Visual Resources Association Core Categories (VRA Core)

Maintained by the VRA Core Oversight Committee.

The Visual Resources Association Core Categories represent an early successful effort of a professional community to develop a metadata standard tailored to its own needs. VRA Core was originally built upon the Dublin Core base, adding features needed for the description and management of visual resources. It allows for the separate description of Images, Works, and Collections, reflecting the need of image repositories to manage data about the reproductions to which they provide users access separately from the metadata about works of art, architecture, and material culture themselves. The current version of this standard is VRA Core 4.0, which features two options for implementation: “unrestricted” which defines the VRA Core data elements, and “restricted” which enforces data constraints on certain elements to predefined vocabularies or date formats.