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Author's note

An object lesson in controlling intellectual property rights - Elsevier will only permit me to publish an abstract of this article here, although I wrote the original for no payment.   - SK

Becoming Digital

by Suzanne Keene

Summarised from Museum Management and Curatorship, Vol.15 No.3, 299-313,1997, with permission from Elsevier Science  

Virtual possibilities

At present, collections are perceived primarily as physical objects. But the contextual information about people, places, discoveries, events, can be held as data and related to and combined with the collections and object data (Bearman 1995), (Carlisle and Blackaby 1995) (Figure 1). Objects not in any museum can be included in virtual form. Museum catalogue information can link to related databases, such as sites and monuments records; natural history databases such as species distribution records; library information, so that references related to objects can relate to other related publications.

There are some important museum-based projects that support this. LASSI (Larger Scale Systems Initiative (Keene Forthcoming)) was a consortium of UK museums that developed model requirements and contractual terms for museum collections systems, now available to all UK museums. RAMA (Remote Access to Museum Archives(Cisneros and Delclaux 1994)) was a European project to develop software to work across the Internet to give access for researchers to museum archives, particularly image based material. CHIO (Bearman and Perkins 1993) is a group of museums together with the Getty Institute and CHIN, the Canadian Heritage Information Network, which is developing a standard means of electronically marking up museum data so that users can search and retrieve data from catalogues across many museums.

Digitisation can be a powerful tool for preserving the collections. Image collections, in particular, can be preserved in digital electronic form, theoretically indefinitely.

At present, museum research is difficult to capture and access. Electronic databases and networks make it possible to capture the results of research so that they can be retrieved by users, however dispersed in geography or time.

The museum's paper files and solid walls, similarly, need no longer be a barrier for contributions to museum information. People can offer their specialist knowledge or expertise by digitising their own information as part of the collections data. The ability to guarantee the quality and integrity of their collections information will parallel the seal of authenticity that museums provide for their collections objects.

The content that museums can provide could be reusable on the World Wide Web, on a gallery, in a CD ROM (Figure 2).

The digital museum can be realised within the actual galleries. There are so-called virtual galleries in most museum World Wide Web sites.

Digital consequences

Museums are almost uniquely well placed to take advantage of digital possibilities, which offer a natural extension of the means to pursue their central purposes.The digital museum will perform all its traditional functions and delivers its objectives, but using electronic means.

Already, museums are seen as significant information providers for the ballooning multimedia publishing industry ((Bangemann 1994). Publishers are already creating pools of reusable content, and there will be pressure on museums to do likewise. Their information databases will become as important as are the physical collections.

The push to be digital will affect jobs and the organisation of museums. Curators will be information conduits, not gatekeepers.

Going digital will affect the way in which the museum allocates its resources. Sophisticated databases require specialist staff. Electronic literacy and capability must be fostered in professionals in all museum areas, who will form cooperative teams just as they do in publishing and exhibition creation now.

Control over the museum's intellectual property will be crucial. The quasi public status of museums in many countries today will complicate matters further. Some museums are already signing some control over images, etc., to commercial companies such as Bill Gates' Corbis.

Conclusions

Will going digital be crucial to a museum's survival? Museums, and especially their collections, are under considerable threat. Museum collections are quintessentially held for the benefit of society, and, even less fashionable, for its long-term benefit. It seems more and more necessary to substantiate our claims that museum collections will benefit people in the future, by showing how these benefits might be delivered.

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