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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.
Same same, but different? Challenges and solutions in the opening process of the GND authority control for cultural institutions.
The growing online presence of cultural heritage institutions such as museums, archives, libraries and other research institutions requires efficient ways to interlink the collections of our cultural treasures in web portals like Europeana or the German Digital Library (DDB). One precondition for interlinking datasets is the shared use of authority files and controlled vocabularies. The Integrated Authority File (GND) is a widely recognized vocabulary for description and information retrieval in German speaking library communities. It is a tool to guarantee true disambiguation of persons, corporations, geographica, subject headings, works etc. being referred to in all media types. Published as linked open data, the GND fosters semantic interoperability and re-use of data. Objects kept in different collections can be retrieved, and cross-disciplinary research is facilitated. However, authority control for the Semantic Web goes beyond the needs of librarians. In order to open the GND for interdisciplinary use, it needs to be adapted and actively transformed by the communities.
The opening process of the GND is accompanied by the project "GND for cultural data" (GND4C) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Together with the German National Library and the DDB, four project partners of the museum, archive and cultural heritage domain define their specific needs on the organisational structure, the data model and application profiles, the technical infrastructure and the community network beyond the library community. We like to focus on the challenge how to create an environment for true cross-domain authority control beyond shared vocabularies.
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.”