Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images (CCO) is a published manual for describing, documenting, and cataloging cultural works and their visual surrogates. The primary focus of CCO is art and architecture, including but not limited to paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs, built works, installations, and other visual media. CCO also covers many other types of cultural works, including archaeological sites, artifacts, and functional objects from the realm of material culture.
CCO is currently available as a print publication from the American Library Association. Excerpts from the print publication are freely available online. The complete CCO publication will be available online in July 2011.
CCO is included as a data content standard in the NISO A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.