This poster provides a snapshot of the work completed in a metadata remediation and vocabulary-building project at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. In resisting existing vocabularies that don't accurately reflect the realities of artists' books, we collaborated on Opening Artists' Books (OAB), an online reference work that links terminologies commonly used by the book arts community to controlled vocabularies used for cataloging. With successful contributions and ongoing term proposals to Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus and the recently approved Library of Congress Genre/Form Source code for OAB, we hope to introduce catalogers and institutions to the possibilities OAB offers. The poster will provide an overview of the website as well as case studies of how the vocabulary can be applied to both existing and new catalog records.
McCormack et al. (2026) studied this question.