In order to semantically describe catalogues, we need to analyse their form. This form has a history, which meets the history of the inventory, whose description is a challenge for anyone who wishes to model their structure, but also try to generalise this modeling to any type of similar documents. The inventorium (inventory) can be considered as an early form and the origin of the catalogue. This list of a set of objects forming a collection was originally built by recording collection items in the very order in which they were stored or displayed (Barbier 2015). That is why in France, as early as the Middle Ages, inventories were primarily used to associate a given object to the place where it was preserved. The inventory is first and foremost a practical tool: it is meant to find and identify an object. Inventories also have a scientific/epistemic interest insofar as the classification of objects echoes the classifications of the natural sciences, especially in the case of curiosities cabinets (Findlen 1994). The practice of classifying allows comparison: "Unlike the inventory, the catalogue organises a set of data and arranges them by object, so as to make them comparable with each other.” (Recht 1996).

With the advent of printing, and the ability to publish inventories for a wider audience, the form of the inventory became semi-industrialised for a few particular types: the catalogue raisonné of an artist’s work, the inventory of a private collection or a museum, the dealer's catalogue, the auction catalogue, the exhibition catalogue. It is with this type of printed data that we believe we can develop a semi-automated pipeline for content retrieval. This process begins with the example of exhibition catalogues.

Generally the content of an exhibition catalogue is quite regular: information about the event exhibition, its title, date, supposed location, its organisers; a list of the exhibitors – first and last name, sometimes completed by biographical detail, a year and place of birth and an address. Most exhibition catalogues complete these lists of artists with a list, for each exhibitor, of the works exhibited (Joyeux-Prunel 2015). Whereas this content is not always represented in the same way in the book-catalogue, it is actually organised according to a limited number of possibilities.

In the documentation we have gathered (c. 1000 catalogues since the 18th c., mainly from Western countries), the most recurrent format displays the following information: name of the artist (here, highlighted in red), information about the artist (blue) and a list of the works exhibited (yellow) with potentially additional information (green).

Catalogue de l'exposition annuelle du musée de Rouen, 1860, p. 19

According to the two types presented supra, entries can be grouped under super-entries, which potentially transmit general properties to entries that they include such as the location of the work in the exhibition (gallery 1, red wing…), or more importantly artistic forms (paintings, sculpture, architecture…).

These two types can be found in similar documents, the structure of which is very similar to exhibition catalogues: bibliographies (Lindemann et al. 2018), dictionaries (Khemakhem et al. 2018b), auction catalogues (Gabay et al. 2020), and phone directories (Khemakhem et al. 2018c).

Catalogue de feu M. de Bruyères Chalabre, 1833, p. 102.

Annuaire des imprimeurs et des libraires, 1841, p. 135 .

Such data has been recently identified as “encyclopedic-like” (Khemakhem et al. 2018a), i.e. entry-based data for which a dedicated retrieval tool has been developed: GROBID dictionaries (Khemakhem 2020). Thanks to the latter, PDF files are automatically structured and annotated in XML-TEI files, which is used as a pivot format to ease encoding refinements via regexes.

The current TEI guidelines https://tei-c.org/guidelines propose elements allowing research to encode various kinds of lists (<list>, <listPerson>, <listPlaces>, <listObject>…) and their content (<item>, <person>, <place>, <object>…). However, some scholars have noted that encoding a catalogue as a “mere list” was not sufficient if some of its entries feature analytical or descriptive content (Nelson 2016). Therefore, following the work on dictionaries with TEI-lex 0 (Romary 2018) on the <entry> element, we would like to propose to the TEI Consortium the creation of a <catalogueEntry> element. The behaviour of this TEI markup would be similar to <entry>, transforming <form> and <sense> elements into <catalogueDesc> and <catalogueItem>. A possible encoding would therefore be the one presented infra.

The stakes of this type of classification are both to allow a clearer description of the content, and the possibility of spreadsheet-type retrievals, where the dependencies of a sub-entry on its entry would be maintained (in particular in the repetition of the entry for each line of the sub-entry in the case of an export in csv). This type of processing is ideal for a pivot to databases, more easily handled by users interested in quantitative and cartographic visualisation as is the case for the Artl@s project.