Cataloging Cultural Objects

Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) is a data content standard published by the Visual Resources Association that provides guidelines for describing cultural works and their visual surrogates. Unlike data structure standards that define fields and elements, CCO specifies the rules for how to populate those fields -- what information to include, how to format it, and which controlled vocabularies to use. It serves as a companion to structural standards such as VRA Core, CDWA, and Dublin Core, and is widely used in museums, visual resource collections, academic slide libraries, and digital humanities projects.

Background

CCO emerged from a decade-long effort to bring consistency to the cataloging of art, architecture, and other cultural objects. Before its publication in 2006, institutions describing visual cultural heritage lacked a unified content standard comparable to what AACR2 provided for library cataloging. The project was funded by the Getty Foundation and developed under the leadership of Murtha Baca (Getty Research Institute) with significant input from the visual resources and museum communities. The Visual Resources Association published the result as both a print volume (through the American Library Association) and a freely available PDF.

The standard was developed with reference to the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), the Getty vocabularies (Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names), and Library of Congress authorities. It was also designed to be compatible with NISO's Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.

Purpose and Scope

CCO addresses the description of cultural works broadly defined -- paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, built works, archaeological sites, and other material culture objects. A distinctive feature of CCO is its insistence on separating the description of the work itself from the description of its images or surrogates, following the principle that a photograph of a painting is not the same thing as the painting.

The standard covers core descriptive categories including object/work type, titles, creator information, dates, styles and periods, materials and techniques, measurements, subject matter, and relationships between works. For each category, CCO provides rules on selection, order, and formatting of data values.

Ten Key Principles

CCO is organized around ten key principles that guide cataloging practice:

1. Establish the logical focus of each work record, distinguishing between single items, multi-part works, and collections.
2. Strive to include as many CCO-formatted elements as possible to provide "who, what, where, when" information.
3. Follow CCO rules and document additional local rules as needed.
4. Use controlled vocabularies such as the Getty vocabularies and Library of Congress authorities, storing record IDs with the data.
5. Create and document local authority records.
6. Use established metadata standards and conform to their rules.
7. Understand that cataloging, classification, indexing, and display are different but related functions.
8. Be consistent in establishing relationships between works and images.
9. Be consistent regarding capitalization, punctuation, and syntax.
10. For English-language systems, use English data values whenever possible.

Serializations and Technical Formats

CCO is not a machine-readable schema. It is a set of content rules published as a PDF document and print book. These rules are intended to be applied within whatever data structure standard an institution uses -- VRA Core, CDWA/LIDO, Dublin Core, or a local system. There are no XML schemas, RDF serializations, or namespace URIs associated with CCO itself.

Governance and Maintenance

CCO is maintained by the Cataloging and Metadata Standards Committee (CaMS) of the Visual Resources Association. The full text is available as a free PDF download from the VRA website under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 license. The standard has also been translated into Russian. The VRA periodically produces supporting materials including training video series (an introductory series from 2018 and a "CCO in Action" series from 2020-21) and a brochure summarizing the ten key principles.

Notable Implementations

CCO is used by visual resource collections in universities and museums across North America, often in conjunction with VRA Core 4 as the data structure. Institutions using cataloging systems such as Cataloging Cultural Objects in ARTstor, Luna, or Shared Shelf have applied CCO principles. The standard is also referenced in digital humanities projects that involve describing works of art and architecture.

Related Standards

• VRA Core -- The data structure standard most closely associated with CCO, providing the element set that CCO's content rules are designed to populate.
• CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) -- The Getty's comprehensive framework for art description, from which CCO draws many of its categories.
• LIDO -- An XML harvesting schema for cultural heritage that can be populated following CCO content rules.
• Dublin Core -- A general-purpose element set that CCO can complement with content guidance.

Further Reading

• CCO Full Publication (PDF)
• Ten Key Principles Brochure (PDF)
• Cataloging and Metadata Standards Committee (CaMS)