Cataloguing Cultural Objects

Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO) is a content standard for describing works of art, architecture, material culture, and the visual surrogates that document them, including photographs, slides, and digital images. Authored by the Visual Resources Association (VRA) and published by the American Library Association in 2006, CCO grew out of the broader Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) and provides practical, rule-based guidance for catalogue records used in museum, slide library, and visual-resources management contexts.

CCO defines core elements (work type, title, creator, creation date, materials and techniques, measurements, location, and subject) together with detailed rules for how to populate each, drawing on controlled vocabularies such as the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN). The standard pairs naturally with CDWA Lite and LIDO XML schemas for data exchange, and is widely used in academic visual-resources collections, museum cataloguing systems, and image-rich digital humanities projects.

[Editor draft - based on canonical knowledge; verify against vra.org/cco/ before relying on for legal or contractual purposes.]