Back to Library Student Blog homepage
<aside> 🧭
Blog Navigation
Homepage 🏡
Music 🎶🔊
Sitemap 🗺️
</aside>
“Okay, you’ve convinced me that Manga is pretty cool and that there is a unique terminology that fans often use to talk about the format, but how does it work for people on the staff-side of a library (since, well, I’m learning about libraries)? What kind of terms are used to refer to manga in an official library system or catalogue?”
In the language of cyberspace, a ‘tag’ is the term used to refer to a piece of metadata that describes a given resource or media type, whether it is a blog post, image, video, audio (file), interactive media (e.g., flash game or applet), etc. (TRY TO FIND A LINK TO THIS)
Metadata just means “data about data”, and can be simply thought of as adjectives that describe data or information resources.
Tags/metadata help users organise, search for, and sort these resources in the same way that item collectors might base their possessions around a certain theme (like colour, size, shape, age, material, weight, condition, etc.).
Metadata/tags can also be simply thought of as adjectives that are used to describe objects as being similar or different to one another.
It is a concept that even cartoon monkeys can understand and apply as Curious George does when he groups different objects together based on a metadata characteristic/adjective (colour) and makes a colourful trash-to-treasure collection.
^from “George's Colourful Collection! 🐵 Full Episodes | Curious George”, viewable on the Curious George Official youtube channel. George wanted to keep all items he found when cleaning up the streets in various ways, but his guardian the Man in the Yellow Hat gave the rule that they need to have something in common. After trying to organise the items by shape or by material or “does it float?” (buoyancy) es that each item has a ‘colour’ characteristic, then sorts the items based on different ‘colour’ characteristics (’red’, ‘purple’, ‘blue’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’ ‘orange’)
In the context of library databases and catalogues, the tags/metadata used to describe the ideas/topics/subjects contained within books are known as ‘subject headings’. Subject headings are administered by a central authority, the Library of Congress (USA government/parliament library), in order to minimise redudancy and needless synonymy (which prevents too many similar words from being used).
Just how the Dewey Decimal system was invented in the USA and has become adopted as the dominant classification system throughout English-speaking countries, so too has the ‘Library of Congress Subject Headings’ (LCSH) method become the main way that modern libraries use metadata to describe their books in their databases.
These subject headings are (always?) included in the catalogue entries/bibliographic records of each book, and some examples are included below. Click each image to enlarge and magnify.
^Screenshot of Penrith City Library’s bibliographic record of ‘Once Upon a Zebra’, by Ken Wilson-Max, published in 2024 by Hodder Children’s Books. The ILMS used by Penrith City Libraries is ‘Spydus’, provided by the software company ‘Civica’.
^Screenshot of Cumberland Council Library’s bib record of ‘So you think you’ve got it bad? A kid’s Life in a medieval castle’, by Chae Strathie, published in 2022 by Nosy Crow. The ILMS used by Cumberland Council Libraries is probably ‘Symphony’, by ‘Sirsidynix’, but I’m not 100% sure.
^Screenshot of Stanton/North Sydney Library’s bib record of ‘[The world encyclopedia of flags : the definitive guide to international flags, banners, standards and ensigns, with over 1400 illustrations](https://aurorashore.com.au/montage/Stanton/Books.aspx??showall=true&keyword=flags&method=0&sort=1003&bibid=R0000599956&)’, by Alfred Znamierowski. The ILMS used by Stanton is ‘Aurora Montage’ by ‘Softlink’.
^Screenshot of Canterbury-Bankstown Library’s bib record of ‘30 easy ways to join the food revolution : a sustainable cookbook’, by Ollie Hunter, published in 2020 by Pavilion. The ILMS used by Canterbury-Bankstown Libraries is ‘Libero’, by ‘Knosys’.
As you can see in the above screenshots, even though the ILMS (library database and catalogue and resource browsing) software varies across different library councils or districts, the subject headings section is a consistent feature that provides pieces of metadata which are used to describe resources.
Going back to the topic of manga: Since manga is a unique subset of the graphic novel format that is recognisable by a range of characteristics (monochrome paneling, right-to-left reading direction, Japanese-authorship or inspiration), are there any subject headings that are unique to the manga format?
Let’s have a look at some library catalogue entries for various titles of manga
(CONTINUE HERE)