I decided to use the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) developed by the Getty Trust to develop metadata for a collection of small metal figures and their associated visual and group records. These items are in my private collection, and they were also constructed by me. This was for a class I took in Metadata.The cataloging rules in CDWA can be rather specific in some areas and requires certain fields to be used based on the presence of others. For example, rules like this appear in more than one spot:

 If the subject refers to function, you may record the same term in OBJECT/WORK – TYPE. If the TITLE refers to subject, the subject must also be recorded in SUBJECT MATTER. “ (CDWA, 16. Subject Matter).

The CDWA specifies vocabularies and several outside vocabularies that can be used. The Arts and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT, 2017) by the Getty Trust is listed first and most often, but many others can be used. Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images (CCO), by the Visual Resources Association (VRA, 2006) is suggested as a means of understanding the categories at their top level, while the vocabularies are employed in the sub-categories.

CDWA is also usable with CDWA Lite,  a schema that is intended for transmission via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting protocol.

Cataloging these items was challenging at times for several reasons. The exhaustive and duplicative categories made for a fair amount of data entry. Consistently applying the cataloging rules was tricky at times, as the record is supposed to have some matching data within the record itself and terms from free text fields are supposed to be indexed in the Authority Section. Selection of a system to generate CDWA  records would need to have logic built in to check for inconsistencies, and would ideally create relationships based on the presence of related metadata.

There was also the emotional and cognitive load of indexing something that I was also the creator of. I found myself striving for the most accurate descriptive terms from the AAT and the built-in vocabularies which often left me feeling dissatisfied. For example, I wanted to include the term postmodern, but it was not part of the vocabulary. I also thought about how some terms might be influenced by the 15 years that have gone by since I made these items. It was hard sometimes to be objective, and where I succeeded in objectivity, I felt I failed in description. My free-text descriptions did get longer, and I feel I mastered some (not all) of the cataloging rules as I progressed through the project.

I could have described each of these more deeply. I was intrigued by the nested structure of some of the fields, particularly for place. One can include administrative entities such as cities or states, as well as environmental ones relating to landscape. I wondered however, could I narrow the place description down to the immediate? I started to think as I recorded the broader regions of time and space where the creation of these works took place, that this was also the space to record the intimate details of my surroundings; the dark blue carpet and crisp white walls of my studio; the trees outside the window and the ambient sounds of traffic passing by. Then there was the small universe on my workbench. A landscape of tools, metal, and soldering blocks. Important notes like a recipe for homemade flux and a guideline to the Brown and Sharpe gauge were committed to squares of thin brass with letter punches and then tacked to the workbench with nails. Shortly after making these I would pack up all my tools and move far away. I created so much artwork there that it seems important to include this, but it seemed possibly extraneous so I did not.

Here is a simple CDWA record for one of my sculptures: