The Visual Resources Association is pleased
to announce that select chapters of the VRA-sponsored project,
"Cataloguing Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural
Objects and their Images, " known as CCO, is now available on the
Web at http://www.vraweb.org/CCOweb/index.html.
Based on the core data elements found in
the VRA Core 3.0 and the CDWA structures, CCO provides guidelines for
selecting, ordering, and formatting data used to populate catalog
records. CCO is designed to promote good descriptive cataloging,
shared documentation, and enhanced end-user access.
The new web site includes information about
the CCO project, a table of contents, and four chapters (Object
Naming, Maker Information, Class, and View Description) from the
"How to Catalog" section of the guide. The CCO editors
(Murtha Baca, Patricia Harpring, Linda McRae, Ann Whiteside, and
myself) are hard at work preparing the remaining CCO content for the
web site by the end of the year. Although most of the remaining
content is written, it will not be released until it has been reviewed
by the Editors and the CCO Advisory Committee (See
http://www.vraweb.org/CCOweb/credits.htm for a list of advisory
committee members.)
In addition to sharing our work, the
purpose of the web site is to solicit feedback from you, the
cataloguing community, before the CCO guide is published as a print
publication. Ann Whiteside, Chair of the VRA Data Standards Committee,
is the main contact for the Project and feedback. You can e-mail her
via the Feedback link on the home page of the site.
Please note that the web content has not
had a full copy edit, but we wanted to get these guidelines to the
community so that the cataloguing practitioners can start testing
their applicability. As you can imagine, CCO is the culmination of
years of theory and practice from the community. The project team has
strived to recommend the best of that practice. We are looking forward
to getting your feedback on this important project.
Elisa Lanzi
President, Visual Resources
Association
http://www.vraweb.org