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The ICOM Statutes of 2007 define the museum as an institution that acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity. What is missing in this catalogue of tasks – and consequently in the definition – is documentation.
This is important to notice as documentation is what can be called the “missing link” between the museum’s five central assignments. This can be visualized by the following illustration [...]: The diagram shows that documentation is the fundamental task that serves as a foundation for all other assignments to the museum. This fact is quite well-known to the staff responsible for the collection management system. However, it is obviously not in the focus of attention of the other museum departments. Especially when planning personnel and budget for both projects and routine activities, the important role of documentation is often neglected. Consequently, it is essential to reconsider its function and significance for the daily museum work as a cross-sectional task.
A clearly structured collection documentation can be used for many purposes inside and outside the museum. How would museum work look without documentation? The answer is obvious. Gaps in knowledge where ever you look and objects without contextualizing information. As CIDOC rightfully states: “Documentation is essential to all aspects of a museum’s activities. Collections without adequate documentation are not true "museum" collections.”
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.
Many museums and other cultural institutions offer online exhibitions on a regular basis and there is even a considerable amount of research literature describing the venture of creating exhibitions in the digital world of the Internet. Nevertheless, there are some popular rules of thumb which will result in really bad online-exhibitions.
The presentation describes the major pitfalls that should be avoided in creating online exhibitions. It is based on a literature review containing a wide range of studies and projects in the museum field. Outline Research on online exhibitions Some rules of thumb for creating online exhibitions Why these rules of thumb do not work Conclusions.
(19 slides)
Many museums and other cultural institutions offer online exhibitions on a regular basis; in addition to this hands-on experience there is a considerable amount of research literature describing the venture of creating exhibitions in the digital world of the Internet. Nevertheless, a handbook, guidelines or evaluation tools are still missing. Instead, there exist some popular rules of thumb, often considered to be tricks of the trade, which will not result in successful online exhibitions but in really bad user experiences for virtual visitors.
This article describes the major pitfalls that should be avoided in creating online exhibitions. It is based on a review of the research literature covering a wide range of publications and studies in the museum field.
1 Introduction
2 Some popular rules of thumb for creating online exhibitions
3 Why these rules of thumb do not work out
4 Conclusions
5 References
This paper is a revised and extended version of the German language paper "Wie gestaltet man in bester Absicht eine schlechte Online-Ausstellung? Hinweise aus der Forschungsliteratur" published in the journal: Museumskunde, Bd. 76, 1/2011. 90-99.