Introduction
Material Order is a consortium-driven project for managing design-based materials collections that started with conversations between Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Frances Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (GSD)Footnote 1. The initiative increased momentum in 2015 when the two schools contracted with LYRASIS, the library services company, and its object-based collection-management product, CollectionSpace. The consortium has grown to include the founding members plus Avery Library at Columbia University in support of the historical architectural materials collection in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, the University of Michigan's Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library, and the University of Pennsylvania's Fisher Fine Arts Library.
Why a consortium? One important initial consideration is that material samples collections tend to be quite heterogeneous and, because of this, are not so easily or optimally managed by the standard suite of off-the-shelf library products and platforms then or even now. The earliest conversations between RISD and GSD acknowledged that neither library on their own had the means to pursue a custom-built collection management system for the material samples collections, for all sorts of considerations, but due primarily to the limitations of funding, staffing, and technical expertise.
The consortial arrangement has many advantages, not the least being greater affordability and, in the case presented here, a new and shared development focus for library visual resources staff formerly responsible for the sourcing and production of images for instruction. There is also the sharing of knowledge across disciplines (for example, material science, construction, engineering, and others) to which material collections connect, but are not represented at all member institutions.
This article will describe the RISD collection before putting it into the context of other material collections; the formation of the Material Order consortium, which continues to move this consortial project forward; and conclude by showcasing the long-desired outcome: a shared cataloguing database and discovery platform for the design material collections of the consortium, now in its fourth year online and openly available to all, not just members, for searching and browsing.
Materials Collection at Fleet Library
The Materials Collection at RISD is housed in the Graham Visual + Material Resources Center (VMRC), which manages the library's legacy 35mm and lantern slide collections, a half-million item picture (or ‘clippings’) collection for image research, other distinctive collections, RISD's instances of JSTOR Forum and Digital Commons, and the collection of roughly 40,000 materials samples, one of the largest such collections in an academic library (fig. 1).
Graham Visual + Material Resources Center in Fleet Library, Rhode Island School of Design. Photo by Mark Pompelia.
Fleet Library itself is located in a former bank building in downtown Providence. Built in 1917 and on the National Register of Historic Places, the building, which features dormitory student housing on the upper floors, offered the library a 500% increase in space over its previous location when it opened in 2006. The Graham Visual Resources Center was generously allocated approximately 230 square meters. The 35mm slide collection was never viewed as a long-term format: replacing it was an expected course of events that allowed for the envisioning and planning for a material samples collection.
Proof of concept came with the 2009 installation of materials gathered from several departments on bookshelves in the hallway outside the slide collection. The first instinct of the previous and current visual resources librarians was to catalogue the collection in a way to enhance its physical arrangement beyond broad compositional categories. However, absent a design-community standard for material description, the current librarian decided upon an acquisitions strategy of significant expansion. Utilizing the increasing number of monographs on design materials in conjunction with the burgeoning population of design websites, blogs, and manufacturer and distributor literature, the collection grew dramatically in size from its initial 3,000 items in 2010 to around 40,000 in 2016, where it has stayed since.
While the collection is encyclopaedic in scope to serve broadly the school's Architecture and Design, Fine Arts, and Liberal Arts Divisions, it increasingly reflects the market trends and curricular interests toward innovation and sustainability.
While a custom materials library from the global consultancy Material ConneXion was not feasible, its database and quarterly ActiveMATTER subscription further strengthened the presence of innovative materials. For a collection that exists to prepare students for their careers that involve material selection and use, these resources attract student interest and exploration of industry-accessible materials that would otherwise be outside the reach of a library collection.
Renovations in both 2012 and 2019 first created then enhanced a space that has been a destination for material inquiry and consideration, browsing and discovery. Classes visit the collection for both one-time orientation and deeper engagement, with some classes reserving regular time with the collection for a whole semester. Course assignments in several disciplines incorporate use of the collection. Providing a teaching space within the collection is one instance of a broader reconsideration of designated and/or embedded spaces for object-based teaching and learning in Fleet Library at RISD.
The successful launch of the materials collection contributed to an increased conversation on materials and materiality on campus as evidenced by the inclusion of a chapter and interview on materials in the publication, The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice (Wiley, 2013).Footnote 2
Launch of the Consortium
Concurrent with the growth of the physical collection and renovated space at RISD was the increasing sense that materials collections could have a deeper curricular fit within the mission of art and architecture libraries. In 2011 the newly approved Materials Special Interest Group (SIG) held its first meeting at the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) annual conference in Minneapolis, MN, with a full room, and has met at every ARLIS/NA conference since. In 2013, Fleet Library at RISD hosted the IMLS-funded symposium, Materials Education and Research in Art and Design: A New Role for Libraries.Footnote 3 With over one hundred attendees, the symposium broke new ground in assembling artists, designers, researchers, and librarians to explore the needs and benefits of materials collections and the library's role in developing, supporting, and programming them.
Since the symposium, many new materials collections have launched—some as a direct result of attending that multi-day event—and the symposium's White Paper, intended as a guide to the creation and management of materials collections, has been downloaded 687 times to date from RISD's online repository.Footnote 4
A descriptive taxonomy and suitable cataloguing database proved elusive despite these major achievements. However, stemming from that first meeting of the ARLIS/NA Materials SIG in 2011, the pivotal partnership between the GSD and RISD's Fleet Library was formed. The libraries had the advantage of geographic proximity, complementary rather than overlapping collections, and a mutual desire for a shared open materials database for both and future schools to join. The project benefited from a literature review of existing and proposed organizational approaches to describing materials that Harvard faculty and graduate students had already produced, the Material Classification Protocol. Most of these in the literature centred on a core of composition-based terms, while a few outliers advocated describing and organizing materials based on properties, such as colour, with one suggesting that materials have personalities—with the suggestion that materials collection be organized based on how the holdings make people feel.
The GSD's Protocol importantly proposed a Material Datasheet for each material that contained fifty-four fields in seven sections including Composition, Properties, and Form, among others. The GSD-RISD project team used the Protocol and its Datasheet as a springboard to create a metadata schema from which a database could be built. The schema work involved both larger and item-level considerations and decision-making for what fields would be desired and how they would behave, and how they would be used in terms of data entry.
Development of the Shared Database
The project had a major breakthrough when approached by LYRASIS. One of its platforms, CollectionSpace, had been developed for object-based collections in museums, and they estimated that the majority of that work could be repurposed for our collections. The collaboration always saw these achievements as part of a larger framework: a multi-institutional consortium called Material Order that would bring additional schools and programs to share their holdings and inspire others.
The group worked with a consultant to craft definitions and policies, timelines, and cost models. These were introduced to the Materials SIG at the 2016 ARLIS/NA annual conference in Seattle, Washington to much interest, as the launch of Material Order stood to catalyse and join similar and distinct collections across schools in a shared group catalogue environment.
Currently, the catalogue consists of two main components on the back end: a shared authority for material records and a local instance for each member to enter object records.
Logging into the web-based shared materials authority, the platform presents a number of authority items. Material Order makes the most use of the Material and Concept authorities. The Concept authority contains the terms that are essential to other material and sample cataloguing. For example, the concept for ‘bamboo’ yields two records: one for bamboo and one for bamboo fibre. The record for bamboo would be a general definition of bamboo and its bamboo-ness based on external authorities, such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus.
Switching over to search the Material authority for bamboo, results include all the material records that utilized bamboo as a cataloguing term. These results represent contributions of terms and records by consortium group members in total (fig. 2).
Search results displaying RISD-only object records for ‘bamboo’.
Each participating institution in the consortium has a local file, easily recognizable via the school logo branding at top left (unlike the shared file). Searching for bamboo in the RISD file yields 141 records. This result represents sample-level cataloguing of RISD-only holdings, something also indicated by the RISD accession number.
Clicking into the newest bamboo material record in the RISD collection reveals it to be a bamboo fabric. This record repeats the accession number and also displays the call number for RISD-specific shelf or bin location information. For this record there are digital images of the sample, uploaded through a media intake process with technical standards decided upon as a collaborative. Only in-house photography is uploaded, nothing from a manufacturer's website, so that not only is the actual sample item represented but to maintain the copyright of the image. With a much higher number of catalogued materials, RISD focused during the pandemic years of 2020-21 on digital photography of samples, supplying staff with home-use light boxes and other equipment.
Scrolling further down, the catalogue record includes colour: both the supplier colour name, in this case ‘bamboo shoot’ (not as esoteric as design colour names are wont to be), as well as an assigned colour family name, in this case ‘green.’ This section also further displays supplier-provided information as well as the dimensions of the sample size.
With both shared and local files reasonably populated, the consortium pivoted to the work of building a front end to provide open online access to the consortium holdings. LYRASIS realized the system-wide need for a front-end browser and worked in house to develop and offer a Wordpress plug-in to allow that capacity. The Material Order project team provided functional specifications and worked with developers to get our ‘must haves’ and even a few ‘nice to haves’ and contributed feedback to iterations of the search and results screens. During that time, the consortium created a Wordpress business site where the group could debut the project and where that search function would ultimately reside.
The site in its current iteration has a homepage with a bold image to grab attention (fig. 3). The selected theme, rated as Accessibility Ready, is organized with a number of pages intentionally kept small in number in order to promote the consortium but primarily allow for the federated search and discovery functionality. Clicking on the Libraries tab shows the libraries and project staff involved with Material Order. On the Membership page, we offer information on the project, the benefits of membership, and how to get more information.
The front page of the Material Order website, http://materialorder.org.
The final tab is Material Order SEARCH, the page that loads the searchable browser plug-in. The consortium believes that exposure of shared search results to be a primary feature of the project. Again, searching on bamboo, we see that the default search is federated across collections but delimiters at left can show results for different holding institutions. Under Composition, we see that there are results for bamboo as being connected to metals and polymers; what could those atypical associations be? This is the type of discovery that RISD students and faculty will find valuable.
Scrolling further down the search results page, we notice delimiters in the left side navigation bar that include typical uses and common forms. Bamboo as cladding is quite a different use than bamboo in apparel. We also see paper as a form for bamboo. All of these elements combine to increase awareness of how materials can be used in a variety of ways. The last set of delimiters are Properties, Ecology, and Processing. Not wanting to get lost in scientific or technical units of measure, we broadband the values used as none, low, medium, and high. This provides a navigable set of search and browse capabilities that are not challenging or off-putting to the non-scientific user.
Clicking into a material record, we have a layout of the Commercial Name prominently displayed, followed by a Generic Name (fig. 4). The patron immediately sees where the samples are located and can click to jump down to learn more about the sample at RISD, in this case. Before doing that, the remainder of the material authority record appears, including holding information.
An individual material sample record via the open front end that assembles fields from both the shared material authority file and the RISD local objects file.
To enable the work of creating policies and standards, as well as updates and implementing changes, LYRASIS set up a site for the Material Order profile where consortium members are its stewards. Within the Materials Profile Steward, we have links out to the site, a link to the profile overview and data dictionaries, and our own Design Materials documentation. Clicking into the latter, we see the most recent Quality Assurance work, as well as our Cataloguing Standards and Manual.
The Cataloguing Standards documentation offers an extensive field-by-field look ‘under the hood’, essentially how to catalogue in Material Order using field definitions and rules. The Wiki also contains project administration information on account types, deleting or deactivating records, the processes for reporting issues and uploading media, and critical SSL certificate information for the front end.
Next Steps
The project team wants to grow the consortium by welcoming more members of the art, architecture, and design library community in which we already actively participate. We are starting to engage with adjacent and affiliate communities such as makerspaces and fabrication studios. We will re-engage with an increased presence at professional events and convene with other materials librarians, activity that already occurs with some frequency. We are promoting Material Order's discovery catalogue as a resource to be added to university and school database guides. We will enhance the Standards Manual and focus on other internal improvements and governing documents for the consortium community. More aspirational goals include expanding the front end with the ability to capture experiential aspects from the user community. Looking more broadly, we want to actively work toward a metadata standard that can be shared out into a global community.
