Controlled Vocabularies

Library of Congress
Library of Congress Subject Headings

Rare Book and Manuscript Section / RBMS Controlled Vocabularies
Controlled Vocabularies for Use in Rare Book and Special Collections Cataloging

Society of American Archivists
Controlled Vocabulary

The Getty Research Institute
Art & Architecture Thesaurus® Online

Disputed Terms and Disambiguation Needed

The controlled vocabularies, while useful for cataloging, do not describe well manuscript material and do not include the level of specificity useful for the study of scripts and letterforms.

In some cases, the controlled vocabularies include terms which remain under dispute by the experts and practitioners in the fields of calligraphy, penmanship, typography, printing, etc. In other cases, one term can have a variety of meanings.

This section of the website hopes to provide a space for a discussion and a means for librarians, catalogers, experts in the field, and others with an interest in using controlled vocabularies to reflect upon terms that need clarification.

Please provide links and information, if you would like.
See terms and references below.

bow and bowl (add also lobe, counter, arc of the bowl, etc.)

bow

“The rounded part of letters such as b, c, d, p (also called a lobe).”  Source: HMML Lexicon.

“Closed curved strokes are called bows.” Source: Lancaster University

bowl

See the use of “bowl” in “Calligraphy” at Encyclopaedia Britannica.

See “bowl,” “counter,” “arc of the bowl” and other terms here in Paul Shaw’s helpful list of the variety of terms in his “The Nomenclature of Letter Forms: A Brief Review of the Literature.”

copperplate

Entering the LOC controlled vocabulary in 1986, the term “copperplate” has an historic meaning, and a different  modern sense (among some penmen and calligraphers).
• copperplate, LOC controlled vocabulary
•  The Great Copperplate Myth,” by Peter Gilderdale