The Textile Museum Thesaurus Edited by Cecilia Gunzburger TM logo The Textile Museum Washington, DC This publication and the work represented herein were made possible by the Cotsen Family Foundation. Indexed by Lydia Fraser Designed by Chaves Design Printed by McArdle Printing Company, Inc. Cover image: Copyright © 2005 The Textile Museum All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise -- without the express written permission of The Textile Museum. ISBN 0-87405-028-6 The Textile Museum 2320 S Street NW Washington DC 20008 www.textilemuseum.org Table of Contents Acknowledgements....................................................................................... v Introduction ..................................................................................................vii How to Use this Document.........................................................................xiii Hierarchy Overview ....................................................................................... 1 Object Hierarchy............................................................................................ 3 Material Hierarchy ....................................................................................... 47 Structure Hierarchy ..................................................................................... 55 Technique Hierarchy ................................................................................... 69 Term Index................................................................................................... 75 Acknowledgements This document is the culmination of eight years of collaborative effort by many individuals. Foremost among these are Ursula McCracken, Textile Museum Director from 1988 to 2004, who proposed the project to the Cotsen Family Foundation and whose advocacy sustained the project and brought it to fruition, and Lloyd E. Cotsen, whose foundation funded the project and who has remained committed throughout. Daniel Walker, current Textile Museum Director, enthusiastically supported the completion and publication of this Thesaurus. The terminology work leading to this Thesaurus has been a major focus, among other pursuits, of the Lloyd Cotsen Textile Documentation Project (LCTDP) at The Textile Museum. Former Directors Madelyn Shaw, Carol Coleman, and Sonja Nielsen, Associates Lydia Fraser and Carrie Beauchamp, and Assistants Erin Roberts, Brewer Thompson, and Jocelyn Gottschalk all made valuable contributions that have shaped the form and content of this Thesaurus. Textile Museum curators originated the cataloging vocabulary and contributed many hours of thought and work towards a unified terminology. Ann Pollard Rowe, Curator of Western Hemisphere Collections, in particular, shared her immense expertise and ongoing work on textile terminology and classification, as well as her subject expertise, along with Sumru Belger Krody, Associate Curator for Eastern Hemisphere Collections; Mattiebelle Gittinger, Research Associate for Southeast Asian Textiles; and Carol Bier, Research Associate for Islamic Textiles. A project of this scope could not have been realized without the assistance of outside consultants as well. Under LCTDP’s Cotsen Scholar program, textile scholars from around the world participated in textile documentation sessions and terminology discussions that informed the present work. Cotsen Scholars were: Lisa Aronson, Skidmore College; Ruth Barnes, Ashmolean Museum; Stuart (Ed) Carter, Oxford University; Peter Collingwood, independent scholar; Joyce Denney, Metropolitan Museum of Art; C.D. (Dee) DeRoche, independent scholar; Mary Dusenbury, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; Marianne Ellis, independent scholar; Kathleen Epstein, independent scholar; Kate Fitz Gibbon, independent scholar; Rens Heringa, independent scholar; Desirée Koslin, Fashion Institute of Technology; Eunice Maguire, Johns Hopkins University; Mary McWilliams, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University; Miriam Milgram, independent scholar; Milton Sonday, independent scholar; Elena Tsareva, Russian Ethnographic Museum; Angela Völker, Austrian Museum of Applied Art; Yoshiko Wada, independent scholar; Jennifer Wearden, Victoria and Albert Museum; and Verity Wilson, Victoria and Albert Museum. As textile specialists, LCTDP and TM staff also benefited greatly from the expertise of information management specialists as we learned the nature of thesauri, their construction, and their presentation. Lydia Fraser ably indexed this publication and designed the presentation format. Consultants Jessica Milstead, Jelem, Inc., and Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland, also were invaluable to the execution of this project. Cecilia Gunzburger Manager, Lloyd Cotsen Textile Documentation Project Introduction The Textile Museum Thesaurus is a data management tool for cataloging and searching for textiles in The Textile Museum’s collection in its electronic database. The Thesaurus functions both as a controlled vocabulary for cataloging our collections and as an electronic querying aid structured to permit the highest level of success in retrieving the appropriate objects during searches. The document in this book has been exported from The Textile Museum’s ARGUS collections database in order to share our cataloging terminology with others responsible for the management of textile collections. Purpose As an electronic thesaurus, the database of terms from which this document was generated works in conjunction with a database of object records to track catalog data, to enforce consistency of data during entry, and to expand entry values for querying. The Textile Museum developed this Thesaurus because no currently available vocabulary resource meets our need to deal with textiles globally, or develops textile terminology to the level of detail necessary for textile specialists. The Textile Museum Thesaurus is, of course, idiosyncratic to its collection, software, data standards, and current curatorial staff preferences. This publication is intended to provide a model of an electronic thesaurus for cataloging textiles to the museum and textile fields. We expect that other institutions will adapt, expand, and/or draw from our Thesaurus as appropriate to their collections and needs. Scope The Textile Museum Thesaurus contains terms used in the description of the primarily Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and indigenous American handmade textiles in its collection. Although the classification scheme in each category was developed to accommodate the widest variety of terms applicable to textiles, only terms currently in use in The Textile Museum’s catalog records are included within these hierarchies. As our collections grow, as research and scholarship progress, and as searching strategies evolve, new terms will be added to the thesaurus and organized within the hierarchies, and the hierarchies will be adjusted as necessary. The Thesaurus itself is a constantly-evolving working document. This publication contains terms in four major textile-specific categories: Object, Material, Structure, and Technique. Object includes names for textiles and related objects, as well as for textileworking equipment. Material includes terms for the substances of which textiles are made. We have created separate categories for Structure, terms for describing the physical relationships of the elements within a textile, and for Technique, terms for the processes used to create textiles. Each section contains the terms we use to catalog our museum objects. This Thesaurus is neither an exhaustive list of textile terms nor a textile encyclopedia. It does not contain definitions, illustrations, or bibliographic references. This publication is intended to share our preferences among textile terms and organizational schemes with colleagues in the field. It is not intended to provide information on what these terms mean or on how to apply them to any particular object. This publication contains only the textile-specific sections and terms from our larger electronic thesaurus. The Textile Museum uses existing external authorities for linguistic, cultural, and geographic terms, for example, which have not been included here. We also record catalog data on designs and colors, and for non-textile objects in our collection, but have not included these terms in this publication because we are not an authority on those subjects. Terms The Textile Museum Thesaurus contains 2948 terms, of which 2263 are preferred. The terms included in the Thesaurus are intended to provide a vocabulary for cataloging the textiles in The Textile Museum’s collections. As an institutional tool, this Thesaurus must accommodate the cataloging practices of several individual curators and research associates, and therefore seeks to be descriptive of textile terminology currently in accepted usage, rather than proscriptive according to any single perspective. Each term represents a discrete concept. Terms may be post- coordinated; that is, combined in whatever ways necessary to fully describe a particular object. For example, the term fragment may be combined with any object term to indicate an incomplete state, or the term warp-faced may be combined with any weave structure name to indicate this attribute of the fabric. Homographs, or words with multiple meanings in the context of this Thesaurus, are separated into two discrete