Beyond the Gallery Walls: Tools and Methods for Leading End-Users to Collections Information

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Jun/Jul 2004 by Coburn, Erin, Baca, Murtha

The library and archive communities have a longstanding history of organizing and managing their information in a way that facilitates access to their holdings, both within their home institutions and via union catalogs and consortial bibliographic utilities such as the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) and OCLC's WorldCat. Metadata element sets and information protocols, such as MARC and the Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and controlled vocabularies and authority files, such as the Library of Congress name and subject authorities, the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), are the data standards and structures that have become synonymous with the way that the library and archival communities provide access to information about their holdings. In the traditional library world, for instance, the AAT is typically used for data values in the form/genre field in a MARC record when cataloging rare books and special collections materials.

Museum Collections: Making Information Available

Museums have only relatively recently come to an awareness that the approach that libraries and archives have taken for decades is also essential for making information on their own collections available. Museum information has a history of being hoarded if not outright hidden in curatorial files. The emerging use of computerized collections management systems in museums caused many curatorial departments to relinquish control over information about their collections, but in many cases the information was limited to whatever was deemed necessary for proper maintenance and inventory. With the rise of the World Wide Web, and the demands of users (and museum trustees) who expect to have collections information one click away, museums have begun to take seriously the audience of users who may want access to their collections even if those users will never physically visit their museums. Meeting this demand is not as simple as just digitizing a collection and creating a link to the image repository from an institution's home page. It is no simple task to ensure that users whose profiles, needs and information-seeking behaviors are many and varied will be successful in finding what they are looking for.

A good starting point for museums grappling with how to enable diverse audiences to effectively access information about their collections is to look within the walls of the museum itself. Collections management systems are growing in their capacity for recording and documenting collections. Cataloging is no longer limited to a registrar entering core information about a work of art upon acquisition. Other key information stakeholders are now using collections management systems to record information on conservation treatments, exhibitions, provenance, published sources, rights and so forth. As a result, the range of users within a museum who need access to - and who help to create - collections information is growing to include curators, conservators, educators and even docents.

This expanded role and importance of collections management systems as the source for gathering a wide range of diverse information about the objects in a collection is resulting in a new way of thinking for museums. Collections management systems are becoming collections information systems, and documentation is going beyond just registration; it is serving the larger purpose of aggregating all relevant information about the works in a collection and preparing that information for delivery or publication in a variety of environments and to a variety of users, both internal and external.

In addition to the Web, another area that museums are exploring as a means to providing greater access to their collections is with public access or kiosk systems. Until a decade or so ago, many museums and cultural heritage institutions packaged selective information about their collections on a CD-ROM, which was then made accessible from a kiosk station within the museum itself. This kind of closed, hard-coded system also gave museums a product to sell; but updating the CD-ROMs to account for changes in attribution or to include new acquisitions was so costly as to be infeasible.

Museums are now creating models and processes in which a collections information system serves as the starting point for publishing selective information to a content management system, or a set of content management and manipulation tools that make it possible for data to be edited and enhanced to better fit the needs of the audience(s) using the public access system or the institution's Web pages. The benefit of this model is that it creates the opportunity to change, update and add additional information about the collection in a dynamic way, rather than producing CD-ROMs, which, for many if not most institutions, become out of date the moment they are produced.

Creating Access: Two Misconceptions

Creating access to a museum's collection on the Web opens up a whole new level of complexity that requires careful thought, for users can no longer be simply identified as museum staff or museum visitors, nor can their needs be neatly categorized. Making collection information available on the Web means that everyone with access to a computer that is connected to the Internet is a potential user, regardless of age, educational and cultural background or native language.