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Archives & Museum Informatics info @archimuse.com |
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Multiple Uses of Data in the Museum EnvironmentDouglas MacKenzie, Sandy Kydd & Morvyn Myles, DMC Ltd. Subsidiary
Session: Museum Applications: Databases to the Web
Every institution has multiple uses for its data. That is why many museum
Web sites are on-line versions of brochures or ugly extensions of collection
management software. Much of the work in repurposing museum data has
looked at interchange and graphics standards. This has its virtues but
getting data from one system to another is not particularly difficult.
The challenge is in adapting the same data to the needs of different
environments. In moving a kiosk application to the Web at DMC we learned
many lessons in how, and how not to, do this which we generalised in
two tools: MusDev, for building standalone and networked museum kiosk
applications, and WebDev, for designing and managing complex Web sites
which make extensive use of on-line databases. We do not (quite !) have
a series of buttons offering options of "publish catalogue", "create
Web site", "build touchscreen application" but in creating multi-environment
applications such as antique golf club collections and a virtual maritime
museum we have discovered how to eliminate much of the tedium of data
repurposing by making the right decisions up-front and by automating
many of the processes. |
