Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls

Citation

McClellan, D. (2006), "Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls", Library Management, Vol. 27 No. 4/5, pp. 314-316. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120610668304

This interesting publication with a foreword, introduction, and index is a collection of six articles contributed by twelve authors and published simultaneously as the Journal of Internet Cataloging, Vol. 7 No. 1, 2004. Bernadette Callery, Museum Librarian and Head, Library and Archives, at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, is well qualified as Editor to bring together examples of collaborative attempts at opening up museum collections to the broader community, in a virtual environment via the internet.

Robert Mann's (Director, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Washington, DC) foreword places the essays in context and their relevance to the Institute's aims of fostering collaboration and “creating and sustaining a nation of learners” so that in the twenty‐first century we move from an “information society” and become a “learning society”. Mann emphasises the complementary nature of museums in the formal learning process at all levels, and so as to become part of an integrated whole, the need for museum resources to “interoperate” with those of libraries, archives and like cultural heritage institutions.

“Searching for Nirvana: Cataloging and the digital collection at the Experience Music Project” is an essay co‐authored by Marsha Maguire, David Motson, Gwen Wilson and Jen Wolfe. The Seattle based Experience Music Project (EMP) is described as ‘an interactive museum dedicated to rock ‘n’ roll and other forms of popular music.” It has grown out of the Jimi Hendrix Museum founded in 1992 (name changed in 1995 to the EMP) with expanded goals to encompass all American pop music with an emphasis on rock “n” roll. It has a collection of 100,000 artefacts with the world”s largest collection of Hendrix memorabilia. Detail is provided of the collection and how it has been accessioned and organised in the years from its 1992 beginnings to its 2000 opening at the Seattle Centre.

Information about the development phase of the EMP database, its software and the application of different standards is provided with a list of the standards adopted and some variation for local needs. An example is provided in cataloguing the title element which must “function as a sort of micro version of a full EMP catalog record, so slightly more information is included in devised titles than standard cataloguing rules generally permit”. While the 2^nd edition of the Anglo‐American Cataloguing Rules is included in its standards' list of publications, so too is the International Guidelines for Museum Object Information: The CIDOC Information Categories. Sectional article headings include name indexing, name authority file, the EMP thesaurus, database structure (they could not use MARC and explain why), and the digital reproduction database culminating in the Digital Lab allowing access both onsite and on the web to much of the EMP holdings. It is a worthwhile account of a specific project outlining the challenges and decision making along the way to achieve the ultimate goal of making much of the EMP collection virtual and available both within the EMP building and globally on the internet.

In contrast the second essay “Collaborative cataloguing: using Dublin Core to unite local cultural heritage organizations” by Kody Janney outlines a number of different groups working together to publish their images online, namely the University of Washington Libraries (UW) and the Museum of History & Industry, Seattle together with ten local heritage organizations. Dublin Core is described as “the glue that made it work” with each organisation maintaining its own database yet allowing integrated access to the resources on the web. UW's server hosts the CONTENTdm database containing the images and descriptive metadata from each of the participating organisations and is available from the project's website King County Snapshots. This article is useful for anyone contemplating building an image database with Dublin Core. There is discussion about elements and mapping together with the challenges faced by participants, such as accommodating different numbering systems used in individual ways to track images within the organisation.

The fourth essay “Building a common catalog for the cultural heritage repositories: a case study of the Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook” is written by Elizabeth Nelson and Laurie Gemmill. The Ohio Memory Project, launched in 2000 with the support of the Ohio Historical Society which “interprets, preserves, collects, and makes available evidence of the past”. Over 320 Ohio cultural heritage repositories contributed electronic catalogue records to the Ohio Memory which is known as a “scrapbook” as all types of materials have been brought together about a person or group together with images. The Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook uses Dublin Core and XML with the images and metadata stored by OhioLINK, a consortium of college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. Three published sources are used for controlled vocabulary: Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, and the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials. An interesting statement which identifies the project as a new type of cataloguing venture and its success is “that the primary goal is not to catalog the items, but rather to make them more accessible” with access on the web. An interesting case study which makes such a project as Ohio Memory appear easy to achieve.

Mark Christal, Loriene Roy, and Antony Cherian contributed the article “Stories told: Tribal communities and the development of virtual museums.” This informative essay describes the outcome of partnerships between museums with Native American collections and tribally controlled schools to develop virtual museum projects. The students chose culturally relevant museum items, researched these with assistance from museum staff and members of their tribal communities so that digitised images and relevant information about the objects were made available on the web. The National Museum of the American Indian has been actively involved in this area using as a model the Heye Center exhibits in 1999‐2000. Detail is given about the impact of such projects on the students and the learning process. Christal's dissertation study of such virtual museum projects identified the theme “bringing objects out from behind the glass”, which can be seen “as symbolic of the limited access Native people have to the important cultural holdings of many museums”.

The remaining two essays are about access to specialised museum collections on the web. The first by Hsin‐liang Chen “Chinese collections in museums on the web: current status, problems, and future” is described in general terms by its title as is the second essay by the book's editor “Patterns of identification of potentially sensitive data in natural history museum online catalogs”. Chen's article focuses on the different types of images indexed in six American museums. Difficulties and potential solutions are discussed about making these collections available on the web and the unsuitability of conventional cataloguing and indexing practices for the new image management system. Again, detail is given about the indexing tools used by the museums for this project. Gallery's article details a study of 23 North American natural history museums together with a survey, November 2003‐February 2004, of 55 separate databases for sensitive data and its inclusion in the museum's online collection databases. Of the respondents there were eight positive results. It is an interesting study.

“Collaborative access to virtual museum collections” contains a very worthwhile set of articles. Each discusses specific projects and the challenges of opening up access to museum collections on the web. Indexing and cataloguing issues are covered together with general project information.