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CDWA And VRA
There are two important Metadata standards
designed for visual collections: CDWA and VRA.
CDWA
stands for Categories
for the Description of Works of Art, a metadata schema
designed by of the Art Information Task Force (AITF),
to "describe the content of art databases by articulating
a conceptual framework for describing and accessing information
about objects and images." It was released in February
1996.
This Metadata schema is very extensive and
developed for use by art specialists. There are 26 main
categories, and each category has its own set of subcategories.
All the categories are fit into two groups: "Object,
Architecture, or Group" as the information intrinsic
to the work, and "Authorities/Vocabulary Control"
as the information extrinsic to the work. CDWA also defines
several core categories that are necessary to uniquely
and unambiguously identify a particular work of art or
museum object.
VRA Core Categories
(current vision 3.0) is Visual Resources Association's
approach of categorizing visual documents that represent
objects of art or architecture. The VAR Core Categories
provides a template designed but not limited to visual
works collections. As VRA
Data Standard Committee pointed, "CDWA was exhaustive
in its list of elements needed to describe museum objects,
it was not entirely satisfactory for the description of
images, and in particular, did not cover all of the elements
needed for the description of architecture and other site-specific
works." There is a need to expand the concept to
non-art objects and visual document for which VRA was
created.
Compared with and Benefit from CDWA, VRA
Core categories is designed to cover most visual materials.
It does not have such comprehensive categories as CDWA.
Similar to Dublin Core, It provides a core set of elements,
which could be expanded by adding new elements as needed.
VRA
3.0 contains 17 categories that can be used to describe
both work and representations of the work (defined as
images). It also borrows the concept of Qualifier
to help describe and distinguish entities, clear the relationship
between works and images, such as a photo of a work, and
a digital image of that photo. Because of the characteristics
of visual objects, it is recommended that develop additional
elements for the local collections, set up controlled
vocabularies in categories and use other Metadata sets
such as CDWA, MARC for guidance.
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