II. History of the Core Categories Project
Beginning with a fact-finding mission, the DSC gathered data on cataloging practices in the
visual resources community, with particular emphasis on the data elements or fields comprising a
visual resources record.
Data elements from over sixty institutions in the United States and Canada were analyzed and
compiled into a master list which was sorted into four types of data elements--elements used to
describe the object or work, elements used to describe the carrier of that information (the
surrogate or visual document), collection management elements, and elements belonging to
ancillary files such as artist authority files. Collection management elements, due to their local,
sometimes idiosyncratic nature, were not considered appropriate for a shared database and were
not included in the next phase of the study.
The master list of object and surrogate elements was then compared to the Categories for the
Description of Works of Art (CDWA), a project of the Getty Information Institute, and where
applicable, visual resources elements were tagged with CDWA equivalents. The DSC found that
while the 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.