Cataloging Cultural Objects

In a visual and artifact-filled world, cataloging one-of-a-kind cultural objects without published guidelines and standards has been a challenge. Now for the first time, under the leadership of the Visual Resources Association, a cross-section of five visual and cultural heritage experts, along with scores of reviewers from varied institutions, have created a new data content standard focused on cultural materials. This cutting-edge reference offers practical resources for cataloging and flexibility to meet the needs of a wide range of institutions—from libraries to museums to archives. Consistently following these guidelines for selecting, ordering, and formatting data used to populate metadata elements in cultural materials' catalog records: Promotes good descriptive cataloging and reduces redundancy Builds a foundation of shared documentation Creates data sharing opportunities Enhances end-user access across institutional boundaries Complements existing standards (AACR) This is a must-have reference for museum professionals, visual resources curators, archivists, librarians and anyone who documents cultural objects (including architecture, paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs, visual media, performance art, archaeological sites, and artifacts) and their images.

In a visual and artifact-filled world, cataloging one-of-a-kind cultural objects without published guidelines and standards has been a challenge. Now for the first time, under the leadership of the Visual Resources Association, a cross-section of five visual and cultural heritage experts, along with scores of reviewers from varied institutions, have created a new data content standard focused on cultural materials. This cutting-edge reference offers practical resources for cataloging and flexibility to meet the needs of a wide range of institutionsfrom libraries to museums to archives. Consis.

How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism has operated through the technologies of museum bureaucracy: the ledger book, the card catalogue, and eventually the database. As Indigenous communities reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on the importance of documentation for access to and return of cultural heritage.

Nomenclature 4.0 for Museum Cataloging is an updated and expanded edition of Robert G. Chenhall’s system for classifying human-made objects, originally published in 1978. The Chenhall system is the standard cataloging tool for thousands of museums and historical organizations across the United States and Canada. For this fourth edition, hundreds of new terms have been added, and every category, class, sub-class, and object term has been reviewed and revised as needed by a professional task force appointed by the American Association for State and Local History. This new edition features crucial revisions including: • A revised and updated users’ guide with new tips and advice • An expanded controlled vocabulary featuring nearly 950 new preferred terms • 475 more non-preferred terms in the index • An expanded and reorganized section on water transportation • Expanded coverage of exchange media, digital collections, electronic devices, archaeological and ethnographic objects, and more

This detailed book is a “how-to” guide to building controlled vocabulary tools, cataloging and indexing cultural materials with terms and names from controlled vocabularies, and using vocabularies in search engines and databases to enhance discovery and retrieval online. Also covered are the following: What are controlled vocabularies and why are they useful? Which vocabularies exist for cataloging art and cultural objects? How should they be integrated in a cataloging system? How should they be used for indexing and for retrieval? How should an institution construct a local authority file? The links in a controlled vocabulary ensure that relationships are defined and maintained for both cataloging and retrieval, clarifying whether a rose window and a Catherine wheel are the same thing, or how pot-metal glass is related to the more general term stained glass. The book provides organizations and individuals with a practical tool for creating and implementing vocabularies as reference tools, sources of documentation, and powerful enhancements for online searching.

"Bibliographic Standards Committee, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association."

An overview of metadata: what it is, its types and uses, and how it can help to make Web resources more accessible and comprehensible. Contains articles, a glossary, and a list of acronyms relating to metadata.