Designing interoperable museum information systems

Museum collections are characterized by heterogeneity, since they usually host a plethora of objects of categories, while each of them requires different description policies and metadata standards. Moreover the museum records, which keep the history and evolution of the hosted collections, request proactive curation in order to preserve this rich and diverse information. In this paper, the architecture of an innovative museum information system, as well as its implementation details is presented. In particular the requirements and the system architecture are presented along with the problems that were encountered. The main directions of the system design are (a) to increase interoperability levels and therefore assist proactive curation and (b) to enhance navigation by the usage of handheld devices. The first direction is satisfied by the design of a rich metadata schema based on the CIDOC/CRM standard. The second direction is fulfilled by the implementation of a module, which integrates the museum database with a subsystem appropriate to support user navigation into the museum floors and rooms. The module is expressed as a navigation functionality, which is accessed through handheld devices and peripherals, such as PDAs and RFID tags. The proposed system is functional and operates into the Solomos Museum, situated in Zakynthos island, Greece

Designing interoperable museum information systems

Museum collections are characterized by heterogeneity, since they usually host a plethora of objects of categories, while each of them requires different description policies and metadata standards. Moreover the museum records, which keep the history and evolution of the hosted collections, request proactive curation in order to preserve this rich and diverse information. In this paper, the architecture of an innovative museum information system, as well as its implementation details is presented. In particular the requirements and the system architecture are presented along with the problems that were encountered. The main directions of the system design are (a) to increase interoperability levels and therefore assist proactive curation and (b) to enhance navigation by the usage of handheld devices. The first direction is satisfied by the design of a rich metadata schema based on the CIDOC/CRM standard. The second direction is fulfilled by the implementation of a module, which integrates the museum database with a subsystem appropriate to support user navigation into the museum floors and rooms. The module is expressed as a navigation functionality, which is accessed through handheld devices and peripherals, such as PDAs and RFID tags. The proposed system is functional and operates into the Solomos Museum, situated in Zakynthos island, Greece

Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit

Linked Open Data has begun to dramatically increase the amount of structured data available on the World Wide Web, which in turn is proving to offer incredible potential to share and access data across the humanities. Yet despite the possibilities, only a few institutions in the US have begun to embrace the use of Linked Open Data. The Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit ("LOD-LAM") will take place in San Francisco in May of 2011. The two-day summit will gather leading US practitioners, industry leaders, and proponents of Linked Open Data in the humanities, together with several leaders abroad, to define the field, address barriers to adoption, and create a report and recommendations for implementing Linked Open Data projects in the humanities

Data Management and Curation Practices: The Case of using DSpace and Implications

Data management and curation is a new challenge with the emerging trend of data-dependent scholarly research. Due to the lack of common standards and best practices, current data management and curation practices have been varied. This poster presents a project that examines the common practices of data management and curation that helps understand the scope of and factors behind such variations. The sample of this study consists of 171 unique data repositories created by 164 institutions from 95 countries worldwide. The preliminary results indicate that data management and curation is a global issue. Currently, academic institutions and government agencies are the leading force in contributing and sharing data. Data repositories are used for various purposes with international repository and learning resources being the most common use cases. Additionally, system functions used to manage data repositories vary to a great extent with statistics and OAI harvesting being the most common ones

Overview of Digital Library Components and Developments

Digital libraries are being built upon a firm foundation of prior work as the high-end information systems of the future. A component architecture approach is becoming popular, with well established support for key components like the repository, especially through the Open Archives Initiative. We consider digital objects, metadata, harvesting, indexing, searching, browsing, rights management, linking, and powerful interfaces. Flexible interaction will be possible through a variety of architectures, using buses, agents, and other technologies. The field as a whole is undergoing rapid growth, supported by advances in storage, processing, networking, algorithms, and interaction. There are many initiatives and developments, including those supporting education, and these will certainly be of benefit in Latin America

The Digital Museum: A Case Study of Digital Applications at the National Palace Museum

In our current age of information digitization democratization and globalization technology has changed people s habits to expect immediately accessible information Technology is no longer merely a tool but a new medium capable of instantaneously and seamlessly altering people s internal consciousness As the treasure houses of art and artifacts museums have evolved with the times to establish its presence and accessibility in the information age digitizing its collection from which new exhibition formats and museum experiences can be created This paper conducts a literature review of digitization s impact on the curatorial efforts of major world-renowned national museums as the context for a case study evaluating the fruits of digitization at the National Palace Museum in recent years with a focus on the most recent new media art exhibition the Giuseppe Castiglione Lang Shining New Media Art Exhibitio

The Digital Museum: A Case Study of Digital Applications at the National Palace Museum

In our current age of information digitization democratization and globalization technology has changed people s habits to expect immediately accessible information Technology is no longer merely a tool but a new medium capable of instantaneously and seamlessly altering people s internal consciousness As the treasure houses of art and artifacts museums have evolved with the times to establish its presence and accessibility in the information age digitizing its collection from which new exhibition formats and museum experiences can be created This paper conducts a literature review of digitization s impact on the curatorial efforts of major world-renowned national museums as the context for a case study evaluating the fruits of digitization at the National Palace Museum in recent years with a focus on the most recent new media art exhibition the Giuseppe Castiglione Lang Shining New Media Art Exhibitio

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Controlled Vocabulary Enhancement through Crowdsourcing: Project Andvari, Micropasts, and Public Quality Assurance

Proceedings paper published by Society of American Archivists. Presented at conference in 2015 in Cleveland, OH (http://www2.archivists.org/proceedings/research-forum/2015/agenda#papers). Published by SAA in 2016.This paper presents an experimental approach of using crowdsourcing to test controlled vocabularies for digital collections of cultural objects. For a digital humanities initiative project, Project Andvari, which is intended to create a digital portal of early medieval northern European artifacts, it was recognized that there was a need to develop a semantically structured iconographic thesaurus to describe the iconographic content of distributed artefactual collections from a variety of contributing institutions. This paper discusses a workflow of planning and development process of controlled vocabularies for the project and a testing process of the vocabularies to determine both the usability of controlled vocabularies and the feasibility of quality assurance approach. This paper demonstrates an applicability of crowdsourcing in developing controlled vocabularies