Guide to Cataloging Your Images

Having well-described images in your personal archive can make finding and using your images much easier during your research, writing, and teaching. Good metadata can even save you time in the long run, especially when it comes to citing images or tracking down potential copyright owners.

You can maintain the dataset for your personal image archive in a variety of tools and platforms, including anything from a spreadsheet to specialized software designed for managing personal research archives, such as Tropy. We encourage you to view our companion guides on Personal Image Archiving Tools for resources on organizing a personal image collection. Likewise, make sure you’re cataloging the best version of your images by checking out our Guide to Image Editing.

If you’re interested in working with images and data the VRC has made for you via our Image Digitization request services, please let us know and we can export the metadata for you. Please also share any user-specific tags you’d like us to include in LUNA for your image digitization requests—we’re always happy to add searchable tags that are relevant to your research and teaching.

As you’re preparing your image files for inclusion in a personal image archiving system, you’ll want to put in place a file-naming structure that will create a cohesive archive of images.

As your image collection grows, it can be useful to include a small amount of metadata within the file names to help organize and search for your files. Storing this information within a database like Tropy or Airtable in addition to folders on a hard drive can expand the organization of your archive while allowing for more extensive metadata. This Research Guide from the University of Michigan presents various file-naming examples. 

One piece of advice: try not to include too much metadata information in the file name. Otherwise you’ll end up cataloging the image twice, once in the file name and then again in the archiving system of your choice! The VRC can consult with you on striking a good balance between how much to include in the filename vs. the cataloging system.

Metadata schemas provide the structure or fields for entering data. Many museums, libraries, archives, and digital collections rely on national standards for structuring metadata. You can use an existing standard and consider modifying it where necessary to create a metadata profile that works well for you and your project.

• VRA Core 4.0: a data standard for the description of works of visual culture as well as the images that document them. The VRC uses VRA Core 4.0 to catalog images for the Art History Department Image Collection and other LUNA collections.
• Categories for the Description of Works of Art: a schema for the description of art, architecture, and other cultural works maintained by the Getty Vocabulary Program.
• Archaeo Core: alternative metadata model for archaeology that foregrounds the site, maintaining the connection of the site to the object throughout its lifecycle.
• Costume Core: building on existing standards to create a specification for cataloging costume and historic clothing.

The VRC has created several templates to work with specific platforms, including:

Tropy: in order to make Tropy more useful for managing images and data for art history research projects, VRC staff created two Tropy metadata templates—one for Tropy Items and one for Tropy Images—based on the VRA Core 4 metadata standard. The templates are available to download via Box. Read installation instructions for more details.

We recommend including a field for copyright information in whatever platform you choose for keeping track of your metadata. We recommend noting whether the work depicted is protected under copyright and whether the image of the work has additional copyright considerations. Some resources for determining copyright include:

• Copyright Information Center, University of Chicago Library
• ALA’s Copyright Slider
• Cornell University Library’s Copyright Information Center
• Digital Image Rights Computator

While more and more publications are employing fair use in academic publications, formally requesting permissions for publication is often a major undertaking. This process may require you to keep track of metadata specific to the permissions project, beyond the scope of your personal research archive. For example, it may be important to keep track of when requests were sent, to whom, what needs follow-up, and so on, especially if you’re working with collaborators or a research assistant. permission to publish images may require keeping track of metadata specific to the permissions project, for example, when requests were sent, to whom, etc. You may wish to create a separate metadata template in a spreadsheet (Such as Excel, Google Sheets, or Airtable) to document your permissions process. For an example of how you might structure a permissions tracking project, please access this Google Sheet that can be copied and adapted for your own purposes. (We also invite you to explore our related copyright/fair use services and resources: Images for Publication and Images for Dissertation.)

Many museums, libraries, archives, and digital collections rely on data content standards to define how to structure the cataloging information within each metadata field. Think of these data content standards as “in-house style guides” that ensure things are described consistently so searching is easy. The following data content standards are used by many collections that describe art, architecture, and cultural heritage objects. They aim to be expansive in scope, which means you might need to customize for your own projects or sub-fields if there are special cases for describing the images in your personal archive. Keeping track of your cataloging decisions (say, in a Google Doc) that you can refer to in between research trips will help ensure consistency within your archive.

• Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO): the first data content standard specifically intended for cataloging cultural heritage materials and their images. The VRC uses CCO in our metadata projects.
• Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA): in addition to being a schema, CDWA provides discussion, guidelines, and best practices for describing works of art.
• VRC Cataloging Guidelines: the VRC's internal cataloging guidelines, available as an up-to-date Google Doc, are based on CCO and informed by critical cataloging practices. (For more information, please also see the VRC's Critical Cataloging Resources.)

Many museums, libraries, archives, and digital collections rely on tools like controlled vocabularies, classification lists, thesauri, etc. to provide standardized terms to populate metadata fields and ensure consistency. While these standards result in a consistently described data set, they may contain terms that are problematic, out of date, or no longer used in current scholarship. We encourage you to use controlled vocabularies insofar as they are useful to you and your research project, and to consider a critical cataloging approach when the existing vocabularies do not meet your needs. Similar to maintaining an “in-house” style guide described above, you may wish to keep a list of key terms you’re using to describe your personal archive to maintain consistency throughout long-term projects.

Getty Vocabularies

The Getty Vocabularies are a robust resource for authoritative information to describe architecture, decorative arts, archival materials, visual surrogates, conservation, and more.

• The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT): thesaurus for dates, relationships, sources, work types, materials, cultures, styles, techniques, and more
• The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN): contains names and biographic information for artists, architects, firms, studios, repositories, patrons, and more.
• The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN): focuses on places relevant to documenting art, architecture, and more, including current and historical cities, nations, empires, and archaeological sites. 
• The Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA): compiles titles, names, and other metadata for works of art, architecture, and other cultural works. An interesting component of CONA is The Getty Iconography Authority (IA): which provides terms for iconographical narratives, religious or fictional characters, themes, historical events, and named literary works and performing arts.

Iconclass

Iconclass is a subject-specific classification system that is particularly strong in the subjects, themes, and motifs in Western art.

Library of Congress Authorities

Library of Congress Authorities: provides authoritative records in MARC format for use in local library catalogs. The LoC Authorities may not be as specific for art and architecture terms as the Getty Vocabularies, but three LoC thesauri may be relevant to your work:

• LC Subject Headings (LCSH): authoritative subject heading strings
• LC Name Authority File (LCNAF): authoritative data for names of persons, organizations, events, places, etc. 
• Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM): a Library of Congress tool for indexing visual materials by subject and genre/format

Islamic Art and Architecture

• Archnet: an open access, intellectual resource focused on architecture, visual culture, and more related to the Muslim world. Archnet is a partnership between the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries.

Gender and Sexuality

• Homosaurus: terms that support improved access to LGBTQ resources within cultural institutions
• The Women’s Thesaurus: terms about women, gender, gender equality, and feminism from Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History

Indigenous Peoples, Art, and Architecture

• The National Library of Australia started using Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Thesauri for materials related to Australia’s indigenous peoples in June 2019
• Māori Subject Headings thesaurus (Ngā Upoko Tukutuku) used in New Zealand
• Indigenous peoples – manitoba archives
• First Nations Metis and Inuit Indigenous Ontology
• University of British Columbia: Xwi7xwa Library
  • Names for First Nations
• National Native American Thesaurus—University of California, Berkeley
• SACC Committee of the American Indian Library Association – Edit proposals for LCSAF
• Heard Museum: Native American Artists Resource Collection Online

Latinx Artists and Visual Culture

• Chicano Thesaurus: from UCLA’s Chicano Studies Library
• Keywords for Latina/o Studies: edited by Deborah R. Vargas, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. The Keywords series collects essays by authors across the humanities and social sciences, with each essay focusing on a single term and set of debates.

Asian American Artists and Visual Culture

• artasiamerica: professional digital archive of Asian/Asian American contemporary visual artists
• Keywords for Asian American Studies: edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Vo, and K. Scott Wong. NYU Press. The Keywords series collects essays by authors across the humanities and social sciences, with each essay focusing on a single term and set of debates.

African American Artists and Visual Culture

• Keywords for African American Studies: edited by Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar. NYU Press. The Keywords series collects essays by authors across the humanities and social sciences, with each essay focusing on a single term and set of debates.