CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) is the Getty Research Institute’s format for describing works of art and cultural objects. Collect produces records in CDWA Lite, about twenty elements meant for exchanging records between institutions.
The format includes the creator and the role they played, technique, support, measurements, what the work represents, and the photograph of the work with its own creator and rights. Collect also produces MARC21 and UNIMARC, Dublin Core and ISAD-G. CDWA is the format that fits when the holding is art.
The work, the photo and the book
In a museum the work, photographs of the work and the books or catalogs where those photographs were published often sit together. Who made the work, who took the photo and which book it was published in have to be recorded separately, because if they are mixed the photographer can end up recorded as the artist of the painting, or the book as the place where the work is held. CDWA keeps each fact in its category, and Collect keeps that separation when it extracts.
Image and catalog card
If the photo and the card both arrive, Collect uses both: from the image it takes what is visible, and from the card the date, the technique, the measurements and the inventory number. How they are combined is in From the image and the catalog card to the record.
If there is only an image, Collect does not fill in the technique or the creator from the photo: it completes what the image supports, marks what was inferred, and leaves empty the fields a reproduction cannot document.
- With no signature and no mention in a document, a creator is not assigned by style. The hypothesis goes in a note.
- Oil, encaustic and tempera are hard to tell apart in a reproduction. If the card does not state the technique, the field stays empty.
- In a nineteenth-century photograph of Maya ruins, the subject is the ruins and the creator of the photo is the photographer.
Cards in another language
Many reference cards are in English, for example those of the Metropolitan Museum or the Rijksmuseum. Collect translates the descriptive vocabulary (object type, technique) and leaves the title, names, dates, inscriptions and identifiers as they are. The translated title is stored as an alternative title, with its language. The detail is in How to catalog cards in another language without translating titles or names.
Getty vocabularies
Collect looks up ULAN for creators, AAT for types and materials and TGN for places. It links only if the term matches exactly and without ambiguity. Examples are in Authority control.
Limits
Many terms never link to Getty. If a work appears in several books, or different people photographed it, each version is a record of its own. CDWA Lite is delivered as a flat file (FLAT); ISO 2709 and MarcEdit do not apply to this format.
To continue the conversation
If your institution holds an art collection, or already works with the Getty vocabularies, write to us at info@janium.com.