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Raise a Toast to Get Bourbon Recognized by Congress
Kentucky Ag Connection - 06/21/2017

For librarians, researchers and even the average library user controlled vocabularies are a necessity for efficient use of library resources, and few are more authoritative than the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

What might be shocking to some is that the centuries old American spirit known as bourbon only recently was added to these headings, an oversight rectified with the help of oral historian Doug Boyd and the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History as the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of a Congressional resolution declaring bourbon whiskey as a unique product of the United States.

Since 2008, the Nunn Center has conducted numerous oral history interviews documenting various aspects of the bourbon industry in Kentucky. The collections, the Buffalo Trace Distillery Oral History Project and the Kentucky Bourbon Tales Oral History Project, can be found online at http://bit.ly/2trM2L6 and http://bit.ly/2sPbBIp, respectively. As they digitized their work, the Nunn Center staff hit a snag in giving the most effective description to the interviews.

"The key to successful discovery in any archive is metadata (data about data)," said Boyd, director of the Nunn Center. "More specifically, descriptive metadata describes the information in an archival resource such as an oral history interview.

"We create summaries, keywords, transcripts and indexes in order to enhance the discovery and access experience for the researcher or user and the use of controlled vocabularies ensures consistency."

When staff at the Nunn Center were describing the interviews they had conducted for their archive, they tried to assign Library of Congress Subject Headings to each interview. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) have been maintained for well over 100 years and is one of the largest controlled vocabularies in the world. An example of the usefulness and effectiveness of LCSH is World War II. Without standards, someone could use a myriad of terms to describe/represent this war, including WWII, World War II, World War Two, WW2 and so on. However, since the LCSH authorized heading is "World War, 1939-1945" that is the way we describe World War II in our cataloging and metadata systems.

Back to the bourbon, after working on the first few interviews, the Nunn Center staff discovered an oversight in the LCSH. "We searched online, we looked through the old red books that we have on shelves, but we could not find an LCSH for bourbon whiskey. Of course, there was a heading for whiskey, but as we all know, all bourbon is whiskey but not all whiskey is bourbon," Boyd said.

The best combination of terms the Nunn Center staff could find in LCSH was "Whiskey -- Kentucky." They used the term for a few years, but the combination of terms always seemed inadequate for describing something that was of such national and international significance, something that was uniquely American.

As the staff became more and more immersed in the story of bourbon in Kentucky, they decided they needed to act and began to do the research necessary to impart the need for the new heading.

Boyd first broached the subject when giving a lecture at Library of Congress in 2013 at the Cultural Heritage Archives Symposium hosted by The American Folklife Center. He talked about the recent work the Nunn Center was doing with bourbon and realized he had no better audience with which to share his findings.

"At that point it hit me, I was at the Library of Congress, I had to say something. When I announced that there was no LCSH for bourbon, the crowd gasped. The reaction is not audibly apparent on the video, but it was pretty profound. People came up to me after the lecture and just couldn't believe it. It was in that moment that I knew that we could do something about this."

Boyd did some more research with metadata specialists and his colleague Bertram Lyons, who, at the time, worked for The American Folklife Center. Having never submitted a request for an LCSH before, Boyd waited until he felt the Nunn Center could make a good case and submitted the nomination.

The staff of The American Folklife Center took over the process from that point. When they realized that May 2014 was the 50th anniversary of Congress passing a resolution declaring bourbon whiskey as a unique product of the United States, things began to move very quickly. And on March 27, 2014, Boyd received an email from Catherine Kerst, a folklife specialist/archivist at the center, announcing that his request had been approved.

Library of Congress realized what Boyd and the Nunn Center staff did a few years before. As noted on the "Inside Adams" blog entry, "On the Subject (Heading) of Bourbon Whiskey" by Ellen Terrell, searching the Library of Congress online catalog with the keywords, "bourbon" or "whiskey," would produce a large array of items from the collections that don't specifically pertain to the spirit known as bourbon, making it an inadequate description for the spirit.

"Bourbon whiskey" was selected as the subject heading, and the authority record even includes information on the nomination from Boyd and the Nunn Center. Using both bourbon and whiskey allows the library user to not be "drown in a diluted blend of over 2,000 bibliographic records, retrieving everything from the Bourbon Restoration to Bourbon County, Kentucky," as Terrell explains in her blog. Similarly, employing only the term whiskey will provide users with an even more massive collection of results to parse through including the Whiskey Rebellion and the musical group Whiskey Myers. And more importantly, as any Kentuckian knows and as Boyd reminded us, all bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.

Thanks to the work of the Nunn Center and Library of Congress, now researchers of the spirit and bourbon enthusiasts alike can find books, papers, photographs, oral histories and more on the topic with great ease at archives all around the world.

"Beyond preservation, the goals of any archive are to provide effective systems for discovery, access and use," Boyd said. "My hope is that the 'Bourbon whiskey' Library of Congress Subject Heading will help to enhance the profound historical and cultural significance of bourbon whiskey. As the Archivist of the United States David Ferriero says at the end of our video, 'Finally, this uniquely American spirit will take its rightful place as part of the greatest standardized vocabulary in the world.'"

A new Library of Congress Subject Heading for bourbon will make oral history interviews like this one the Nunn Center did with Parker Beam (1941-2017) easier to locate and use.


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