Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) Moves to Quire

Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) is a set of guidelines for the description of art, architecture, and other cultural works.

CDWA represents best practice for cataloging, based on surveys and consensus building with the user community.

“The CDWA has long served as a foundational resource for the international image cataloging community across the spheres of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums,” says Nancy Um, associate director for research and knowledge creation at the Getty Research Institute. “Getty is very pleased to present this enduring resource in a new, sleek, and user-friendly way, offered via Quire, our digital publishing framework. Quire is an ideal format for the CDWA as it pairs elegant navigation across different types of devices with long-term durability.”

Formulated in the early 1990s, CDWA has been regularly updated in order to remain current, to include guidelines for new media works, and to become ever more inclusive, with examples for cataloging works from many cultures. The CDWA and the corresponding suite of resources that are offered by the Getty Vocabulary Program are some of the most frequently consulted digital resources that Getty maintains with a broad international audience.

In addition, the content in CDWA identify key vocabulary resources and descriptive practices, also offered by Getty, that make the information residing in diverse systems and in the cloud both more compatible and more accessible.

The use of the CDWA guidelines contributes to the integrity and longevity of data and will facilitate the inevitable migration of data to new systems as information technology continues to evolve. Above all, using standard content as described in CDWA helps give, reliable access to information, regardless of the system or data model in which it resides.

CDWA advises and provides a framework for the use of the Getty Vocabularies, the pre-eminent resource for terminology in the arts and cultural heritage sphere. An implementation of CDWA is the Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA), one of the five Getty Vocabularies. A subset of CDWA is incorporated in another published resource, Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO), designed for the visual resources community.

The CDWA is maintained by the Getty Vocabulary Program.