Documentation pyramid
Ligue des Bibliothèques Europeénnes de Recherche, Groupe des Cartothécaires de LIBER
TRANSLATE ENGLISH to Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Português, Español! Explanation
© LIBER and author
Published from: LIBER Quarterly, the journal of European research
libraries, ISSN 1435-5205, Vol. 8(1998), No 2. With permission from K.G. Saur Verlag, Munich, Germany
E-mail: Jan Smits
Introduction
When, working in a general map collection, one is approached with the question "Where can I find such and such a map?". This question can be answered from our catalogues or from mental or printed knowledge of other map collections, but sometimes we may lack information. Other questions we encounter are "What kind of maps and in what number do you have?" One is speechless for a moment and then starts shooting off subjects, area's, and maybe numbers. In the best case this may be an approximation of the truth. But I think most of us would not know really what to give as a specific answer.
Questions come in gradations from general to specific and usually answers fail the more general the question is. This paper tries to sketch how we can document the cartographic domain better, enabling us to answer better some general questions.
A documentation pyramid
In the spring of 1988, during one of the study-meetings of the Dutch Working Group for Map Curatorship, Marjanne Kok, former Head of the Maproom of the General State Archives, read a paper under the title Customer or King. Map user and map curator. The supply of information on mapsRef 1.
From the premise of the infeasibility of an union catalogue for cartographic materials -in spite of our then 20 years of promotion of such an automated catalogue- she wondered how customers in general could be served better in different ways. To illustrate her thoughts on this she structured the documentation of cartographic materials into different levels of documentation, starting from the specific towards the general:
This structure can be visualized by a pyramid where level 5 is the top and level 1 the base. The size of the pyramidical compartment gives at the same time an implication about how much documentation should be available.
She then envisaged a national cartographic information centre which would manage this pyramidical documentation and distribute information (free of charge or paid) to whatever user requested it. Though we are still working on a national cartographic information centre we think now it will be a distributed effort of information holders with one managing institution, having in mind amongst others the possibilities Internet offers us and the use of e.g. the Information Retrieval Service and Protocol standard Z 39.50Ref 3 which may alleviate the problems of the different formats in which information is delivered.
Up till now we have realized quite an amount of documentation in levels 1, 2, 4 and 5, but level 3 has been lacking quite a lot.
Level 1 is realized in the CCKRef 4
(Dutch Union Map catalogue) -which contains individual descriptions of the holdings of several organizations- and by the separate general catalogues of the map collections. One of the problems of union catalogues is the obliging adherence to a single format, which cannot take into account the many different automation infrastructures. While inventorying Dutch map collections and topographic-historical atlases in 1994-1995 we encountered 64 different formats!Ref 5
Level 2 is documented in many catalogues, inventories, etc. What is lacking at the moment is a general overview of these, though most archives have lists of their inventories.
Level 3 is subject of this paper and will be treated below.
Level 4 is realized in a combined second editionRef 6
of the directory of map collections and the directory of topographic-historical atlases. These were combined as we thought their subject matter to be overlapping for researchers, especially those who do historical research. Though the entries contain short descriptions of the history and contents of collections this is far off from collection profiles as wanted under 3. This publication is enriched with literature useful in documentation but it lacks indexes which point to thematic and geographic contents of the collections.
Level 5 is realized, amongst others, in the aforementioned IFLA directory, which is more a service guide with numerical data. Unfortunately not all collections can co-operate which makes a lot of data outdated.
What to research?
The past few years we have been very fortunate to have had several good trainees from the Department of Cartography of Utrecht University. In their 4th year they have to work a 10-week period with a production institute, before they finish for their masters degree. One of them has researched the Internet for possibilities to document cartography, another in co-operation with the department has made a bibliography of almost 4,000 maps with the parliamentary papers from 1865 onwards. The last one helped us to gather data for a collection profile and to find ways to visualize these.
The Royal Library has two main cartographic collections, one in the humanities branch and one in the depository branch.
Though we knew that the research should result in a collection profile we first didn't know where to start. When you want to create arithmetic lists it is preponderant to know what should be counted. Should these be separate documents?
Ref 7
And if so, how should these be structured in subjects and areas.
We have an ongoing inventory of our stackrooms in which physical items are counted.
It is only structured to area and puts a document under that area under which it is filed in the stackrooms. This means that series which consists of documents concerning different areas are listed under the overall area
Ref 8
. It only shows, however, the amount of physical items and not the amount of maps described, which is a multiple of these figures. Also maps in books and periodicals which are described, but which are administered in the general stackrooms, are not counted.
The spreadsheet shows us the number of separate documents in the humanities and depository collections and allows us to convert the numbers into percentages. This shows that the humanities collection, which runs from the Middle Ages to the present, is more diversified in area and less concentrated on The Netherlands than the depository collection, which only started in 1975. However, there is no indication which kind of subjects are concerned, mainly because we keep this record for conservational and space management objectives.
Though we have a database concerning the cartographic materials in the humanities branch this is not very suitable for analysis. It contains appr. 3,000 summary descriptions of single items, atlases and publications with maps as illustration or appendix. We guess that these items concern appr. 100,000 maps. As we have more data, and more specific, concerning the depository collection we decided to concentrate on this collection. We came to this decision also because the trainee was allowed only 10 weeks to work on this project.
Though we have a database concerning the cartographic materials in the humanities branch this is not very suitable for analysis. It contains appr. 3,000 summary descriptions of single items, atlases and publications with maps as illustration or appendix. We guess that these items concern appr. 100,000 maps. As we have more data, and more specific, concerning the depository collection we decided to concentrate on this collection. We came to this decision also because the trainee was allowed only 10 weeks to work on this project.
Our next thought was to use the retrieval facilities of the CCK to create statistics. Unfortunately the programme does not discern separate collections, so we had to find other ways to separate the Royal Library holdings from the other holdings. Fortunately the CCK has the possibility to create a hardcopy of the depository library holdings, inclusive indexes on area and subject. This resulted in a bibliography of 37,645 descriptions (3,356 p.), an area-code list of 302 p., a subject-code list of 273 p., and a title register of 288 p. Altogether, inclusive reference lists, 4,278 p. of information in the same format as our overlapping tri-annual national bibliography Ref 9
to work with.
These were not our total holdings. Some 13,000 descriptions from the years 1983-1986 are still in the process of being converted from Pica Ref 10
and there is a gap for the years 1990-1992, of which up till now only half of all documents are described due to the publication of the new national bibliography. Because we select the cartographic documents according to a specific programme Ref 11
we have the idea that the 37,645 descriptions are a fair representation of the total collection, which amounts presently to some 65,000 descriptions.
A case study: townplan coverage
As part of the study we wanted to see whether there had been a shift in the coverage of townplans of The Netherlands during the period 1975-1995. But we soon found out that this was too ambitious. In 1975 there were some 845 municipalities and in the period up till 1996 these were reshaped into 633 new ones due to administrative reorganisations. The municipalities were sometimes renamed, which made comparison of old and new situations almost impossible.
Therefor we took the situation of 1995 as a starting point. But we differentiated 4 classes of coverage:
No unfinished Sisyphus labour
3 of the 10 trainee weeks had gone by already with preliminary work and the case study. But now came the hardier part. As basis for the profile we decided to use almost the same area division as with the stackroom table. On this area division would be projected the main subject division. Taking the available time into consideration no further subdivision was possible. The subjects were aggregated according to the five main themes
Ref 13
:
2. Geodesy, history of cartography, topography;
4. Physical geography;
5. Landscape, environmental problems, landuse and planning;
6. Human geography;
8. Polythematic user maps.All these were subdivided into three subthemes.
For this article we have concentrate on theme 4, physical geography.
The next weeks were used for keeping a tally (count in fives) from the subject index of the bibliography which is subdivided by area. The basis for counting was 37,645 descriptions. Some maps have more than one area entry, and thematic maps especially can have more than one subject entry. We did not know how many entries there were, consequently also not how much time it would take. Counting entries from the indexes, with recourse to the bibliography for checking, was not as easy as we might have imagined. It was an arduous job which could not be done by one person alone. Otherwise it would have looked like a Sisyphus Ref 14 labour without end. Because we use local names in the area-index we had to verify under what class they fell in order not to pollute the statistics Ref 15 . To divide the burden the whole Department had to step in to count. After several weeks we were ready, heaving counted more than 60,000 entries after subtracting for multiple countsRef 16 . From this material we could construct the tables and calculate percentages to know how emphasis could be pointed out in the collection.
The tables
The list of numbers as such does not differentiate enough between The Netherlands and the rest of the world. Of course the main emphasis is on The Netherlands as this is a depository collection. But The Netherlands also has many publishing firms which publish on behalf of the international scientific community. This means a relevant part of the collection is concerned with other areas than the Netherlands.
Therefor we decided to construct two tables. One for The Netherlands and one for the rest of the world.
The Netherlands would be subdivided into the provinces and into The Netherlands as a whole. But computing percentages we had to reckon with the next stage, i.e. the maps we would like to construct with them. This resulted in the next two tables.
Table for physical geography, The Netherlands
Table for physical geography, the world, excl. The Netherlands
Maps for maps
We were nearing the end of the training period rapidly. In the course of the past weeks we had thought about how we would like to visualize the data. Though some provinces in The Netherlands are far bigger than others they are easily comparable when mapped in a normal projection. Therefor we decided to construct choropleths for The Netherlands.The process went again through Aldus Freehand and Paint Shop Pro to the final .GIF files. The classes were defined in such a way that significant differences could easily be visualized. To arrive at a workable overview Simone Meijer decided to create triplet maps for each of the five main themes. To prevent tiring the eyes of the viewer and because they are choropleths the maps were done in soft colours. The result of this creative process can be viewed in the following map, which corresponds with the first table
The world as a whole, however, was a different question. Not only are the continents incomparable, also the statistical data was so divergent that naturalistic maps would not give the desired results. We also had to take into account that we had areas like "the imaginary world", "extra-terrestrial space", and "oceans and seas". After much thinking we decided to construct for the world as a whole, including the three classes mentioned before, a less used map form, which would show emphasis better than choropleths. We decided for anamorphic maps, also called diagrammatic maps. The construction of these was rather difficult as the programmes used did not contain software which automatically created anamorphic maps. So Simone set up a 10 x 10 cell-matrix and worked this into a map. As the three extra area classes could not be worked into the map they were put on top of the maps in a separate box. As some viewers might find it difficult to relate the continents to their real physical positions on earth a naturalistic map of the world is shown in the lower right hand corner. To compare the amount of maps for The Netherlands and the rest of the world each map contains a bar which shows this relation.
Here also triplets were constructed except for themes 5 and 8 as the amount of maps counted was not enough to show sub-theme differences. Therefore theme 5 and 8 were constructed as one triplet map.
To emphasize that the surfaces of the different continents, etc., show the importance of a certain sub-theme it was decided to use non-related hard colours to differentiate between the areas.
The result of this process can be viewed in the following map, which corresponds with the second table.
Conclusion
The process to arrive at the tables and maps was very labour-intensive. Only with the aid of a hard-copy of the bibliographic database could we come to a somewhat truthful representation of the collection, though multiple access points per description may have their influence on the results.
We can imagine that large collections will be daunted by the efforts needed to come to these results. We are, however, sure the user will find a practical aid in the tables and maps if more of these projects could be undertaken. As we will have users which seek more or less specific information to guide them we should give them as much as possible different levels of access.
Acknowledgement
Without the help from Simone Meijer we could not have realized this project. Not only because she has done the tedious job of tallying so well, but even more because she applied her knowledge from the cartographic domain in such a way that we can show users well what they might be looking for. She has given far more, wrestling with drawing and cartographical programmes, than the trainee programme called for. I hope the reader will enjoy her work when we put this on the Homepage of the Royal LibraryRef 17
.
Notes and References
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Map of the coverage of townplans, Depot map collection Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of The Netherlands) per July 1, 1996.
Map of the coverage of the subject physical geography for The Netherlands and its parts in the map collect ion Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of The Netherlands) per July 1, 1996.
Map of the coverage of the subject physical geography for the world, excl. The Netherlands and its parts in the map collection Koninklijke Bibliotheek
(National Library of The Netherlands) per July 1, 1996