Lettering

Catalogued material

Lettering for catalogued material will be exported from the 246 field 'Other/alternative Titles' in Sierra. No input from the Inventory team is required unless the transliteration/ diacritics have not exported cleanly. If lettering is in another language and the accents have not imported into QB as visible in Sierra, then please copy and paste directly from the 246 field into the lettering field in QB.

Uncatalogued material

Procedure followed from April 2019 to March 2020.

If language is known and easy to transcribe, we will record the main lettering (e.g. lettering in bold, large font, poster’s titles etc.).

Do not transcribe more than 8 words; the cut-off for the lettering should be determined at a natural point (punctuation, change of font size, etc.). If needed, further transcription of lettering can be done at Phase 2 or Cataloguing Phase. If you think it might help future identification you can transcribe the first and last section of lettering using ellipsis for text omitted in the middle.

Do not write fully in capitals even if lettered in that way on the item.

Begin the lettering with a capital letter and include punctuation if present.

Foreign lettering is also entered in this field. A translation can be given at a later stage in the Description field.

NB. We haven’t still found an efficient, quick way of transcribing accents on Quickbase, therefore the lettering will appear incomplete. Further work to improve this content, will be done as part of Phase 2 and/or at Cataloguing Phase.

Procedure adopted from March 2020 onwards.

Following a team meeting on 3rd March 2020, we have agreed that:

For uncatalogued items we will use some of the lettering, in the same way as inscribed title, incorporating this in the Title/brief description field. If we think that more lettering/inscription can be useful to identify and distinguish between similar items, we could also add a bit more information to the lettering field. Please see the following example:

Scenario: photograph inscribed ‘A Chinese woman and her maid. Pechino, private garden’.

1. Record ‘A Chinese woman and her maid, photographic print after John Thomson, 1971’ in the Title/Brief Description field.

2. Record ‘Pechino, private garden’ in the lettering field (not mandatory). This could be useful should we have multiple photographs inscribed ‘A Chinese woman and her maid’ and need a quicker way for identification.