Introduction

In this chapter, we discuss the application of corpus linguistic approaches to printed catalogue data and how they open up new areas of enquiry into cataloguing and curatorial practice over time. While similar methods are being adopted by scholars and practitioners in a range of fields, here we are primarily concerned with research in libraries that aims to develop collections metadata processes and practice for description, discovery, enrichment and computational use.

Our use case is Atanassova's project ‘Legacies of Curatorial Voice in the Descriptions of Incunabula Collections at the British Library and Their Future Reuse’, undertaken between 2022 and 2023, with Baker as her mentor. This research was funded under the Research Libraries UK and Arts and Humanities Research Council Professional Practice Fellowship scheme that enables library professionals to be active participants in research, and it was one of ten funded projects in the first year of the scheme (Research Libraries UK, 2024). The project took a ‘catalogues as data’ approach by using corpus linguistics methods to analyse legacy catalogue descriptions of books printed before 1500, with the ambition of gaining new insights into both the catalogues and the collections they describe. The motivation for undertaking this project was to use and embed the research methodology within British Library (BL) operations as a means of demonstrating the impact of digital scholarship applied to collection catalogues.