User:Mybihonteem

CCO
Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) is a data content standards initiative for the cultural heritage community. Cataloging visual works whether they are cultural objects or their visual surrogates has long been challenging for the administratively diverse communities that are engaged in describing them. In contrast to the traditional bibliographic arena that has long benefited from the implementation and use of agreed upon community standards for both data content and values, museum documentation specialists and curators, visual resources professionals, archivists, librarians, and others who document cultural objects and their corresponding images yearned for a rulebook to guide the implementation of existing as well as emerging data value standards. Cataloging Cultural Objects provides that much needed structure.

CCO web resources include cataloging examples, training tools and presentations for use by practitioners, excerpts from the CCO print publication, etc. Sponsored by the Visual Resources Association (VRA), CCO activities center on educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of cataloging best practices for the community. Building upon existing standards, CCO provides guidelines for selecting, ordering, and formatting data used to populate elements in a catalogue record. CCO is designed to promote good descriptive cataloguing, shared documentation, and enhanced end-user access. Whether used locally as an aid in developing training manuals or in-house cataloguing rules, or more broadly in a shared environment as a guide to building consistent cultural heritage documentation, it is hoped that this tool will advance the increasing move toward shared cataloguing and contribute to improved documentation and access to cultural heritage information.

Summary
Over the last decade, many organizations and agencies have been working toward the development of data standards for creating descriptions of and retrieving information about cultural objects. Data standards not only promote the consistent recording of information; they are fundamental to the efficient retrieval of information on line. They promote data sharing, improve the management of content, and reduce redundancy of effort. In time, the accumulation of consistently documented records across multiple repositories will increase access to content by maximizing research results. Ultimately, uniform documentation will promote the creation of a body of cultural heritage information that will greatly enhance research and teaching in the arts and humanities.

Standards that guide data structure, data values, and data content form the basis for a set of tools that can lead to good descriptive cataloguing, consistent documentation, shared records, and increased end-user access. In the art and cultural heritage communities, the most fully developed type of data standards are those that enumerate a set of categories or data elements that can be used to create a structure for a fielded format in a database; these data structure standards are also known as metadata element sets. Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) and the VRA Core Categories, Version 3.0 (VRA Core) are examples of data structures or metadata element sets. Although a data structure is the logical first step in the development of standards, a structure alone will achieve neither a high rate of descriptive consistency on the part of cataloguers, nor a high rate of retrieval on the part of end-users.

Usage
CCO is designed for use by professionals in museum collections, visual resource collections, archives, and libraries that have a primary emphasis on art, architecture, and material culture.

The choice of terms or words (data values) and the selection, organization, and formatting of those words (data content) are two other types of standards that must be used in conjunction with an agreed-upon data structure. Of these two types of standards, far more work has been done in developing standards for data values, typically in the form of thesauri and controlled vocabularies such as the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. Along with the Library of Congress Name and Subject Authorities, the Getty vocabularies and other online thesauri bring us to the second step on the road to documentation standards and the potential for shared cataloguing.

Design
CCO is organized in three parts. Part One examines the issues that must be considered during the analytical process of describing one-of-a-kind objects, including guidance for minimal records, relationships between work and image records, and describing complex works. It also provides an overview of database design and entity relationships and authority files and controlled vocabularies. The second part consists of a chapter on each element of the final metadata record. Each chapter includes information about the metadata element, cataloging rules, and information on the presentation of the data. For example, for the element "object naming" (what a cataloger would call the title field) the book presents information about naming, cataloging rules, and information on how the object name should be displayed. At the end of each chapter, there are a number of extremely pertinent and useful examples. Part Three includes chapters on a personal and corporate name authority, a geographic place authority, a subject authority, and an authority for generic concepts.

Features
CCO is the latest standards tool for the cultural heritage community. It provides descriptive standards for art, architecture, cultural objects, and their images. It is organized by core data elements needed to describe cultural objects, includes lists of terminology sources, and illustrates hundreds of examples. CCO covers controlled vocabularies and authority control. CCO maps to the CDWA core and VRA Core 4.0 metadata element sets. It can be used with other descriptive standards tools and metadata element sets.

Print Publication
Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images is a manual for describing, documenting, and cataloging cultural works and their visual surrogates. The primary focus of CCO is art and architecture, including but not limited to paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs, built works, installations, and other visual media. CCO also covers many other types of cultural works, including archaeological sites, artifacts, and functional objects from the realm of material culture. Published by the American Library Association in 2006, CCO may be ordered through ALA itself, Amazon.com, and other vendors.

Reviews
"In a visual and artifact-filled world, cataloging one-of-a-kind cultural objects without published guidelines and standards has been a challenge. Now for the first time, under the leadership of the Visual Resources Association, a cross-section of five visual and cultural heritage experts, along with scores of reviewers from varied institutions, have created a new data content standard focused on cultural materials.

This cutting-edge reference offers practical resources for cataloging and flexibility to meet the needs of a wide range of institutions—from libraries to museums to archives. Consistently following these guidelines for selecting, ordering, and formatting data used to populate metadata elements in cultural materials’ catalog records: Promotes good descriptive cataloging and reduces redundancy; Builds a foundation of shared documentation; Creates data sharing opportunities; Enhances end-user access across institutional boundaries; Complements existing standards such as AACR.

This is a must-have reference for museum professionals, visual resources curators, archivists, librarians and anyone who documents cultural objects (including architecture, paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs, visual media, performance art, archaeological sites, and artifacts) and their images."

CONA
Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA)TM is a controlled vocabulary produced by the Getty Vocabulary Program that is slated to be introduced to the user community in 2011.

CONA includes authority records for cultural works, including architecture and movable works such as paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, textiles, ceramics, furniture, other visual media such as frescoes and architectural sculpture, performance art, archaeological artifacts, and various functional objects that are from the realm of material culture and of the type collected by museums. The focus of CONA is works cataloged in scholarly literature, museum collections, visual resources collections, archives, libraries, and indexing projects with a primary emphasis on art, architecture, or archaeology. The coverage is global, from prehistory through the present. Names or titles may be current, historical, and in various languages.

The Getty vocabulary databases are produced and maintained by the Getty Vocabulary Program. They are compliant with ISO and NISO standards for thesaurus construction. They contain terms, names, and other information about people, places, things, and concepts relating to art, architecture, and material culture. They can be accessed online free of charge by clicking on the links below.

The Getty vocabularies can be used in three ways: at the data entry stage, by catalogers or indexers who are describing works of art, architecture, material culture, archival materials, visual surrogates, or bibliographic materials; as knowledge bases, providing information for researchers; and as search assistants to enhance end-user access to online resources.

Built Works
For CONA, built works include structures or parts of structures that are the result of conscious construction, are of practical use, are relatively stable and permanent, and are of a size and scale appropriate for—but not limited to—habitable buildings. Models and miniatures are not built works (they are movable works). Most built works in CONA are manifestations of the built environment that is typically classified as fine art, meaning it is generally considered to have aesthetic value, was designed by an architect (whether or not his or her name is known), and constructed with skilled labor.

Movable works
For CONA, movable works include the visual arts that are of the type collected by art museums. Note that these are works of visual art of the type collected by art museums. The objects themselves may actually be held by an ethnographic, anthropological, or other museum, or owned by a private collector.

With the exception of performance art, CONA records unique physical works. However, CONA may include works that were never built or that no longer exist, for example designs for a building that was not constructed or a work that is now destroyed.

In general, CONA does not include records for objects in natural history or scientific collections, although there are exceptions for works of particularly fine craftsmanship that are of the type collected by art museums. CONA does not include names of musical or dramatic art, most names of films, and titles of literature. CONA does not include records for corporate bodies (although the building that houses the corporate body would be included, even if it has the same name as the corporate body).

Purpose
The Categories provide a framework to which existing art information systems can be mapped and upon which new systems can be developed. In addition, the discussions in the CDWA identify vocabulary resources and descriptive practices that will make information residing in diverse systems both more compatible and more accessible.

The use of the CDWA framework will contribute to the integrity and longevity of data and will facilitate its inevitable migration to new systems as informational technology continues to evolve. Above all, it will help to give end-users consistent, reliable access to information, regardless of the system in which it resides.

It is our hope that these guidelines will provide a common ground for reaching agreement on what information should be included in art information systems, and what information will be shared or exchanged with other institutions or systems.

We envision the curator, the registrar, the researcher, the information manager, the systems vendor, and others using the Categories as a basis for making decisions about the content of both new and existing databases.

History
The CDWA is a product of the Art Information Task Force (AITF), which encouraged dialog between art historians, art information professionals, and information providers so that together they could develop guidelines for describing works of art, architecture, groups of objects, and visual and textual surrogates.

Formed in the early 1990s, the task force was made up of representatives from the communities that provide and use art information: art historians, museum curators and registrars, visual resource professionals, art librarians, information managers, and technical specialists. The work of the AITF was funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust, with a two-year matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to the College Art Association (CAA).

CDWA Lite
ARTstor, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and RLG Programs/OCLC have worked together to develop an XML schema to describe cultural materials and their surrogates to provide an easier and more sustainable model for contributing to union resources. This initiative was driven by the absence of a data content standard specifically designed for unique cultural works, and a technical format for expressing this data in a machine-readable format.

The result of this effort is CDWA Lite, an XML schema based on the core elements from Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), and Cataloging Cultural Objects. CDWA Lite is intentionally *lightweight,* to encourage and facilitate its use even by small institutions in cataloging, online publishing, and exposing metadata.

The purpose of this schema is to describe a format for core records for works of art and material culture, based on the data elements and guidelines contained in the CDWA and CCO. (CCO is based on a subset of the CDWA categories and VRA Core.) CDWA Lite records are intended for contribution to union catalogs and other repositories using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting protocol.