Download CCO Community Space Working Group

Cataloging Cultural Objects:
A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images
www.vraweb.org/CCOweb/
What is CCO?
Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images (CCO) is a manual
for describing, documenting, and cataloging cultural works and their visual surrogates. The project
was conceived and developed by an editorial team of members of the Visual Resources Association
(VRA), with an advisory board of experts from the museum, library, and archives communities.
The first phase of the project formally began in December of 2001. Primary funding was provided
by the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and the Getty Grant Program, with secondary support
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and others. The CCO rules and guidelines are structured
to relate to a subset of metadata elements from Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA);
CCO maps to several other metadata standards, including the VRA Core Categories, as well.
Project accomplishments to date
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A complete draft of CCO has been published on the VRA Web site at
http://vraweb.org/CCOweb/index.html. All chapters are temporarily available as
downloadable PDF files. The document consists of the following: Part 1 (General
Guidelines); Part II (Elements); and Part III (Authorities).
A vetting process has taken place, including drafting of the Guide by the project's Editors,
reviews by Advisory Committee members, and revisions by the Editors. A formal review
program was initiated in 2004. Comments from the museum, art history, visual resources,
archives, and library communities was solicited and incorporated.
A print edition of CCO will be published by the American Library Association (ALA) in
Summer 2006.
CCO Editors and Advisory Committee members continue to present papers and hold
workshops at professional conferences.
The VRA Core 4.0 schema, currently under development, will incorporate new features
that grew out of CCO.
What is CDWA Lite?
CDWA Lite is an XML schema to describe core records for works of art and material culture based
on the CDWA and CCO. Such records are intended for contribution to union catalogs and other
repositories using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI/PMH).
The CDWA Lite elements are designed to be a subset of the full CDWA set of elements. The
specification for version 0.09 is available at
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/cdwa/cdwalite/index.html
CCO Project Credits and Partners
Editors
Murtha Baca
Head, Getty Vocabulary Program and Digital
Resource Management, Getty Research Institute,
Los Angeles, California
Patricia Harpring
Managing Editor, Getty Vocabulary Program,
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California
Elisa Lanzi
Director, Imaging Center
Department of Art, Smith College, Northampton,
Massachusetts
Linda McRae
Director, College of Visual and Performing Arts
Visual Resources Library
University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida
Ann Whiteside
Head, Rotch Library
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Project Manager
Diane M. Zorich
Information Management Consultant
for Cultural Organizations, Princeton, New Jersey
Advisory Committee
Matthew Beacom
Metadata Librarian
Yale University Library, New Haven,
Connecticut
Erin Coburn
Manager, Collections Information
J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles, California
Jan Eklund
Curator, Visual Resources, Department of Art
History, University of California,
Berkeley, California
Mary Elings
Archivist for Digital Collections
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley, California
Major Funding Provided by
The Getty Foundation (formerly
the Getty Grant Program),
Los Angeles, California
Elizabeth O'Keefe
Director of Collection Information Systems,
Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York, New York
Trish Rose
Image Metadata Librarian,
Union Catalog of Art Images (UCAI) Project,
University of California, San Diego, California
Layna White
Head of Collections Information,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
San Francisco, California
Digital Library Federation,
Washington, DC
Cataloging Cultural Objects
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
New York, New York