Culture Knowledge Base

CCO is a handbook of guidelines for documenting cultural heritage objects and the visual resources they represent. The focus is on art and architecture, but many other types of culturally relevant objects are also considered.

CDWA provides easy-to-understand and clear guidelines for structuring information when cataloging art and other cultural heritage objects in collections. It is supplemented by many examples.

An introduction to digitization for cultural heritage collections. It focuses on digital collection management and explains all the steps involved in the computer-assisted documentation of a collection and the subsequent networking of the data in comprehensive portals.

Das Getty Research Institute bietet mehrere aufeinander abgestimmte strukturierte Fachvokabulare für die Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften. Der AAT ist ein mehrsprachiger, hierarchisch strukturierter Thesaurus mit über 72.000 Allgemeinbegriffen (Nov. 2021). 

The Getty Research Institute offers several coordinated structured subject vocabularies for the arts and cultural studies. The TGN lists georeferenced entries for 2.5 million geographies worldwide with a focus on historical places (as of Nov. 2021).

The Getty Research Institute offers several coordinated structured subject vocabularies for the arts and cultural studies. ULAN is a vocabulary of over 527,000 artists and arts-related individuals and entities (as of Nov. 2021).

Iconclass is a comprehensive classification system for the indexing of representational content in pictorial collections that is used in museums, libraries and research projects worldwide. It is particularly suitable for indexing Western art.

ISIL records identifiers for libraries, archives, museums and related institutions within the globally applied ISIL identification system. The German ISIL agency is the Berlin State Library. The data are provided with addresses and georeferenced.

The LIDO Handbook is dedicated to objects of the genres painting and sculpture and is an application profile of the internationally established metadata standard LIDO, which serves as a guide for structuring information in local collection management systems.

The Association of German Art Historians has posted a guide to image rights in art historical practice that explains various usage scenarios and the related legal situation. It has been published in an updated edition in 2022, which brings the guide up to date after the copyright…

If protected material is to be put online, there are modules on the Rights Statements page for corresponding information. This expresses, for example, that licences have been obtained, but that subsequent use is not possible without further ado.

The guideline of the German Museums Association on dealing with collections from colonial contexts provides information and working aids for collections in researching, documenting and presenting objects and in cooperating with societies of origin.

This 2021 guide from the German Museums Association provides important guidance for collections dealing with issues related to the management, presentation, and restitution of human remains.

The CARE Principles were formulated to complement the FAIR Principles with an important research ethics aspect. The topic is explained in an introductory way and via the page one can obtain both a summary and a detailed presentation (each as a PDF).