Sheila Hannah’s responsibility is to write sensible image documentation standards for the 300,000 items in the Bainbridge Bunting Memorial Slide Library. “I spend a lot of my time working with metadata,” says Hannah, director of the Bunting library. Metadata, broadly defined as “data about data,” refers to the searchable definitions used to locate specific information within a larger body of information. The definitions “are the metadata that allow a user to find one particular picture among all the others,” explains Hannah.

As digital images, electronic databases and the Web have emerged as major research tools to study the arts, metadata has become a crucial topic. In 1995 Hannah joined a select group of specialized librarians on the Visual Resources Association Data Standards Committee. Over the following three years, the committee developed the VRA Core Categories, now a recognized and applauded national metadata standard for describing images of art, architecture and artifacts. “It was a daunting challenge for us to develop a single set of data elements that could be used consistently to identify and retrieve images of any work of art or architecture,” says Hannah. “Elements appropriate to describe and locate an Italian Renaissance altarpiece are very different from those necessary to describe a Native American war club, Chartres Cathedral or a zoot suit. In the end it took thirty-four repeatable core elements to do the trick.”

Slide Library staff member Cindy Abel Morris filing slides.

The Research Libraries Group, a not-for-profit corporation that develops information resources for research institutions, selected VRA Core Categories as the basis for The VISION Project. The project created a test application for shared cataloging of images of art, architecture and artifacts. The VISION Project selected only thirty-two institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada, including UNM, to participate in the effort. Bunting Slide Library staff contributed descriptive records for images of architecture, photography and Native American art. The successful test application is now leading the way to a national shared image database for scholarly institutions.

“It’s inspiring to be a part of such a significant initiative,” says Hannah, “and it keeps UNM and the College of Fine Arts at the leading edge of efforts to ensure visual images are easily accessible to those who need them.”

finearts@unm.edu