Demystifying the Collections

For over a year we have been trying to get some momentum behind a new Intranet site for the Collections catalogue, and it looks like we are getting very close now!

Our aim is to create a simple online search environment (google-style if you like) that will enable the rest of the organisation to explore the contents of our collections without the need to use the relatively complex EMu interface and without using up our limited number of licences.

Significant resources were put into establishing a basic catalogue of skeleton records during the Electronic Cataloguing Project. We've now got alot of basic information about most of the collection. This approach - a little bit of information about the majority of things - has been a major shift from our previous focus when it came to electronic cataloguing - earlier web projects had focussed on creating complete information about a few selected things.

So what exactly is a "skeleton" or Collection Management record?

• Who did it come from? (Collection Name, link to full Accession Lot details)


• What is it? (Classification, Type, Name, Title )


• Who, What, Where does it relate to? (Keywords)


• What does it look like? (Description, materials, dimensions, reference image)


• Where is it? (Current & Permanent Location)

In a nutshell, the skeleton record should provide staff or researchers with enough basic information to know if an object is relevant to their needs, and provides a path to find out more detailed information about an item should you decide it is relevant.

Having a dedicated web environment for staff to browse a read only limited view of our catalogue will help to demystify what is held down in the archives. Another aim of the Intranet site is to test our skeleton data on real users. Only a few fields will be published through the closed staff network, which helps reduce copyright complications as we are not making images available to the public.

Knowledge Engineering, (aka KE) have developed some really useful new features in the web package that we'll be implementing - they've also jumped on the bandwagon and called it iMu (aka Internet Museum). The most useful change in functionality is the overall use of the Narratives Module to link records together and provide a context. So rather than just publishing individual catalogue records and expecting them each to contain enough information to stand-alone, records can now be grouped into relevant themes for browsing using the Narratives Module. Much more useful from a users perspective...



I'm hoping to have a demo version up and running soon to show you all what is possible.