Ever wish you could put your fingers on all of the information about a specific topic in a museum, regardless of whether it was drawn from the objects collection, exhibit catalogues, the library's holdings, prints and slides collection? Or your interest might even extend beyond a single department. With computerization and public access projects, museums are increasingly called upon to provide information drawn from a great deal of heterogenous material. The advent of the World Wide Web has placed even more pressure on information holders.
Museum information has been gathered and described in disparate forms -- due either to the nature of the material or the nature of the data that can be gathered about it. For a variety of reasons -- availability of software, variations in standards, the needs of collections -- heterogeneity can be expected to persist and in many cases, it should be encouraged. In spite of these variations of form, style, emphasis, and content, in reality museum information takes only a few actual forms -- text, imagery, and occasionally sound. Web publishing enables museums to provide access to this information through innovative means, ranging from exhibits created in hypermedia form to samplers of collections, to searchable bodies of text that can be queried directly by the user, with the potential for obtaining results that closely match the searcher's information needs. Search engines that enable querying multiple information sources drawn from diverse formats are changing the nature and the expectations of the role of museum information systems.
This paper investigates fundamental approaches to constructing integrated museum information systems. A key element in the process of building these systems is the development of a thorough understanding of the data structures and formats within your organization. Also critical is the need to determine how data ought to be stored and shaped, and how a museum would like the data to be displayed, once it is retrieved. Practical examples are drawn from projects in which the authors have participated, including the Oregon Historical Society's Collections Access Project, sponsored by the U. S. Dept. of Education, and the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, sponsored by the Getty Information Institute, and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. An overview is provided of current web and database technology that supports integrated systems development, and consideration is given to the ways in which these technologies match existing information access systems.
Copyright Archives & Museum Informatics, 1997
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Last modified: February 28, 1997
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