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Archives & Museum Informatics info @archimuse.com |
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The Virtual Collection of the Musées du Nord-Pas de Calais, Thirty-three French MuseumsBruno B. Simon, Association des Conservateurs de musées du Nord-Pas de Calais Subsidiary
Session: Museum Applications: Building and Delivering Large Digital
Art Libraries
The web project of the Association of Curators of the Museums of Northern
Calais (ACMNPDC) was the first in France to demonstrate the potential
of new technologies for information dissemination using the Internet.
It was based on common collections management software and the mutual
administration of a database of a minimal cataloguing record and image
for works of art. The Northern Calais region was chosen in November
1994 as a participant in the European Union IRISI (inter-regional information)
initiative which supported efforts to introduce the "information society".
In this context , the regional museums association (representing the
33 museums of the region) decided to explore establishing a virtual
collection in 1995. As those responsible for documentation of the museums,
the curators had previously undertaken an inventory and a photographic
campaign to protect and assess the collections of regional museums.
In the course of computerizing works of art, twenty of the regions museums
participated in the establishment of a public web site. The objective
of this US$1.3M project was to create a network of about 50,000 works
from all museums - fine arts, cultural and natural history. In order
to focus the project, several themes were selected:
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