interest include "GA" (Cartography), "TT" (Arts and Crafts), "TH" (Building Construction), and "Z" (Book Arts). Further subdivision within broad classes uses Arabic numerals.

The Fine Arts classification is itself split into eight subclasses as follows. Within each subclass may be found subdivisions by topical subject, form, history, and place. The following chart illustrates the development of this class.

While the Library of Congress classification has been used in a few libraries to organize image collections and in many to organize books, videos and periodicals, it was not designed to be used at the individual object level of the content of most slides. The majority of art and design books discuss particular types of art objects (German Expressionist painters, Ming pottery, Renaissance churches, Japanese gardens, Bauhaus design), works held in important museums (Villa Borghese, Victoria & Albert Museum), or the oeuvre of a particular artist or architect. Images tend to depict single objects, such as a particular cathedral, tapestry, or chair. This classification, as well as the Dewey and Universal decimal classifications, are really designed to deal with slides at the set level rather than the individual slide level. With this in mind, we do not propose to use the existing LC classification for slides at NCSU Libraries, but rather to combine elements of Fogg with the Art & Architecture Thesaurus.