By Ali Lane and Charise Dinges
The Museum of Flight is the largest independent air and space museum in the world. Its Archives are one of the largest on the West Coast related to both aviation and space exploration, with more than a million images (including prints, negatives, slides and transparencies) and approximately 5,000 cubic feet of archival materials. The EAD finding aids that describe our archival holdings are accessible to the public via our ArchivesSpace public interface (archives.museumofflight.org). In addition to our physical collection, we have approximately 14,000 digitized images, documents, films, oral histories, artifacts and library materials from our collection available online. The digitized materials are available through our online database and digital collections website (https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org).
The Archives’ physical materials and digital assets are currently managed by a team of five full-time staff members: Supervisory Archivist Nicole Davis, Processing Archivist Charise Dinges, Digital Asset Coordinator Ali Lane, Reference Archivist Jenn Parent, and Digitization Specialist Karen Bean. Volunteers also lend their subject matter expertise, and interns periodically help out with specific processing, metadata, and digitization projects.
In our archival cataloging and descriptive metadata work, we generally use the Library of Congress (LC) subject headings for describing most topical subjects in our library and archival records. However to describe aircraft we follow the National Air and Space Museum Directory of Airplanes standards. The NASM directory was created as a single authoritative listing of aircraft names, including manufacturer, models, and variants. Since the NASM directory is focused solely on aircraft description, it is more detailed in the information and language structure of the subject heading. The NASM directory also covers many more manufacturers and individual models than exist in LC. Though when attempting to integrate the two, we have found that there is conflict within both of our online databases.
Issues arise when applying both LC and NASM headings to our resource records within ArchivesSpace. For instance, the LCNAF term for the famous aircraft Spirit of Saint Louis has the LC heading, Spirit of St. Louis (Airplane), but the NASM term for the same aircraft is: Ryan NYP “Spirit of St Louis”. To dig even deeper into the discrepancies, we can take a look at the Boeing 747 aircraft. The LCSH heading is Boeing 747 (Jet transports). The NASM directory has a term for each of the various types of Boeing 747 aircraft produced, with a total of 32 individual entries, not including the catch-all term Boeing Model 747 Family. The term Family at the end of an aircraft name is an umbrella term that covers all the different model variants of that specific aircraft.
A few examples directly related to Boeing 747 are:
- Boeing Model 747-300ER, Boeing Model 747-300BC, and Boeing Model 747-300LR
- Boeing Model 747-100B, Boeing Model 747-100F, and Boeing Model 747-100F
- Boeing Model 747-200B Combi, Boeing Model 747-200C Convertible, and Boeing Model 747-200F Freighter
As you can see, the simple Boeing 747 is not so simple. The specificity of the NASM terms can make it difficult to catalog if one isn’t certain about which term to apply. This can also make it difficult for researchers if they are looking for a Boeing 747 model but are not aware of the complete breakdown of the number sequence or if they are researching all 747s rather than one particular variant. On the other hand, the LCSH term is too simplified and might not cover the breadth of 747 models developed by Boeing and wouldn’t be granular enough for some researchers’ needs.
The Archives team staff members have discussed what the best approach would be when there are two sources applicable to describe a specific aircraft. We have leaned toward only using the NASM terms for aircraft since LCNAF/LCSH has so few. If using the NASM directory and we are not sure which version to use for an aircraft then we use the “Family” entry.
To further complicate the problem, there is an issue with agent versus subjects with LC and NASM headings. LC classifies specific named aircraft as corporate names (agents in ArchivesSpace) and aircraft types as subjects. We follow this structure when creating agent records and subject terms in ArchivesSpace. The problem is that NASM includes named aircraft in its terms and all its terms are essentially classified as subjects.
For example, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Silverplate “Enola Gay” aircraft would be considered a subject in NASM. The equivalent term in LCNAF, Enola Gay (Bomber), is listed as a corporate name. Over the years as various staff have added agents and subjects to our ArchivesSpace database, named aircraft such as the Spirit of Saint Louis or the Enola Gay have ended up with agent and subject records, using both LC and NASM terms, leading to confusing redundancy and inconsistent application to accession and resource records. Our solution going forward is to continue to give preference to the more specific NASM terms but to make sure NASM terms for specific named aircraft get entered in ArchivesSpace as agent records rather than subjects. Then we would also apply the more general NASM subject term for the aircraft model. For instance, in a resource record a named aircraft would have Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Silverplate “Enola Gay” as an agent record and then it would also have the more general term for the aircraft type, Boeing B-29 Superfortress, under subjects. Because of our inconsistency in the past, we will need to undertake a fair amount of data cleanup to rectify this confusion.
Another angle we have to consider is the use of NASM subject headings in natural language descriptions. In the past, it was standard practice for Museum archivists and catalogers to copy the NASM heading directly into natural language descriptions such as the scope-and-content notes in our finding aids and the Dublin Core description field in our metadata records. This approach worked well enough when our finding aids and metadata were primarily for internal use; staff were familiar enough with the NASM directory to be able to easily parse and understand descriptions, even if the headings could sometimes be long and cumbersome.
However, once we started making our archival and metadata records available to the public, we discovered that external users often found the NASM headings to be confusing in a natural language context. For example, consider this NASM heading for the Mitsubishi A6M Reisen, a Japanese fighter aircraft from World War II:
Mitsubishi A6M Reisen (Zero Fighter) Zeke (Ben, Ray) Family
The heading contains the manufacturer (Mitsubishi), the model (A6M), its designated name in Japanese (Reisen), the English translation of the name (Zero Fighter), its codename used by Allied forces (Zeke), and two additional Allied codenames that were later determined to be misidentifications (Ben and Ray). All this information is helpful in a subject heading context but can make for some long and difficult-to-parse sentences in a natural language description, such as this one:
Photograph of students looking at a battered Mitsubishi A6M Reisen (Zero Fighter) Zeke (Ben, Ray) Family aircraft, Lunghwa Airdrome, China, circa 1940s.
Even worse, the headings-in-descriptions approach could occasionally be downright misleading to users. For example, the NASM heading for the McDonnell F-4 Phantom II includes both the operational model (F-4) and its original production model (F4H), like so:
McDonnell F-4 (F4H) Phantom II Family
When we recently published a collection of Vietnam War-era photographs to our Digital Collections site, users were confused as to why both the operational and production model numbers were used in the item descriptions. Some users even assumed we had misidentified the photos and contacted us to point out that all the pictured aircraft were operational models (F-4s) and not production models (F4Hs). This incident became the tipping point for us to reassess our guidelines for natural language description.
After some discussion, Collections staff decided to transition away from our “copy NASM headings into descriptions” policy. While most headings were simple enough to not cause issues, the issues that were arising were significant enough to impact the readability and perceived accuracy of our descriptions. Our solution was to use NASM headings as a baseline for the aircraft name in the natural language description, but to simplify the heading so that it better matches the structure of a standard sentence. We recommend that our archivists and catalogers select the most pertinent information for the aircraft in question and exclude extraneous details in parentheses or words denoting general categories, such as “Family” or “Series.” Under these new guidelines, the description for the Mitsubishi A6M photograph referenced above now reads:
Photograph of students looking at a battered Mitsubishi A6M Reisen aircraft, Lunghwa Airdrome, China, circa 1940s.
Of course, all subject headings are retained as-is in our Subject field, so no information is ultimately lost within the record.
While the Collections team hasn’t found the perfect solution for the issues when applying LC and NASM terms, we continually meet to discuss options on how to integrate the various subject headings and use of natural language in our public access portals.
Ali Lane is the Digital Asset Coordinator for the Collections Department at The Museum of Flight. She holds a MLIS from the University of Washington and has a professional background in metadata and digital archives.
Charise Dinges is the Processing Archivist for the Collections Department at The Museum of Flight. She completed her Master of Library and Information Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, with a concentration in archives and preservation.