LIB 122: Week 9-10 (March 18, 2014)

In our first class after Spring Break, we talked about description in museum culture and the evolution of VRA. Linda started off with a reminder that museums do not have a long standing tradition of exchanging data nor a standard in resource description. This is why the implementation of CDWA, or Categories of the Description of Works of Art (with its 512 categories and sub-categories) was such an important set of guidelines for these institutions. CDWA morphed into CDWA Lite (35 categories and subcategories) which included a data standard, Cataloging Cultural Objects, and XML encoding.  The next step in metadata schemas for museum objects was VRA which looks a lot like Dublin Core. VRA relies heavily on the one to one principal, differentiating between the record of an original work and the various derivatives of it. We also discussed some of the differences between VRA 3.0 and VRA 4.0, although most systems have only adopted VRA 3.0 at this point. Our in class assignment required us to take pictures of art works from around the Shatford Library and describe them using VRA categories. Our assignment was twofold because we created tables in Microsoft Office Word to describe the “work” and created records in ContentDM (Project Client) to describe the image of the art. VRA has now joined Dublin Core, MODS, and EAD in m y repertoire of metadata schemas; it’s like learning new languages, very exciting. At our professor’s request, class the following week was cancelled; we will be making up the lessons in the weeks ahead.