Controlled Vocabularies: People, Places, Dates

Do you need help keeping your data under control? Are your struggling to find the right terms, keywords or tags? Does your data contain ambiguous or unknown dates, places whose names changed over time, or multiple names or spelling variants for a single person or subject? Data problems like these are typical for humanities projects.

Controlled vocabularies may be your answer! Library cataloging revolves around creating large masses of data for indexing, sorting, and searching, and can provide useful guidelines for managing humanities data. This workshop will bring a cataloger’s insight into standards and best practices for dealing with data for people, places and dates. Topics covered include name authority files, subject thesauri, standards and formats, and linked open data.

If you have specific questions relate to people, places or dates from your dataset, please send your inquiry via email to cdh-consults@princeton.edu by Friday October 19, and the workshop leader may address your question in the session.

This workshop will be led by Joyce Bell, Director of Cataloging and Metadata Services at the Princeton University Library. Joyce has led Princeton’s participation in several national-level initiatives, such as the Mellon-funded Linked Data for Production (LD4P) project. An Arabic cataloger by training, Joyce remains an active member of the Middle Eastern Librarians Association and Asian and African Materials section of ALA’s Committee on Cataloging.

This event is co-organized by the Princeton University Library