You are invited to judge this book by its cover: a pair of taxidermied crow wings.

“It is quite a visceral object,” said SK Maston, a cataloguing and metadata librarian in the Queen Elizabeth II Library on Memorial’s St. John’s campus. “When I was cataloguing it, I felt a little bit nauseated. Maybe because we are averse to touching things that have died.”

The book, Preáchán — Gaelic for crow — is a self-published artist’s book by contemporary Irish artist Sarah Lewtas.

It’s bound between two crow wings, with hand-cut pages shaped to match the curves of the bird’s wings and contains handwritten Gaelic text and crow illustrations.

‘Charged presence’

The book was part of an art installation featuring approximately 40 other books.

Lewtas’s book includes a section of English poet Ted Hughes’ poem Crow, translated into Irish.

“It doesn’t feel like a neutral book,” said Maston, “but that is something I really like about it. It has a very charged presence and it’s strange. Then you open it up and you appreciate the care that went into cutting each page, the shape of the wing and the fact that it is about crows in mythology. It is quite special.”

When a book such as Preáchán lands on Maston’s desk, her job as a cataloguing and metadata librarian is to make the book discoverable within a catalogue of thousands of other resources by creating a bibliographic record for people to find it.

Cataloguers, among other things, identify set access points that include details like title, author (s), place of publication, date, subject, and/or genre, so a library user can find their way to the book they were searching for — or the book they didn’t know existed until they come across it, which often happens.

Recently, Maston was sitting in her cubicle when she overheard her colleagues comparing their cataloguing work to the work of Christmas elves.

“It’s a nice analogy because it captures the invisibility and the importance of it happening,” she said. “We work behind the scenes and things get funneled through us and people don’t see how it happens, but there is an expectation that it will be done.”

Challenging controlled vocabularies

Preáchán didn’t have a colophon — a brief statement with publication information provided by the publisher or printer.

Maston says it didn’t have the core elements she would want as a cataloguer to enable discovery and access, such as a statement of responsibility, creator or contributor names, publisher’s name, place of publication, date of publication and edition number.

“I prefer to bring in that information from sources that can be verified.”

Instead, Maston relied on the author’s note supplied by archivist Michaela Doucette, who acquired the work, the artist’s website and one pre-existing record from the National Irish Visual Arts Library.

In the note, Lewtas writes about how she became interested in the universality of crows in mythology and spiritual belief: “Over the years, I habitually picked up crows that had been killed on the road and turned them into little reliquaries of themselves.”

For Maston, the challenge was to think where it fits within a collection.

“The subject headings I chose were crows in art, crow mythology, Ireland, art and mythology, roadkill in art, artists’ books, Ireland and book objects,” she says.

Rules and international standards bind the work of cataloguing and metadata librarians.

Phrases like “controlled vocabularies” are commonplace. Yet artists’ books often subvert rules and challenge this approach.

Maston has an affinity for cataloging artists’ books. She has even created her own spreadsheet of subject headings that come up more often when cataloguing artists’ books.

She jokingly says she added “roadkill and art” and that it wouldn’t surprise her if she finds herself in a position to use it again.

Non-human knowledge

Before coming to Memorial University Libraries, Maston worked at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, where she catalogued everything from 13th-century medieval texts to current periodicals from the queer community.

She also worked at Art Metropole, one of the oldest, artist-run centres in Canada that operates as an artists’ bookstore, cultural archive and gallery for multiples, where books were a regular occurrence.

Maston is a practising visual artist with a master’s of fine arts degree from York University. She continues to pursue an area of research that began as a graduate student: exploring alternative forms of knowledge from the point of non-human animals and how these beings experience different layers of information that humans might not recognize.

“It intertwines with information science,” she said. “Thinking about the many ways people navigate information while keeping an openness to alternative forms of knowledge is very helpful for me as a cataloguing librarian.”

In early April, Maston will present Preáchán at a webinar titled Cool Things We Catalogued, organized by the Bibliographic Standards Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Other cataloguers will also present on their unusual finds, including a presentation on a baked clay tablet (circa. 700 BC) that is an early treatise on medicine.

Experience Preáchán

See the bibliographic record for Preáchán that Maston created. Make an appointment to visit the Archives and Special Collections in the Queen Elizabeth II Library and experience Preáchán.