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Usage
Used to describe works of visual culture (e.g. painting, sculpture, building,
performance, composition, literary work) as well as their surrogate images
(digital, photomechanical, photographic) or works of material culture
and their surrogate images.
Creators
Visual Resources Association (VRA) Data Standards Committee;
Art Libraries Society (ARLIS)
Revisions
VRA Core 1.0 was created in 1997 by expanding on portions of the CDWA
(Categories for the Description of Works of Art). Version 2.0 came out
in 1998 with the addition of guidelines and refinements of the core categories.
VRA Core 3.0 was issued in June 2000. The Visual Resources Association
(VRA) Data Standards Committee will continue to develop the VRA Core 3.0
through mappings to other metadata standards and further guidance on recommendations
for the use of controlled vocabularies.
Ease of use
Simple. Includes a total of just 17 record elements, all optional and
repeatable. Many of the elements have associated qualifiers to further
refine the specificity of the description.
Documentation
"VRA Core Categories, Version 3.0" available at http://users.rcn.com/elanzi/vracore.htm
with FAQs, description of core elements and associated qualifiers.
A compendium of examples of paired "work records" and corresponding
"image records" compiled by the VRA Data Standards Committee
is available at http://users.rcn.com/elanzi/vracore.htm#compendium.
Thesauri
Subjects and genres: LCSH ; AAT ; TGM.
Names: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) ; Union List of Artist
Names (ULAN).
Projects
The VISION Project : Visual Resources Sharing Information Online Network is a collaborative project of the Visual Resources Association (VRA) and the Research Libraries Group (RLG), with support from the Getty Information Institute. Beginning in late 1997, a group of 32 contributors created records using a template based on the "Core Categories for Visual Resources, Version 2.0" to form an RLG testbed database for visual resources. This project will be conducted with other RLG-sponsored cultural heritage data sharing initiatives, specifically the REACH Project (Records Export for Art and Cultural Heritage Project) for museum records. Using such a database as a testbed for shared museum and visual resources records will demonstrate the rich potential for cultural heritage research in a database of combined object, image, and text records.
IRIS Project: The Image Resource Information System, an application of FileMaker Pro, was designed cooperatively by the curators of seven academic visual resource collections to implement the VRA Core Categories, version 2.0. Smith College, a member of the IRIS Coop, now intends to contract with a professional software developer to re-invent IRIS to bring it into compliance with version 3.0 of the Core Categories.
The Visual Information Access (VIA) system is a union catalog of visual resources at Harvard. It includes information about slides, photographs, objects and artifacts in the university's libraries, museums and archives. Check the repository's web sites for more information about access policies and coverage for their visual collections. To learn more about what's included in VIA see the scope statement http://sitesearch.harvard.edu:748/html/VIA.html
Granularity
VRA records may describe an item as well as a collection. Although detailed
bibliographic description is allowed for only one hierarchic level, the "relation" element provides qualifers (e.g. "part of"
and "larger context for") that make it possible to reference
(by title) larger, smaller, or related works. By providing local system
linkage to the various "levels" referenced in a work, it is
possible to navigate between different hierarchies or versions.
Data for Original and Surrogate
The VRA Core description relies on a system of paired records intended
to describe both the original work and its surrogate image. Whereas a "work record" provides data for the original work, a separate
"image record" provides data relating to the surrogate. The
same element set is used for both types of record, though the data values
in the "image record" describe the characteristics, creation
and management of the surrogate. How the paired element sets are linked
to form a single record is a local database implementation issue. It is
possible to create more than one "image record" for a single
work, depending on the number of ways in which it is reproduced.
Metadata types
Includes provision for the following types of administrative metadata:
a rights statement, provenance, existence of related works, and location
of repository. Some "technical" metadata is also provided for
through the "measurements" and "technique" fields
of an "image record" (as opposed to the "work record").
The VRA Core does not include provision for structural metadata.
