Metadata elements for object description and representation: A case reportfrom a digitized historical fashion collection project

This project's goal is to develop a catalog for a digitized collection of h istorical fashion objects held at the Kent State University Museum and to a nalyze and evaluate how well existing metadata formats can be applied to a fashion collection. The project considered the known and anticipated uses o f the collection and the identification of the metadata elements that would be needed to support these uses. From a set of 90 museum accession records , 42 fashion objects were selected for cataloging. Three metadata treatment s were created for these 42 items using (a) the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) in use with the United States MAchine-Readable Cataloging (USM ARC) formats, (b) the Dublin Core set of elements designed for minimal leve l cataloging, and (c) the Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core Categorie s for Visual Resources created for developing local databases and catalogin g records for visual resources collections. Comparison and analysis of the formats resulted in the adoption of a modified VRA metadata format to catal og the entire digitized historical fashion collection.