The garments produced by clothing manufacturers fall into three main categories, although these may be split up into additional, more specific categories.
Until the 1950s, fashion clothing was predominately designed and manufactured on a made-to-measure or haute couture basis (French for high-sewing), with each garment being created for a specific client.
A couture garment is made to order for an individual customer, and is usually made from high-quality, expensive
embroidery digitizing fabric, sewn with extreme attention to detail and finish, often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques.
Look and fit take priority over the cost of materials and the time it takes to make.
Due to the high cost of each garment, haute couture makes little direct profit for the fashion houses, but is important for prestige and publicity.
Some of the knots, as well as other features, such as color, are thought to represent non-numeric information, which has not been deciphered.
It is generally thought that the system did not include phonetic symbols analogous to letters of the alphabet.
However Gary Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system which could record phonological or logographic data.
Within the very restricted domain of cataloging rules in the field of Library and information science the term "realia" is used to describe those mass-produced objects which incorporate documents or significant amounts of text (such as world globes, decks of quiz cards, board games), but which have a format which makes it hard to incorporate them in the general collection or to describe them easily in the catalog.
Objects of realia, due to their diverse and compound nature, pose unique preservation challenges for libraries and archives.
Unlike books and other traditional library
digitizing materials, the artifactual value of these materials is key.
In fact, when such items are unaccompanied by written documentation, as is often the case, the intellectual value sought by most library collections is often uncertain