Since its inception CCO has been a welcome addition to the corpus of cataloguing codes. Its impact has traversed geographical and organizational boundaries. As community-specific metadata standards proliferate, there is a growing awareness that CCO can bridge disparate communities by prescribing common practice for describing cultural works.
CCO is a data content standard that helps cataloguers and builders of cultural heritage systems. Emerging CCO cataloguing practice has resulted in a significant body of records from museum and image library communities headed for LAM (library/archive/museum) integrated access environments. These new records will improve such catalogues because CCO practice facilitates sharable metadata.
CCO guidelines address the unique and often idiosyncratic descriptive requirements of one-of-a-kind cultural objects. Using generic concepts to illustrate cataloguing practice, CCO can be implemented in a range of metadata element sets (e.g., VRA Core 4.0, CDWA-Lite, Dublin Core, MODS, MARC, and more).
CCO practice has been adopted and implemented in a range of settings by a diverse group of cultural organizations, academic institutions, and special initiatives. Here is a select list of such projects.
The Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) has appointed a task force to research and explore options for the continued, sustained, and future development, maintenance, web presence, and administrative structure of Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO).
The Visual Resources Association Foundation is pleased to announce that a Russian translation of Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images is available online. The translation is a project of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.