Archives of the Commons: Collective Cataloguing in Art Museums (original) (raw)
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Although museums vary in nature and may have been founded for all sorts of reasons, central to all museum institutions are the collected objects. These objects are information carriers organized in a catalogue system. In this chapter, the museum will be conceived as an information space, consisting of an information system related to different methods of reasoning. We will highlight the new possibilities offered by digital technology and the changes brought by the way in which visitors come into contact with objects. Our central claim is that the visitor moved from being onsite within the museum's information space to being outside the museum in the online information space of the Internet. This has fundamental implications for the institutional role of museums, our understanding of metadata and the methods of documentation. The onsite museum institution will, eventually, not be able to function as an institutional entity on the Internet, for in this new information space, objects, collections and museums, all function as independent components in a vast universe of data, side by side at everyone's disposal at anytime. Potentially, users can access cultural heritage anytime, anywhere and anyhow.
Re-thinking an annotation tool for museum community-created content
The key question of this paper is how to re- design a tool for deploying museum community content as a means to enhance the visit experience. During two exhibitions an annotation tool, ImaNote, was used to gather and share comments in the exhibition space. This user-centered study of ImaNote gives us the opportunity to understand the challenges and possibilities that map annotation tools can have for the museum community in the specific context of an exhibition. Along with developing an instance of ImaNote that would be easier for visitors to use, we created two “maps," as we called the compiled images based on the layout of the exhibition spaces. These maps worked as an interface between visitors, staff, designers and artists, and the displayed objects. The design of these images was developed according to the possibilities of the instance of ImaNote we were working with. User studies performed at the museum reaffirm that the concept of the map as interface was useful; these studies also raised other issues (questions related to the software, the maps and the installation at the museum) that constitute the core material of this paper. Although this article emphasizes identifying opportunities for the development of software, in the context of the museum many other issues influence the use and perception of software. In this study, the concept of the ecology of participation is a way to speak of software, installation and the exhibitions’ maps in their relation to the collaborative design process within the museum community in which they were conceived. We aim to design user-centered software that can motivate visitors and staff participation while acknowledging that ImaNote is only one piece of the ecology of participation.
Striving to Persist: Museum Digital Exhibition and Digital Catalogue Production
2019
Although museum automation emerged in the mid-1960s, American and British art museums continue to have a difficult relationship with digital technology. Indeed, within the broader cultural heritage network, art museums have been particularly reluctant to disseminate their missions online. Particularly since the eighteenth century, art museums have remained beholden to certain perceptions of authority that are tied to the authentic object. Yet, as new technologies offer more efficient and cost-effective ways to store and disseminate information and promise greater accessibility, these museums have continued in their efforts to incorporate digital methods into their practices. The following document considers the role of information organization in the creation of knowledge and value within and beyond the space of the art museum by interrogating two major scholarly products of the well-endowed, early 21st century Western art museum’s ecosystem: online catalogues and online exhibitions...
As cultural institutions libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) share the mission to organize information objects, artifacts, and data for user access and enlightenment. While (LAMs) may follow different metadata standards and procedures to manage their collections and each type of institution has unique information organization and service concerns, digital technologies have enabled them to create, organize, preserve, and provide access to digital collections for global audience. Increasingly LAMs are converging in their information organization and management effort (LAM entries in Hangingtogether.org;, and the cultural silos created by libraries, archives, and museums are being integrated or rendered transparent for users . The proposed panel is designed to examine the convergence of information organization practices of libraries, archives, and museums; explore collaboration opportunities; and discuss the implications of LAM information organization practices for educating information professionals for these cultural heritage institutions.
Everyday documentation of arts and humanities collections
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2018
Formal institutions can only collect, document and provide access to a limited number and type of materials in limited ways. Thus, institutions miss out on collections or aspects of description that may be culturally important (to underserved groups, to small subcultures, to countercultural groups, etc.), which introduces myriad ethical issues. This panel will focus on "everyday documentation" of arts and humanities-based collections done by those outside libraries, archives, and museums, and how such documentation practices can and should inform institutional practice and technological developments. The panel consists of a diverse group of academic researchers and practitioners working with a variety of arts and humanities collections. This panel is a program of the SIG for Arts and Humanities (SIG-AH).
Metadata helps users locate resources that meet their specific needs. But metadata also helps us to understand the data we find and helps us to evaluate what we should spend our time on. Traditionally, staff at libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) create metadata for the content they manage. However, social metadata—content contributed by users—is evolving as a way to both augment and recontextualize the content and metadata created by LAMs. Many cultural heritage institutions are interested in gaining a better understanding of social metadata and also learning how to best utilize their users' expertise to enrich their descriptive metadata and improve their users' experiences. In the first report, Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Musems, Part 1: Site Reviews, the 21-member RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group reviewed 76 sites relevant to libraries, archives, and museums that supported such social media features as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc. In this second report, we analyzed the results from a survey of site managers conducted in October-November 2009. Forty percent of the responses came from outside the United States. The survey focused on the motivations for creating a site, moderation policies, staffing and site management, technologies used, and criteria for assessing success. In our upcoming third report, we provide recommendations on social metadata features most relevant to libraries, archives, and museums as well as the factors contributing to success.
2016
It is a familiar observation that digital cultural heritage brings with it new challenges. One such challenge is the effect of age on digital objects held within heritage databases, and on the array of materials that surround and support access to these resources. In this position paper, we discuss effects of long-term societal change on data preservation in digital cultural heritage, and present a means by which ongoing user modelling processes drawing on contemporary resources can support ‘just-in-time’ preemptive review of material to be presented to the public, as well as feeding into enhancement of data retrieval processes. We remark that similar issues and principles apply in contemporary information access contexts: for example, the processes of information sharing between expert practitioners and non-expert members of the public may exhibit similar effects. ACM Classification
Curating Data, Disseminating Knowledge: Museums of the Digital Age
This paper substantiates the premise that cultural heritage is a construct, and therefore engagement with theoretical issues are mandatory for understanding the ways in which heritage gets created, nurtured and preserved. It demonstrates that although digital media allow the nurture of repositories of culture heritage, they require curatorial directions for establishing notions, and illuminating the changing social lives of the phenomenon.
Public Access in the Age of Documented Art
Ephemerality and variability in contemporary art is fostering an age of documentation within museums. Conservators, curators, and other museum professionals spend an increasing amount of resources documenting technical details and conceptual underpinnings in an effort to provide a knowledge base for future staff that will design new exhibitions and conduct conservation interventions. The resulting archives contain information about production methods, materials, past manifestations, and artists' concerns that can inform art history, art criticism, and public understanding. This article proposes activating these closed archives by opening them to scholars, educators, and the public. In addition to providing access for greater awareness, further benefit can be gained through participatory programming that promotes public contributions in a form of crowd documentation. The article traces ethical, legal, and artistic challenges to greater transparency of museum documentation. Despite these hurdles, tools are emerging that facilitate public access and participation in documenting the art of our times.