The Cataloging Cultural Objects experience: Codifying practice for the cultural heritage community

摘要

A body of cataloguing practice has coalesced around Cataloguing Cultural Objects: a Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images (CCO) since its publication in 2003. CCO is a manual for describing, documenting, and cataloguing 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. This paper examines the influence of CCO and its implementation in cataloguing settings for the museum and image library community. In drawing together three diverse scenarios, the authors have identified common strategies for particular challenges in each one. The showcase projects include: ( I ) the development of a de facto standard for contributing cultural and natural history collections to union catalogues and digital repositories by harmonizing the CDWA Lite and museumdat XML schemas; (2) the use of CCO in the Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive (SAHARA) project, a shared online archive of photographs that document architecture and cultural landscapes worldwide – the SAHARA project developed a cataloguing template for use by scholars and librarians; and (3) the application of CCO alongside other guidelines in records for cultural works in library settings. Emerging CCO cataloguing practice has resulted in a significant body of records from the museum and image library communities headed for LAM (library/ archive/museum) integrated access environments. The authors comment on how cataloguing decision-making ( e.g. differing concepts about a 'work') may impact the convergence of records in these environments.