"Now for the first time, under the leadership of the Visual Resources Association, five visual and cultural heritage experts, along with scores of reviewers from varied institutions, have created a new data content standard focused on cultural materials." "This reference offers practical resources for cataloging and flexibility to meet the needs of a wide range of institutions - from libraries to museums to archives. These guidelines for selecting, ordering, and formatting data used to populate metadata elements in cultural materials' catalog records will, when followed consistently, promote good descriptive cataloging and reduce redundancy." "This is a reference for museum professionals, visual resources curators, archivists, librarians, and anyone who documents cultural objects (including architecture, paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs, visual media, performance art, archaeological sites, and artifacts) and their images."--BOOK JACKET