Under the Guidance of Other Lights: Art, Subjects, and the Conflict of the Ideal Versus the Reality

Since 2010, the Getty Research Institute has developed the CONA project, which strives to be an authoritative resource on art objects and their metadata. ARTstor, a premiere collection of digital visual materials for hundreds of art-related institutions, strives to contribute its massive collection of architectural metadata to CONA. CONA, however, has specific, structured standards for metadata, while ARTstor has only few requirements. This study analyzed 428 architectural works in ARTstor to find the number of objects that had subject headings, and whether they adhered to CONA’s standards. While almost all objects had information that could be applied to Subject, less than ¼ of the sample had subject headings. Even less were compliant with CONA’s requirements. Several of the collections that lacked subject headings, including one of the Getty’s, belong to institutions that pioneer metadata standards, which leads to the discussion of the value of subject headings and metadata standards.Master of Science in Library Scienc