Descriptive information concerns factual details about the object’s provenance (e.g. its maker, date, title) and other defining properties, such as the object’s material structure or medium (e.g. a maquette, photograph, a blueprint) and what/who it depicts. This information is either what the object directly tells us about itself, or what can be otherwise confirmed by secondary sources.

Interpretive information concerns anecdotal and associative accounts of an object. This information sheds light on the ongoing ‘life’ of the object within social imagination — including international perspectives, as well as historical (i.e. at the time of its creation) and contemporary (i.e. following its archival acquisition) perspectives.