Guide to Good Practice:
prepared by
Linda McRae, University of South Florida
Elisa Lanzi, Smith College
Murtha Baca, Getty Research Institute
11/21/00 draft
Over
the last decade, many organizations and agencies have been working toward
the development of standards for describing and retrieving information
about cultural objects.Data standards
are not new, but they have become far more critical as information is increasingly
stored in electronic form.Data
standards not only promote the consistent recording of information, they
are fundamental to the efficient retrieval of information online.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 (e.g., Categories for the Description of Works of Art
(CDWA), VRA Core Categories, Version 3.0 (VRA Core).Although
such a structure is the logical first step in the development of standards,
a structure alone will achieve neither a high rate of descriptive consistency
nor a high rate of retrieval.
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 in
order to achieve an optimum rate of retrieval and a high level of consistency.Of
these two types of standards, far more work has been accomplished, particularly
by the Getty, in developing standards for data values, typically in the
form of thesauri and controlled vocabularies such as the Art & Architecture
Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, and Thesaurus of Geographic
Names.However, data content
standards for art and cultural heritage information have received little
or no attention outside of local contexts.
Both the library
and archival communities have well-established rules for data content.Known
as the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition (AACR2),
the rules were originally intended primarily for describing books, but
over the years adaptations have been developed for graphic materials and
archival collections.Occasionally
these rules have been applied to works of art, but they fall far short
of meeting the specific and idiosyncratic needs for describing works of
art and cultural objects.
Similar to
AACR2, the proposed guide to good practice will be designed specifically
for those communities engaged in describing and documenting works of art,
cultural artifacts, and their visual surrogates.Standard
rules for describing cultural objects will immediately 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 access to which will greatly enhance research and teaching
in the arts and humanities.
The
proposed guidelines will cover a limited set of cultural objects and their
images.The primary focus is on museum
objects, including but not limited to paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts,
photographs, archeological artifacts, and other objects from the material
culture.It is hoped that these guidelines
can be used as a model for additional publications covering such areas
as the built environment that have been excluded from this proposal.
The
intended audience is visual resources professionals, museum registrars,
library catalogers, archivists, and others engaged in documenting cultural
heritage objects and images.Based
upon existing data structures, particularly the Categories for the Description
of Works of Art and the Visual Resources Association Core Categories,
the guide will have extensive relevance to other data structures such as
the Canadian Heritage Information NetworkCHIN
Data Dictionary; Spectrum, the UK museum documentation standard;
and the French document, Méthode d’inventaire informatique des
objets beaux-arts et arts décoratifs.To
extend its value to the widest possible community of users, it will include
mapping to the MARC format and Dublin Core elements, where appropriate.