Since the mid 1990s, MusIS (Museum Information System), a service of the Library Service Centre Baden-Wuerttemberg (Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden Württemberg BSZ) runs a documentation network for museums.
Among the members are the State Museums of the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg and several larger and smaller institutions from other branches. MusIS hosts a wide range of services for museum documentation and management. An important goal of the network is to create high quality documentation in a consistent form that can be used for multiple purposes inside and outside the participating museums. In order to achieve this goal, MusIS established a set of strategies and guidelines for quality control in museum documentation:
- Quality measures during data migration
- Consulting in documentation
- Application of controlled vocabulary
- Rules for entering data from index cards or inventory catalogues
- Data revision
These measures, techniques, and strategies lead to a certain degree of consistency and quality of data and documentation.
The paper describes the services of MusIS, the South-Western German Museum Network, for the curation of digital heritage. These services range from an object documentation software and the application of controlled vocabulary to a content management system for presentations on the Web and a joint portal for libraries, archives, and museums (the BAM Portal). The BAM Portal offers the possibility to connect selected content to the German Wikipedia and to improve the access to this content via this online encyclopaedia.