Archives & Access project: (Subject) index to the soul: opening up Tate’s archives By Darragh O’Donoghue

Hallo, I am Darragh O’Donoghue, Subject Index Manager on the Archives and Access project.  The Archives and Access project aims to open up Tate’s archives to new audiences, by integrating them with the Art & artists section of the website, as discussed in Alex’s and Tijana’s posts.

My work as Subject Index Manager is to broaden access further by linking objects with similar subjects and themes.  I look at an archival item, try to decide what it’s ‘about’ and how it relates to other items in the collection, and to pass this information on to the user.  The content of an item is broken down into index terms which will allow users to find artworks from the collection and other archival items through browsing on the same subject.  In this way, the subject index is a mix of the traditional index you get at the back of printed books, and the cross-referencing applied to entries in encyclopaedias.  For the user, the index offers two basic functions: it provides a summary of individual items, and it is a way of opening up those items beyond their obvious art-historical interest.

The index used for this project is adapted from Iconclass, an art-historical classification system used to divide the multitude of possible index terms into (relatively) logical themes.  The items digitised for the project are a mixture of textual and visual archives, so some headings will be more relevant for different items.  The themes used by the project include Group/movement; Emotions, concepts and ideas; History; Literature; Nature; People; and Places.  The index terms can be found by clicking on the ‘Explore’ section of an item’s webpage.

Looking at subject indexing in Walter Sickert’s letters

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