MUSEUMS IN THE MIX-COLLECTIONS ACCESS ACROSS COMMUNITIES

Museums, Libraries and Archives increasingly collaborate to bring their collections online within one integrated system. The integration of access is fueled by the realization within the different communities that all cultural heritage institutions hold similar objects, as well as by end-user demands for searches across institutional boundaries. The statewide project Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) adapts archival and library standards to integrate museum collections into the greater space of cultural heritage. Long before the Internet, each individual cultural heritage community developed its own unique access model suited to its’ particular collection and mission. Libraries have developed the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) to facilitate searching of their book holdings. Archives have used the finding aid as an access tool for researchers even long before finding aids became synonymous with their electronic incarnation as Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Access to collections in museums revolves around thematic exhibitions, which bring together objects from within the institution’s collection as well as borrowed objects from the outside to form a coherent experience for the visitor. In this way, museums provide value-added access through grouping the objects into meaningful exhibitions, plus they enrich the offering through educational materials and programming. However, this form of access remains incomplete: over 95% of a museum collections will be in storage rather than in the galleries at any given time. Historically, museums have not developed a model for providing access to materials not on display in their galleries. With the advent of networked access, museums started to image their collections and put versions of their in-house collections management systems online. While these online databases provide a more exhaustive view of an institutional collection, they usually restrict interoperability by locking the data into a proprietary system. Ultimately, access systems of individual institutions need to be integrated to provide maximum service to researchers and cultural tourists alike. A project led by the UC Berkeley Art Museum 99
called Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) addresses this issue by encoding museum materials using archival and library standards, which allows the integration of data into a larger cultural space opened up by the Online Archive of California (OAC), hosted by the California Digital Library (CDL). The project adapts the standards developed by other communities because the OAC union database had already been established around those specific submission information packages. Furthermore, the museum community had not yet (and still has not) established a file exchange format for collections information. Standards used in MOAC are Encoded Archival Description (EAD) xml, Metadata Encoding and Transcription Standard (METS) xml and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Lite xml. The archival standard EAD describes collections hierarchically down to the item level. The xml mark-up allows them to successfully integrate their collections with library and archival materials. Since the EAD has no other uses for museums than to integrate data, archival principles pertaining to other internal functions the EAD fulfills in archives, such as authentication, documentation and collection management, lose their relevance in a museum setting. A typical museum EAD collection guide provides item-level access to a thematically structured collection enriched with educational materials. Since EAD makes few provisions for encoding rich multimedia content at the item-level, the collection mark-up is extended by the digital object mark-up Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). METS allows the encoding, transfer and display of hierarchically structured digital objects which mimic the behaviors of their analog counterparts. An artist’s book, for example, may be presented to an end-user as a navigable set of digital images. METS has been developed by the library community, but its extensive use of extension schemas makes the mark-up flexible enough for easy implementation in other communities. A good example for METS adaptability through extension schemas is its approach to descriptive metadata. Each implementer may choose the descriptive metadata schema they feel most comfortable with to describe the information content of their METS object. The METS object also becomes a coordinating hub for other services provided alongside digital media surrogates, such as TEI Lite transcriptions. From a museum perspective, this development may lead to an interesting shift in the role of collections for online access. Rather than providing an absolute home for items / digital objects, collections may now be viewed as services built on the digital object repository. Any single digital object may be part of multiple collections, which contextualize the digital object in a unique way. For example, a painting by abstract painter Hans Hoffman may be part of a provenance-based finding aid; a collection guide pulling together highlights from the UC Berkeley Art Museum’s holdings; a collection guide thematically arranged around works from the particular school of abstract painting Hans Hoffman belongs to; etc. Each of these collections provides a different access path to the individual work. Viewed from this perspective, collections may move closer to the exhibition paradigm favored by museums—objects appear in ever-changing constellations of other objects in order to tease out particular facets of meaning.