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

Re-Purposing Data from Collection Information Systems: Projects at the Getty

Adherence to metadata standards, using controlled vocabularies and following best practices for descriptive cataloging open up numerous possibilities for re-purposing data and increasing access to collections for diverse audiences with varying needs. Access to collections should be data-driven - ideally coming from a central repository, such as a collections management system, that is maintained by key information stakeholders in accordance with a set of accepted rules and practices. This model enables the institution to efficiently and effectively manage, maintain and preserve data over time.

The Getty Museum has made it a policy to re-purpose data from its collections information system to enhance access to its collection for a variety of users, internal and external; as much as possible, the content we deliver to our users on the Web, in our kiosk system and in our hand-held system is "fed" by data from our collections information system.

The Getty Museum builds collection-specific thesauri incorporating terminology from existing vocabularies such as the AAT, in addition to including "local" headings that help to categorize the objects in its collection in meaningful ways for non-expert users. One of the museum's local thesauri is a vocabulary of object types represented in the museum's collection. A section, or facet, of this thesaurus deals with furniture in the collection, which is then broken down into categories such as chairs, and further by types of chairs such as fauteuils (French chairs with open arms) (Figure 1). In the museum's database, objects are linked to their appropriate object name in the thesaurus. This data is then re-purposed on the Web in two different ways.

First, the structure of the thesaurus itself assists users in browsing by categories to help them retrieve information. This is particularly helpful for users who are unclear about what exactly they are searching for or for users who may not be familiar with art terminology. The Getty Museum exposes the broader, more generic categories of the thesaurus to facilitate retrieval for these types of users. For example, someone interested in chairs could select this heading as a category and retrieve results immediately without having to be confronted with a list of specific types of chairs, such as fauteuils (Figure 2).

Secondly, the Getty Museum utilizes the specific terms from the object type thesaurus that are linked to the objects in the database to assist users who know precisely what they are interested in finding. These data values or names are brought over to the META keyword tag for the individual object records available in the Getty Museum's collection on the Web. The META keyword tag is for select words and phrases that properly describe the Web resource and are used by a variety of search engines, including the Getty's own site-wide search engine, to facilitate retrieval. For example, if a curator from another museum were interested to know if the Getty had any fauteuils in its collection, he or she could perform a keyword search on fauteuils and would retrieve three results (Figure 3). The first two results are retrieved not because the term fauteuils appears explicitly on the text of the Web pages for these objects, but because the term fauteuils from the local thesaurus has been embedded in the META keyword tags for these Web pages and is indexed by the site-wide search engine.