CCO - Why CCO? Overview: Purpose and History
Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to the first video for the Cataloging Cultural Objects standard, “Why CCO?” where we’ll discuss the history and purpose of the standard.
 
And show you how you can enter your data with style.
 
In the late 1990s, when online digital collections began to be formed, a group of librarians, curators, and archivists began exploring what would be necessary for their institutions to share images and information of their holdings between each other and to the public. Sharing this data would require common formats and practices, similar to way the MARC format allowed for the exchange of book information in the late 1960’s.  So, work began with a core set of descriptive elements. The Art Information Task Force, funded by the Getty Trust, College Art Association and National Endowment for the Humanities developed Core Description of Works of Art while the VRA developed the VRA Core. Both standards are meant to describe works of cultural heritage and their surrogate images
 
In 1999, when a working group for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) was implementing the new VRA Core element set for cataloging visual information, they realized a component was missing. This need became apparent during training sessions for using the VRA Core with the Getty Vocabularies. Trainers kept getting the same question…
 
We know where to put specific image cataloging information (VRA Core elements). We know what terms are preferred to describe the image (Getty Vocabularies).

We don’t know how to format those terms when they are entered into their elements. Should the creator’s preferred name be listed last name first? Should the descriptive title for a soup spoon be capitalized?
 
What was needed was a style guide, similar to the former Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR2) for cataloging in MARC. The Digital Library Federation proposed to co-fund a collaboration with the Getty Museum (who managed the Getty Vocabularies) to have members of the Getty and VRA (who developed the VRA Core) to investigate how such a guide might be put together. The Getty needed such a guide for the development of their thesauri as well.

The product of this collaboration was the reference work and style guide, Cataloging Cultural Objects, A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images. A content standard which guides data values (words or terms) and data content (formatting) for the purpose of creating shareable metadata, and building common practice across libraries, archives and museums. This would improve discovery, retrieval, and access, as well as lay the groundwork for Linked Open Data by using controlled vocabularies.

While the creation of CCO was inspired by the development of the VRA Core elements and the Getty Vocabularies, this style guide can be used with any thesaurus, like the Library of Congress Name Authority, VIAF, ICONCLASS, TGM, and so on.

It can also be used with other structural standards besides VRA Core, including Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) and Dublin Core

Keep in mind that CCO is NOT a structural standard that lays out data elements, or field structure, as you would see in VRA Core or CDWA. It is a style guide or content standard that is used in conjunction with a structural standard to provide guidelines on how to enter and format data, for instance, how to form a title. The CCO print and online publication is organized around common elements (like creator, location or title) for ease of look-up and reference, NOT because it recommends a specific element set.  

Because of the time period when CCO was developed, it also contains an overview of how to structure local relational databases, and how to define relationships between the works and images you are cataloging.

Interested in learning more? Next in this series is part 2, Applying CCO, The Ten Key Principles