Resources > Cataloging and Data Management
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Many of these questions are excerpted and adapted with permission from the printed versions of the papers which Eric Childress, ElisaLanzi and Roy McKeown presented at the session Faces and Names:Standards for Navigating Visual Databases, at the XXIX International Congress of the History of Art: VRA Satellite Meeting. These papers, together with the "Selected Resources for Image-Related Intellectual Control Standards" are published in the VRA Bulletin, Vol. 23 (Winter 1996), pp. 88-103.
BACKGROUND QUESTIONS
Q. What are standards?
A. Standards are mutually agreed-upon statements that help control an action or product.
Q. Are there different types of standards?
A. Yes, they include technical standards, conventions, and guidelines. The most exacting standards,
technical standards, are codified forms of common practice that yield consistent results.
Conventions are similar to technical standards; however, they are intended to accommodate
variation in local practice. Guidelines are criteria against which products,
systems, or programs can be measured or evaluated.
Q. Where do standards come from?
A. Standards originate in various sectors and exist as both proprietary and open standards. The commercial sector develops standards for such products as computer hardware. Organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the American Standards Institute (ANSI), and the British Standards Organization (BSO) are official standard-makers. Professional organizations such as the Visual Resources Association (VRA), the Art Libraries Society (ARLIS/NA), etc. draft standards in an attempt to meet the needs of their constituencies. Standards are also developed in conjunction with collaborative projects such as the core record developed by Colum Hourihane for the Van Eyck project.
QUESTIONS ABOUT DATA STANDARDS
Q. What are data standards?
A. Data standards promote the consistent recording of information and are fundamental to the efficient exchange of information. They provide the rules for structuring information, so that the data entered into a system can be reliably read, sorted, indexed, retrieved, communicated between systems, and shared. They help protect the long-term value of data.
Q. Are there different types of data standards?
A. Yes, there are at least four: data structure, data content, data value, and data communication.
Q. What are data structure standards?
A. Data structure standards are concerned with the definition of a record and the relationship of the
fields within it.
The MARC (MAchine ReadableCataloging) format is a good example, although it is really a hybrid of a data structure and an information exchange standard.Spectrum, a collections management standard developed by the Museum Documentation Association (MDA), provides what are called "procedures" for documenting museum collections, including aprocedure for object creation.
Q. What is metadata and why is it important?
A. Metadata is data about data; this includes data aboutinformation resources. The identification and
management of metadata is important to facilitate access to wide ranges of materials over networks. This is particularly important because of the rapid development of resources on the World Wide Web.
The Dublin Core is an example of work currently being done in this area.
This effort focuses on defining a core set of metadata (i.e.,descriptive) elements that will be adequate
to meet the needs of mostusers of most types of information objects--both textual and imageobjects.
Q. Will proposed data structure standards for visual resources collections impose a rigid system which everyone must follow? Will this lead to eventual international standards?
A. No. The trend is to develop guidelines or categories whichserve as templates for the development of cataloging records but which are not true record structures. Record structures incorporating the concepts of VRA/DSC Core with additional necessary fields willneed to be developed locally.
The VRA/DSC Core is being mapped to various related templates which reflect different points of view such as MARC and CIDOC. We hope that this effort will facilitate sharing while fostering access to rich local data.
For the field of visual resources there are three relevant, important developments in this area:
the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA)
the VRA/Data Standards Committee Core Categories (VRA CORE3.0), and the
CIDOC information categories.
Q. What are data content standards?
A. Data content standards are the rules for how data are entered,for example cataloging rules
and syntax conventions. Examples of this are the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2),
Graphic Materials:Rules For Describing Original Items and Historical Collections by Elisabeth Betz Parker,
and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) Application Protocol, which suggests protocols for combining individual AAT terms to form headings
or strings for indexing.
Q. What are data value standards?
A. Date value standards usually take the form of controlledvocabularies, including subject specific-terminologies andauthorities for names and places. Well-known examples include the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), the Thesaurus of Geographic Name (TGN), the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
Q. How do data value standards differ from classification schemes?
A. Classification systems are sometimes treated as data value standards because their elements can sometimes be used as values. However, in the visual resources community, the use of classification tends to be collection specific as well as dictated by the changing needs of users.
The intention of the VRA/DSC is not to prescribe either a national or international classification
system or a national image database but to promote a standard of communication. Decisions about how to
classify images remain local ones. Some collections will use more than one classification scheme,
others will use a single system, andcertain collections will not use any.
Q. What are data communication or information interchange standards?
A. The success of shared cataloging is due in part to the adoption of cataloging standards but is also attributable to the development of effective data communication/record interchange standards and protocols. These standards which define the technical framework for exchanging information work between systems and functioning either within a single institution or among systems in multiple institutions. Of primary importance are the family of national and international MARC (MAchine eadable Cataloging) standards widely used by libraries around the world. Of the national MARC standards, USMARC (developed by the Library of Congress), is the most widely used.
An alternative to MARC is SGML(Standardized General Markup Language) which constructs finding aids--a form of documentation that combines brief descriptive information about a collection with background and othercontext-of-the collection information. A "marked-up" document can support electronic links between the reference to objects provided by the finding aids and the electronically-stored image of the object.An SGML Document-Type-Definition (DTD) specifically developed for archival materials, called Encoded Archival Description (EAD), is beginning to be used in some image material collections.
Q. My collection contains surrogates of objects which are neither art nor architecture; they include such items or topics as musical instruments, geography, natural science, etc. Will the VRA/DSC Core Categories work?
A. The VRA/DSC Core is designed to work in the first instance with surrogates of objects of art or
architecture. In some cases, it maybe possible to widen the applicability of this core so that it will work
with surrogates of other types of objects such as musical instruments, etc. However, it may be necessary to
look elsewhere for sets of elements developed for other disciplines to find appropriate categories.
Q. What do I do if I need more fields than are covered by the VRA/DSC Core?
A. The VRA/DSC Core is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to identify those essential elements which describe the data common to most visual resources collections and which are shareable. It splits the difference between a minimal and full level. Most curators of visual resources collections will decide to incorporate additional fields in their local databases in order to adequately describe and manage their holdings.
The VRA/DSC recommends the use of various commonly available guidelines including the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), MARC, the CIDOC categories for guidance when developing local fields.
Q. Is the current VRA/DSC Core definitive or will it change?
A. The VRA core exists in 3 versions, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, which is the current version.
These documents represent work in progress, and both the content and the form of the core may change.
Changes to the core will be posted on this webpage and will be signaled with different version numbers.
Q. What if I need to use the core before it is completed?
A. By all means do so and report your successes and failures to the VRA/DSC. We need to know what you think about the elements and how well they work for you. You should feel free to ask questions and make constructive suggestions.
Adapted by MargaretWebster
3/13/1997
Visual Resources Collection
College of Architecture, Art & Planning
B-56 Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: (607) 255-3300
page last updated 01/15/02 by Eileen Fry
