About The NAI
The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) is more than a museum of architecture. It is above all a cultural institute which is open to the public and which uses a variety of methods for communicating about the shaping of human space. The NAI was founded in 1992 and occupied its current premises in 1993. The striking building is situated at the edge of the Museumpark in the center of Rotterdam and was designed by Jo Coenen.
The NAI stores important architecture archives and collections, and makes them accessible to the public. The institute offers facilities for research and a platform for discussion. The NAI presents exhibitions, lectures and debates, and issues publications which aim to inform, inspire, and stimulate both professionals and the general public.
Collection: Archives and Library
The NAI has one of the largest architecture collections in the world; eighteen kilometers of shelves contain drawings, sketches, models, photographs, books, journals and other materials.
The NAI is entrusted with the safekeeping and management of these archives and collections and with making them accessible to the public. Virtually every prominent Dutch architect since 1800 is represented in the archives. The NAI library is open to the public and contains over 40,000 books on architecture and related disciplines, plus an extensive range of Dutch and international architectural journals.
Exhibitions and symposiums
The NAI presents architecture, urban design, interior design and landscape architecture in more than twenty exhibitions every year. It also devotes a great deal of attention to developments in industrial and graphic design and other aspects of the designed environment.
The large NAI collection often provides content for the exhibitions. Currently the NAI is preparing the exhibition City of Holland, in which all of urban Holland, both built and unbuilt, will be condensed into one singe gallery space.
About the collection
The NAI keeps and cares for roughly 800 archives and individual collections created by Dutch architects, urban designers, professional associations and training institutes. They date from the period 1800-1970. Our goal has always been to collect complete archives. Besides museum-quality drawings, you can also find sketches, preliminary designs, working drawings, business and personal correspondence, photographs, models, collections of press clippings, and published articles.
The archives of the firm P.J.H. Cuypers and his son J.Th. Cuypers, and the archive of the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Bouwkunst (Society for the Promotion of Architecture) are prominent nineteenth-century components of the NAI collection. The main bulk of the collection is from the period 1900 to 1940, and includes the archives of H.P. Berlage, K.P.C. de Bazel, W. Kromhout, M. de Klerk, J.J.P. Oud, W.M. Dudok, J. Duiker, J.A. Brinkman and L.C. van der Vlugt, T. van Doesburg, H. Th. Wijdeveld, G. Th. Rietveld and C. van Eesteren.
Another important archive from the same period is that of the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA). The postwar reconstruction period (1940-1965) is well represented by the archives of J.H. van den Broek and J.B. Bakema, H. Maaskant, and W. Wissing. More recent archives include those of T. Bosch, M. van Schijndel and the early work of OMA.
The Archival Process
The collection’s intertwined data model
The Netherlands Architecture Institute's vast architecture collections are all interconnected: a book may have been part of an architect’s archive that has been acquired, and so on. The same goes for architectural models. Drawings that are part of an archival file may be exhibited in house or elsewhere, and so gain the status of a museum object.
Every item in the NAI collection is conceptually connected with an architectural project, an architect and/or a firm of architects. A project may have been part of an event such as a competition or an exhibition. An exhibition may have been about an architect and may have been documented in a catalogue that is held in the library, and so on. Information on people, organizations, projects and events is thus shared among library, archive and museum items.
Resource description: it’s all about standards
To manage these diverse collections, the NAI has developed a collection management system (aka CIS: Collectie Informatie Systeem). The data model of the CIS consists of seven databases: library, archival descriptions, objects, and four authority databases (persons, organizations, building projects, events). The system allows the registrars, librarians and archivists to define relationships between different collection items and authorities, and to register every item with its adequate standards. Thus the system supports the museum standard Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) for the description of objects, International Standard for Archival Description (ISAD(G)) for the description of archival records, and International Standard for Bibliographic Description (ISBD) for cataloguing periodicals, books and articles (http://www.getty.edu/research /conducting_research/standards/cdwa/, http://www.ica.org/en/node/30000, http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbd.htm )
CDWA, ISAD(G) and ISBD can be defined as metadata structure standards: they define the elements and their meaning by which a given type of object is described. The rules by which the elements are constructed are defined by the data content standards, such as Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO), Rules for Archival Description (RAD) and Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) (http://www.vrafoundation.org/ccoweb/index.htm, http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/archdesrules.html, http://www.aacr2.org/). These are known as data content standards.
Besides data structure and content standards, the Collection Information System adopts a set of data value standards, defined as ‘established list of normalized terms to ensure consistency in the database’ (A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, http://www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp.) One of the most important data value standards in the field of cultural heritage is the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) maintained by the J. Paul Getty Trust (http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/aat/). The thesaurus has been translated into Dutch as AAT-NED and has been widely adopted by the Dutch-speaking cultural heritage community in the Netherlands and Belgium (http://www.aat-ned.nl/). In the CIS, all keywords that define an object type, the subject of a drawing or the type of a building all in the system have an equivalent in the AAT. A second data value standard in use is the RKD’s RKD-Artist&, an authority list of – mainly Dutch and Flemish – artists’ names and their biographical data (http://Website.rkd.nl/Databases/RKDartists). The idea is simple: by using widely accepted vocabularies, we promote the accessibility of our collection.
In short, the aim of using all these metadata standards is fourfold:
- Following a standard as a best practice saves us from reinventing the wheel and doing all the definition work ourselves
- Applying a widely accepted standard makes future conversions from one software application to another easier
- Describing and presenting data in a standard way makes it easier to mash up with data from other cultural heritage databases or to make them accessible through federated search engines (In Web development, a Mashup refers to a Web site that contains information from multiple sources - although this is usually quite seamless to the user. Sources can be (and often are) from third parties using Web services. Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API, Web feeds (RSS or Atom) and Web services)
- Using standard data value standards or vocabularies improves data consistency within the database and resource discovery between databases.
A drawback of many data structure standards is the fact that they are widely accepted within the communities of libraries, museums or archives, but often unknown outside them. Using crosswalks between object specific structures and a generic structure solves this problem. We used Dublin Core to operate as a lingua franca or common denominator to cross the boundaries of these communities (http://dublincore.org/). Every data element in the database is mapped to a Dublin Core data element, thus ensuring interoperability on a larger scale.
Digitization
While the CIS was initially set up to manage analog, 'real world' objects, the number of digital objects in the NAI has grown substantially over the last few years. First of all, digital reproductions of archival material ordered by publishers or researchers have resulted in some thousands of files which are stored on a file server. As demand for this material is still rising, this number is expected to grow exponentially. Next to this 'digitization on demand', the NAI has started systematically digitizing archival collections. The first project of this kind is the digitization of the Jan Duiker archive, a project sponsored by Senter Novem (2009-2010) (http://www.senternovem.nl/). Since early 2010, the NAI has initiated the mass digitization of its entire archival collection - resulting in terabytes of data each coming year.
Although the Minisis software suite provides some functionality in the storage and description of digital objects, it was clear that the existing CIS could not provide all the necessary functions. We therefore decided to develop an independent environment to deal with the storage and preservation issues, while the CIS would deal with the content metadata. This allowed us keep the registration of both physical and digital objects in one database, using the same authorities and keyword sets in a straightforward way. In this view, physical, digitized and born digital objects are all treated the same way. The only difference is that analog objects have a physical storage space which is documented in a location field, while digitized or born digital objects are retrieved by means of an ID or a hyperlink that connects the descriptive record in the CIS with the record in the digital repository. In the Web environment, the hyperlink can be used to retrieve the digital object or a copy.
Pampering the digital born
A third source of digital objects is the acquisition of new architectural archives that hold born digital objects. Since the NAI acquires archives mainly from architects who retire, the share of born digital material was minimal until recently. The Carel Weeber and Abel Cahen archives will be the first acquisitions with a substantial share of born digital material.
With an ever growing number of born digital materials in the near future, decisions have to be made about what will be archived, and how this can be achieved in a cost-efficient way. The general aim is to save the maximum of information, which requires a clear definition of what (relevant) information is. Thus it may be important to preserve the formatting (look and feel) of a document, or at least its main features. On a higher level, a preservation strategy is concerned with the functionality of a document. A three-dimensional Computer Aided Design (CAD) object can be viewed from different angles; its shape can be modified, etc. Saving it as a raster-based image would mean a significant loss of information. Therefore, a preservation strategy must define the desired level of information that has to be retained for each type of object. Fundamental to the preservation strategy of the NAI is its central mission “to document the design process.” The focus is on the information and form of a document, with relatively less attention for functionality or legal issues. On the other hand, the longevity of a document is much more important than it presumably is in a production environment (the architectural firm).
Again, standards play a major role in the safekeeping of data and promotion resource discovery. The majority of the born digital drawings are produced in proprietary formats, such as AutoCAD or Vectorworks. Archival standards and best practice demand that these file formats be converted to a non-proprietary, open format. An open file format is a file format that is both (1) published so that anyone can read and study it in its entirety and (2) not encumbered by any copyrights, patents, trademarks or other restrictions so that anyone may use it at no monetary cost for any desired purpose. Such specifications are usually maintained by a non-commercial standards organization, such as ISO (The Linux Information Project, http://www.linfo.org/free_file_format.html [retrieved 2010-01-18]). As it is common practice in digital archives to save a copy of a Word file to e.g. PDF/A, every CAD drawing should be converted to an open format for vector-based drawings.
The problem, however, is that there is not one good open alternative to the many proprietary vector-based formats. The main cause of this is the complexity of architectural drawing programs. Every application software has its own ways of defining elements: e.g. a cylinder can be defined as a curved volume, or as a set of rectangular shapes forming a polygon that has the aspect of a cylinder. Every entity in the original data format has to be mapped to a similar entity in the other. Very often, formats do not support all entities. Inevitably, data gets lost in translation (Lacourse, 2003). Therefore, the best approach to ensure accessibility of 3D CAD files in the long term is to keep the original file format as well, together with one or more copies in an open format.
The next problem when handling vector-based drawings is to find a format that is suitable for presentation in a Web browser or on a (mobile) device. Again, there is no one best solution. 3D files can be flattened to 2D and saved as a raster image (jpg). This is by far the easiest approach, but implies a massive loss of information. Every other solution will need a browser plug-in or will not be browser-independent. For example, a DWF (a compressed file format by AutoCAD, intended for exchange of 3D models on the Web or by e-mail) file can be read by Internet Explorer in an attractive way (users can swivel and zoom objects), but the same file cannot be read by other browsers. The HTML 5 specification could solve a lot of these problems, as it is much more powerful and capable of rendering three-dimensional objects (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/). At the time of writing, there is no clear perspective as to when browser developers and Web site builders will accept this standard.
The bottom line is that the potential of 3D models cannot be exploited due to a lack of standardization on the Web. They would, however, match with recent trends in virtual three-dimensional environments very well. As an experiment, we converted an AutoCAD drawing to Google's Collada format, after which it could easily be placed in Google Earth – on the exact location where it was planned, but never built (Figure 1).
Fig 1: A design by Abel Cahen in Google Earth
Opening Up The Collections
In the course of the CIS development project, a preliminary Web interface was built where users could search the collections and the person authority (http://www.nai.nl/cis). The site was built using the standard Minisis Web API. Though it was a major advance in the accessibility of our collections, the Web site has many shortcomings. Search functionality is limited, and so is the general usability of the Web interface. The site is extremely unidirectional and very un-Web 2.0. Moreover, although the data are searchable, they cannot be downloaded or exported except by copy/paste. Very early in the project, it was decided to develop a state-of-the art Web interface in a twin project called ArchiVista. The ArchiVista interface (expected to be on line in May 2010) will build upon the possibilities given by the data model of the CIS. Users can browse through the databases in a very intuitive way. With every retrieved record, other associated records will be presented, inviting the user to explore the body of knowledge in the database (figure 2).
Fig 2: preview of the ArchiVista interface
Towards real open data
But ArchiVista has more to show: the underlying database will be the backend for new, exciting applications. Using the ArchiVista API, other databases will be able to connect and retrieve data and process them for uses we might not even be thinking about right now. This is the point where the use of cultural heritage metadata standards is fully exploited. External applications can not only extract data from ArchiVista, but they can also merge them with data from other resources, thus creating the so-called mash ups. This could be another Web interface, but it could be made for a mobile application too – so we built SARA, an Augmented reality app for smartphones.
The protocol used to extract data from ArchiVista is the OAI-PMH protocol, which in turn is based on the Dublin Core data structure standard. ArchiVista in itself is also able to extract data from other OAI-PMH compatible resources. This enables ArchiVista to present data from other databases than its own backend, the CIS. As an example, we connected the Person Authority dataset with RKDArtist. Users can be directed to this RKD database, from where they can explore the holdings in the RKD collections. Other OAI-compatible databases, such as MACE (http://www.mace-project.eu/), will be added successively.
Web Sites And Beyond
The domain name NAi.nl was registered on 26-03-1996. It was soon followed by the first Web site. Currently the NAI is currently working on the sixth version of its interface. Since version five the Web site has been managed by the Open Source Content Management System CMScontainer (CMSc) (http://www.cmscontainer.org/). CMSc is based on the technology of MMbase (http://www.mmbase.org/), which was developed in 1995 by the VPRO Dutch broadcasting company. MMbase was made available as an open source package in May 2000. Since then it has been further developed to form an enterprise content management system CMScontainer by Finalist IT.
The NAI has developed its own Web site www.nai.nl within CMSc, as well as several project-related presentations such as www.maakonsland.nl and cityhallmodels.nai.nl. The NAI CMS makes use of a system of metadata to establish relations between content. Name of architect, firm of architects, type of material are among the metadata that are linked to all available NAI articles within the CMS and used at the front-end to be able to display related content to articles.
The arrival of ArchiVista also makes it possible to create links regarding content between Web site content and collection information: metafields from CMSc are sent to the ArchiVista search engine and the results are shown as related objects to articles. Vice versa, Web site results are also displayed as related ‘objects’ to searches within the collection.
Connecting it all: City of Holland
The NAI started to develop its new permanent exhibition, Stad van Nederland (City of Holland) at the end of 2009. This project can be broken down into three subsidiary projects:
- The exhibitions Strijd om de Stad / Disputed City (Feb 2010) and Stad van Nederland / City of Holland
- The Web site stadvan.nl / cityofholland.nl
- The augmented reality application SARA.
The exhibition Disputed City, which opens in February 2010, presents forty controversial scale models – forty designs that caused a stir – because the public was allowed to cast a vote but was subsequently ignored, or because the architect got carried away and disregarded the original wish of the principal, or because letting the public have a say led to a watering down of the project to a feeble result, or because the principal stubbornly got his way.
The NAI is raising these projects for discussion again. Visitors can indicate which of the forty controversial designs merit a place in the City of Holland, and which ones certainly do not. Eventually ten of the forty models will be displayed in City of Holland and the other thirty will be relegated to the depot.
The City of Holland exhibition, which will open in October, will present the city as it is known in the Netherlands, but condensed in a single gallery. Visitors will see the City of Holland pass in review, filled with all its stories, in a landscape of models.
The City of Holland Web site will be a permanent component of the NAI Web site. Like the exhibition, the Web site will be presented in two stages. During the first stage, commencing in February 2010, visitors to the NAI Gallery 1 and the Web site can vote for the models. Which models should be displayed in the City of Holland, and which not? The NAI will be closed for renovation from June to October 2010. City of Holland can only be followed via the Web site during this period.
In October 2010, the City of Holland will be presented in its full glory. Visitors to the Web site will find not only a general introduction but also a complete digital representation (photographs, text, film, audio, maps, etc.) of objects that are also on show in the physical exhibition, plus related in-depth material. Visitors can also create their own personal page to put together personalized guided tours of the exhibition or of Holland (to view the objects live), to give their opinion on issues that arise, to vote for designs, etc.
This personal page forms the link between the gallery and the site: visitors to the physical exhibition should be able to find their contribution on the personal page that has been created for them, and visitors to the Web site can place their personal guided tour of the NAI on a PDA and find their contributions in the exhibition as well. The Web site will be available in both Dutch and English and will include a special variant for children.
Besides the exhibition and the Web site, the NAI wants City of Holland to be experienced as far as possible where it is actually situated: in the Netherlands. Digital technologies make it possible to offer information about architecture on location: Points of Interest (POIs) can be downloaded on a TomTom or other navigator to create a personal architectural route through the Netherlands. Another innovative application that the NAI wants to link with City of Holland is an Augmented Reality Architecture application.
City of Holland builds further on the infrastructure of ArchiVista, but while ArchiVista mainly targets the professional public, City of Holland will be expressly made for ordinary visitors, thereby forming the bridge and basis for a connection between the collection, Web and real world that is meaningful to the public.
Augmenting Reality: SARA
The NAI launched the application SARA (Stedelijke Augmented Reality Applicatie) in December 2009. The first demo of the potential of Augmented Reality in architecture was shown in collaboration with the IN10 communications agency and the augmented reality browser Layar (http://layar.eu).
SARA enables smartphone owners to obtain additional information about architectural objects in the city – not only textual information ,such as the name of the architect and the year of completion of the building, but also photographs, video, audio, etc. The NAI is the first in the world to enable 3D objects to be viewed on location thanks to SARA. SARA is thus subtitled ‘See what isn’t there’: the application makes it possible to see the former situation, designs that were never implemented, and future building plans.
Augmented reality is a sector that is primarily concerned with the addition of computer-generated images to direct, real ones as realistically as possible. Instead of presenting information on classic and isolated screens, the data are projected in the field of vision of the user. It makes the difference between the real world and the virtual world even smaller.
Fig 3: The Markthal, Blaak, Rotterdam is still being built. It can already be seen in 3D in the augmented reality app of City of Holland... if you are at Blaak
Augmented reality is a relatively new technology which is attracting a good deal of interest at the moment. This technology offers unprecedented possibilities for architecture in particular. It goes without saying that the location is important for architectural objects: the site where a building stands often tells you a lot about its background. Architecture is thereby inextricably intertwined with location.
There are several possible ways of presenting architectural information on location. A simple hoarding provides all the necessary information, but it is static. Digital technology is required to present information in a dynamic and expandable way. Navigational devices such as TomTom have the disadvantage of only containing limited information (confined to text) that can only be shown in 2D on a map. The use of augmented reality yields a far more complex experience.
In order to be able to show information via augmented reality, two factors are essential:
- The exact location of the building or architectural object (geodata): the exact addresses of many buildings are available in the NAI Collection Information System (CIS, see above). They can easily be converted into geocoordinates;
- An application with GPS and compass function: not only must the mobile device be able to know where it is located in order to be able to show the relevant information, but it also has to know which direction the user is looking in, to project the correct information on top of the real situation.
At present the application can only be used on iPhones and Google Android telephones. Google Android works with Motorola, HTC, Samsung and LG. It is estimated that 17.1 million telephones with Android and 9.5 million iPhones will be sold in 2010 (Bill Hughes of the In-Stat research agency) (http://www.instat.com). At the time of writing (11:00 am on Thursday 19 November 2009), worldwide sales of iPhones are estimated to be 25,608,413. There are 8,156,405 iPhones in Europe, 208,427 of them in the Netherlands.
Symbian and Nokia are jointly targeting the application market, so there is a high chance that some Nokia telephones may also be able to make use of the applications.
Availability
iPhone applications can be downloaded from various Web sites. One of the most popular is the Apple iTunes Store, where it is also possible to be chosen Tip of the Week. This ensures extra publicity on the home page so that you can sell more applications. We provide regular updates for the application to keep up the publicity. We ensure that we score high ratings in iPhone Apps hit lists.
Pioneering
There is a lot of interest in augmented reality at the moment. The NAI is the first museum in the Netherlands – and one of the first in the world – to make use of this application, enabling it to act as a pioneer and promoter for other museum-related applications. A deliberate choice has been made of open source for the technological structure of the application to make it simple for other institutions to develop it further.
Developmental stages
SARA is being developed parallel to the City of Holland exhibition. The development of SARA is in three stages:
- A small pilot went on-line on 1 December 2009. We already provide a small area of Rotterdam with augmented reality. For our sample we have used Blaak so far: a location where there is a lot to see (Cube houses, White House, Wijnhaeve, Red Apple, Library, Willem de Kooning Academy, etc.). The idea is that people can walk around Blaak with their telephone and be shown something about each of those buildings, from photographs and clips to 3D representation of designs that have never been built or have not yet been implemented.
- The pilot stage is over on 20 February 2010 – with the opening of City of Holland under Construction and the whole of Rotterdam can be admired with the help of augmented reality.
- By October 2010, when City of Holland opens in Gallery 2, all of the big cities will be visible in the augmented reality application. Cities and towns will be continually added to the application in the course of the exhibition (over at least five years).
Software And Open Source
The NAI endeavors to use open standards and proven technologies as much as possible. Within these technologies, NAI has a preference for open source software and applications, and these are used whenever possible. This is partly based on the government ICT guidelines; they are not (yet) obligatory for subsidized institutions, but it is expected that they will become more so in the future.
For its office automation the NAI uses standard Microsoft applications which can be used at very favorable license prices, so Open Source is not the obvious choice here. But when the NAI develops applications itself, it does deliberately opt for open source. It examines for each product whether and to what extent the developed application can be made open source and which ones are further developed by the institute itself.
A survey of applications used for making the collection accessible:
CIS
In the search for software to function as the basis for the CIS, priority was given to ensuring that the system would support library, archive and museum registration, including the valid standards. Moreover, the applications must make use of the same authority. At that moment (2004) the demand for an integrated package was a defensible choice: few applications had as yet a sufficiently developed API, so that the linking of different applications (from different companies) with one another was not evident.
In the light of this demand, only two candidates were left in the field in the end. Minisis proved to be the best match to the requirements, and it was decided to make use of that system. At the moment there is no sign of an open source equivalent to this system.
ArchiVista
The infrastructure of ArchiVista is based on the system Quplo (http://q42.nl/quplo) developed by Q42. Quplo was developed by Q42 itself, but talks are going on to make this package open source available.
Web site
The NAI Web site is constructed on the basis of the Open Source system CMScontainer. Linking to ArchiVista is via the API based on OAI-PMH.
The City of Holland Web site is being developed on the basis of Ruby on Rails. CMSc will be used as input environment, so that there will be no difference between content generated in CMSc or by RoR for both front-end and back-end users.
SARA
The downloadable SARA application consists of three components which combine to form a Web app: a Layar virtual reality browser, a Safari mobile Web browser, and a compact set of basic data for the application. The basic components of the app are thus not open source.
The CMS with which the application is fed and by which the link with ArchiVista is made is being developed in-house by IN10 communicatie. The SARA CMS will be made available open source with the definitive release of SARA in October 2010, and a developer platform will be made available. In the meantime talks are going on with other Layar developers to arrive at common standards.
The decision to build the SARA CMS custom and not to base it on existing CMS possibilities is connected with the rapid developments in the augmented reality sector: three new releases of the basic Layar engine were issued during the developmental period of SARA. At the time of writing, ArchiVista is not yet in production either, so the required API connection will have to be implemented at a later stage of the project. In order to be able to respond to these developments rapidly without the burden of a community, the SARA CMS is being developed internally and will not be released to the community until after the final release of the application and the API connection.
Organization
To guarantee the necessary information architecture, the NAI has created an organizational structure that suits the requirements of both archive management and access via different platforms. As of 1 November 2009 the NAI has an information manager (1 fulltime equivalent FTE), who is responsible for the management and security of all the institute’s (digital) information flows and for directing the further development and management of information systems.
The NAI has the E-projects team (3.2 FTE) for management and accessibility of digital collection material. Collection material is digitized, described and managed, and systems such as CIS, E-Depot and ArchiVista are developed and managed within this team.
To make content accessible, the NAI has a Web team (2.8 FTE) within which specific content is created, developed and managed for digital media. A digital curator within this team will be responsible for the narrative and public accessibility of City of Holland.
Users
An important factor in the process of connecting the collection that has been left out of account in this paper concerns the end users (this would have taken a paper by itself). Visitors to the exhibition and the Web site, users of the SARA application and of ArchiVista can all generate content themselves by taking part in polls, by adding objects to SARA, or by making sets of collection objects. All of these data are managed and displayed separately from the institutional content. Research must reveal how desirable it is to feed these data back into diverse systems.
For the management of user data, a Single Sign On (SSO) solution was developed at the beginning of 2010 on the basis of CAS, Central Authentication Service (http://www.jasig.org/cas). CAS is an SSO solution for Web applications that is open source available. The SSO environment is connected to the NAI Customer Relations Management System, which contains not only the information required for the digital services (e-mail and password), but also the addresses of some 16,000 contacts. By means of this construction, all of the NAI physical and digital services have an overarching user base, and it is possible for users of SARA who visit a physical exhibition to make use of the profile data known from their mobile application, or to share personal sets among different platforms.
References
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Byrum, John D. Jr. (chair, International Federation of Library Associations), ISBD(ER): International Standard Bibliographic Description for Electronic Resources, Revised from the ISBD(CF): International Standard Bibliographic Description for Computer Files (Originally issued by K.G. Saur, München, 1997,as Vol. 17 in the UBCIM Publications, New Series), consulted November 26, 2009 http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbd.htm
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International Council on Archives (2009), ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, Second edition, consulted November 26, 2009. http://www.ica.org/en/node/30000
J. Paul Getty Trust College Art Association (2009), Guidelines for the description of art objects and images, including a discussion of issues involved in building art information systems. Revised 9 June 2009 by Patricia Harpring Murtha Baca and Patricia Harpring, Editors, consulted November 26, 2009. http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/cdwa/
Lacourse, D. (2008). Lost in translation: understand data loss and how to avoid it - Modeling: 3D solid modeling fundamentals, CADalyst, Dec 2003
The Linux Information Project (2007), Free File Format Definition, 2008, consulted January 18, 2010, http://www.linfo.org/free_file_format.html
Pearce-Moses, R (2005), A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology. 2005, consulted November 26, 2009, http://www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp
