This vocabulary describes artists' books by their physical attributes. These attributes include: materials, processes used in their creation, and binding structures.
Artists' books are unique items that span the boundaries between literature, visual art, and sculpture. In a constantly changing domain, we are attempting to provide a controlled vocabulary as a standard set of metadata to assist in indexing and retrieving Artists' books. Our initial set of terms does not cover the entire possible realm of Artists' books, but rather provides a representative set of terms dealing with the books' materials, production processes, and binding structures. We used the collection of modern Artists' books at the University of Washington Special Collections as our sample set.