Talking about Textiles: The Making of The Textile Museum Thesaurus
Cecilia Gunzburger Anderson

 

The vocabulary for talking about textiles has always been rich and evocative, yet also varied based on the disciplines, geographic areas, and professions of those involved in textile conversations. The advent of computerized databases for managing museum collections accelerated the demand for a standardized textile terminology in order to enforce consistency in data entry and facilitate searching of the databases. In 1998, The Textile Museum in Washington, DC, embarked on a project to catalogue its collections in its electronic database. Since no existing vocabulary resource met the museum’s need to deal with handmade textiles worldwide, or developed textile terminology to the level of detail necessary for textile specialists, the first step was to develop a thesaurus, or classified, controlled vocabulary, for textiles. In 2005 The Textile Museum published the resulting cataloguing vocabulary as The Textile Museum Thesaurus.
While The Textile Museum Thesaurus is specific to The Textile Museum’s collection, software, data standards, and current curatorial staff preferences, as the first published thesaurus in the textile field it may be a useful model or reference for curators, scholars, collections managers, cataloguers, and others working with textile collections. In fact, we are very interested in the ways in which our colleagues at other institutions will adapt, expand, and/or draw from our Thesaurus to serve the needs of their collections.
In this presentation, I discuss the challenges we faced in the development of the content and form of the Thesaurus, how we apply it within our collections database to aid cataloguing and searching of our collections, and the ways in which the Thesaurus has evolved since its publication last year in response to changing institutional practices and to feedback received on the Thesaurus publication.

 

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