Developing guidelines for translating any digital system to a shared standard for cataloging historic clothing.

1. • search and sort in ways that are specific to
costume
• sleeve type
• waist level
• etc.
• help novices with close reading of costume
• bring together records from multiple institutions
to study larger groups of relevant objects
• bring records for costume objects together with
records for documents, photographs, etc.
A Detailed System for Digital Catalogs
of Historic Clothing
by Arden Kirkland (HistoricDress.org and Vassar College)
BASED ON EXISTING STANDARDS
SCREENSHOTS OF WORK IN PROGRESS WHY?
• Cataloging Guidelines
• Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO)
• examination of conventions in costume
collections across the country
• Metadata Schema
• Dublin Core (DC)
• Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core
• Controlled Vocabulary
• Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)
• Europeana Fashion Thesaurus (EFT)
Developing guidelines for
translating any digital system
to a shared standard for
cataloging historic clothing.
DON’T reinvent the wheel!
CostumeCore needs YOU!
Help to test this system with your
own collection so we can
improve it together!
© 2016 Arden Kirkland - this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Costume Core builds upon the work of Marcia Lei Zeng:
Marcia Lei Zeng, “Metadata Elements for Object Description and Representation:
A Case Report from a Digitized Historical Fashion Collection Project,” Journal of
the American Society for Information Science 50, no. 13 (1999): 1193–1208,
doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:13<1193::AID-ASI5>3.0.CO;2-C.
VISUAL WORKFLOW FOR CHOOSING TERMS
• for each element, the prototype Omeka
site for HistoricDress.org shares visuals for
each term
NEW ELEMENTS SPECIFIC TO COSTUME
• neckline
• torso
• sleeve type
• waist
• skirt
• hem
• closure type
• closure
placement
• components
• main color
• secondary
colors
More at:
ardenkirkland.com/costumecore
COMPARING RECORDS FROM INSTITUTIONS ACROSS THE COUNTRY
XML examples from 5 institutions
admin view, Vassar College
public view, Vassar College
admin view, Shared Shelf
visual terms lists, HistoricDress
visual terms lists, HistoricDress