Considering Asian American Collections and Critical Cataloging

PDF: Ayson-Plank and Ueno, Considering Asian American Collections

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting telework mandates offered an unexpected opportunity for the Archives of American Art to address projects that had been postponed.¹ In September 2020, Erin Kinhart, Head of Collections Processing and Digitization, convened the first meeting of the Subject Terms Working Group (STWG) with the goals to review existing subject terms, to research and replace outdated and problematic terms, and to update records to enhance the visibility and accessibility of collections for researchers.² The results of this critical cataloging project underscore the need for sustained cataloging efforts, especially as institutions acquire collections related to Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) artists.³

The Archives was established in 1954 as a research center of primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in the United States of America. Today, the Archives holds close to 6,500 collections comprised of more than thirty million objects of artists, scholars, and other art-world figures and institutions. In 2020, the Archives surveyed the collections and found that less than 1 percent related to AANHPI artists. Some of these collections were processed by Rihoko Ueno, an archivist and one of the authors of this article. In response to this gap, the Archives hired Dr. Christina Ayson-Plank, the Asian Pacific American Collections Specialist and this paper’s coauthor. Neither of us participated in the STWG, but we will reflect on the project and on access to AANHPI-related collections.

Discoverability means making the content of archival collections easy and accessible for users to find when navigating our website. This is accomplished by enhancing our metadata, whether in the form of providing more richly detailed finding aids, writing comprehensive biographical and historical notes, or improving cataloging practices and tagging. Sometimes archives will mention the existence of “hidden treasures,” which are collections that might not get much use because researchers are unaware that they exist. Discoverability is about facilitating users to find what they need more easily, and cataloging is one way we can increase access points to collections and link related collections together.

At the Archives of American Art, cataloging is integrated into the workflow of collectors and archivists. When a collection is accessioned, collectors add tags that are later supplemented by archivists during processing. We receive most of our collections as donations, and to thank our donors for their support, our priority is to make these collections accessible by processing them promptly. All repositories have a backlog of unprocessed collections; we want to minimize the amount of time between when a collection is acquired and when it is physically processed with a finding aid posted online. Until the audit of the collection, it was hard to see what patterns, omissions, and biases existed in our practices for making collections discoverable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Archives was not acquiring new collections, which opened an opportunity to shift our priorities from processing to updating our cataloging guidelines and creating a more controlled and concise list of subject terms.

The STWG was a reparative description and tagging project comprised of about ten members, including archivists, interns, an archives assistant, and a reference specialist.⁴ Having a wide-ranging group of individuals with different specialties across many departments helped gain insights into the various ways in which people access the collections. For example, an archivist who physically arranges the contents of a collection and writes a finding aid might have a different perspective from a reference specialist who assists members of the public—including curators, professors, students, historians, and auction houses—and the myriad ways in which they might use Archives resources. Collectors interface closely with artists and donors, and they can anticipate the impact of a collection for the history of the visual arts in the United States. By harnessing technical, user, and content experts, the STWG sought to update the Archives’ standards of cataloging by balancing theoretical and practical needs.

The project was based on the redescription of African American art and artist collections that was already underway by Rayna Andrews, a STWG member and archivist formerly at the Archives.⁵ The STWG mostly focused on subjects related to underrepresented groups and underdescribed collections, such as women artists, Latino artists, Black artists, and Asian American artists, as well as war- and craft-related terms. The STWG had four phases: 1) an audit of current subject terms and collections, 2) research and consultation on subject terms, 3) tagging and redescription, and 4) training. The archivists have always cataloged collections, but the STWG would delve more deeply into cataloging practices and their standardization. This article will focus on changes made to AANHPI collections by Lewis Tio, a former archives assistant at the Archives.

Tio began by compiling a list of terms that could be relevant to AANHPI artists, cross-referencing with Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which was considered for a controlled list of terms. Next came the collection description audit, which involved listing subject terms used for past collections. Tio also identified AANHPI collections in our holdings and supplemented this list by conducting keyword searches in ArchivesSpace, the content management system used by the Archives. As a result of this audit, the STWG found that there were hundreds of subject terms that were only applied once to a single collection instead of across multiple collections to facilitate discoverability. Furthermore, several of our subject terms were not the most updated versions recommended by LCSH, and a few AANHPI collections had no tagging identifying them as such. For example, the Kahlil Gibran papers, circa 1945–2008, were previously not tagged as Asian American. Although we do not know why Kahlil Gibran’s collection was not tagged, we can speculate that it was previously overlooked as an Asian American collection because of the shifting definitions of Asian America.⁶

The STWG met regularly to discuss changes to the Archives’ subject terms. While LCSH is widely adopted by libraries and archives as a tool for cataloging, it does not always include the most up-to-date terminology, and for this reason the STWG also referenced sources for additional subject terms, such as the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Homosaurus, and Densho, and reached out to colleagues within the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center (APAC) in order to create a new list of updated terms. The AAA also has the ability to create new subject terms, if the authorized terms are insufficient or not the most current preferred terminology. Other Smithsonian museums have taken this route in the past. Notably, the National Museum of the American Indian created reference lists of controlled terminologies to describe their collections, because much of the preexisting terms at the time of the thesaurus’s creation were problematic. Similarly, conversations with APAC were helpful because the center was also creating a glossary that it hoped eventually to make available online. While no system of cataloging is perfect, the STWG hoped to offset the shortcomings of using any one set of terminology exclusively and to supplement its existing lists of terms by consulting a range of different vocabularies.

Tio contacted Adriel Luis, Curator of Digital and Emerging Practice at APAC, about the most recent preferred terminology related to Asian American artists. Luis recommended Densho, a nonprofit organization that uses digital tools to preserve and share the history of Japanese Americans. APAC’s position on terminology coincided with Densho, which, for example, suggests the use of “incarceration” over “internment” when referencing the history of Japanese Americans in World War II. While the LCSH changed from the subject heading “Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942–1945” to “Japanese American—Forced removal and internment, 1942–1945” in 2021, many Asian American scholars note that two-thirds of the Japanese Americans forcibly removed were citizens and thus “incarceration” is a more appropriate term.⁷ However, the STWG discussed discoverability in terms of how researchers might search for collections and the continued widespread use of “internment.” To balance these interests, the STWG used the LCSH in collections’ metadata but edited the biographical notes in finding aids to use “incarceration” and provided greater historical context. This included changes made to the Chiura Obata papers, 1891–2000, bulk 1942–1945 (figs. 1–2).

The group carefully considered any updates to the proposed vocabulary, given the tremendous diversity of the AANHPI community. They determined that collections needed to be identified with both the panethnic (Asian American) and an ethnic-specific term (Japanese American, Chinese American, and so forth). By identifying collections as “Asian American artists,” they sought to address the erasure of identity when collections are underdescribed and to ensure the discoverability of artists. On the other hand, using ethnic-specific subject terms was a way to recognize the diversity of AANHPI communities. For example, the tags for the Toshiko Takaezu papers, circa 1925–circa 2010, include “women artists,” “Asian American artists,” “women potters,” and “Japanese American artists” (fig. 3). By disaggregating our tags, the STWG ensured that artists could be discovered on our website whether a researcher was searching using keywords for ethnicity, gender, or medium.

Furthermore, artists and other donors of papers can also provide information about their race and gender to the collectors, who can add that to a field within the accession/intake form. Donors can also recommend art movements and organizations to be added to the accession record. This provides artists an opportunity to have a say in how they and their work are described in the Archives collection records. The STWG had many conversations weighing the different interests of researchers, artists, and staff members to establish our best practices.

As a result of this project, eighty-six AANHPI collections were identified and updated with new subject terms. The biographical and historical notes of finding aids were also edited to revise outdated terminology and supplemented to provide more detailed information about the artists. Although the STWG successfully revised many collection records and finding aids with updated controlled vocabulary, time constraints prevented the group from having the opportunity to train their colleagues to widely adopt these subject terms. After the pandemic, the AAA returned to the office in stages, with the archivists returning first since they physically handle collections that needed to be accessioned and processed. STWG, however, continued to meet online, as some of the staff continued to telework. The STWG no longer meets regularly, but its members are still implementing these changes individually. As many critical catalogers have noted, limited resources and mounting priorities often result in the postponement of cataloging work.⁸ We bring this up not to excuse cataloging but to demystify the contemporary realities of archival labor.

When we spoke to some members of the STWG in preparation for this article, they expressed appreciation for the space to reflect on the success of the project but also the desire to revisit conversations on cataloging. Perhaps the next phase of this work is to establish quarterly meetings to discuss evolving subject terms, update our Internal Procedures and Guidelines, and continue collaborating across the Smithsonian to develop updated subject terms. As the Archives acquires more collections related to AANHPI artists and art, it is imperative that cataloging efforts are sustained, because subject terms and identities are constantly evolving. In addition, the Archives is expanding its collections on Native Hawaiian, Korean American, and Chinese American artists, communities that require a new set of subject terms. AANHPI art history is an ever-expanding interdisciplinary field and one with its share of biases, as it simultaneously grapples with historical disenfranchisement from the American art canon. As Sharon Mizota powerfully says, “Taxonomy is necessarily reductive, but it is a necessary abstraction. If we do not have language to describe groups of people, particularly those who experience oppression or disenfranchisement, those people do not get represented or accounted for. When people are not represented, they have more difficulty accessing resources and getting their needs met.”⁹ Revisiting the efforts of the STWG was an opportunity to celebrate our colleagues and reminder to continue the work.

Cite this article: Christina Ayson-Plank and Rihoko Ueno, “Considering Asian American Collections and Critical Cataloging,” in “Critical Cataloging: Researching American Art History on Its Own Terms,” ed. Tracy Stuber and Jennifer Way, Digital Dialogues, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 1 (Spring 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.19956.

Notes

About the Author(s): Dr. Christina Ayson-Plank is Asian Pacific American collections specialist at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Rihoko Ueno is archivist at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.