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An Australian in Baltimore, thinking and writing about museums, ethics, technology, and teaching.

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Tag: archives

The Museum Metadata Exchange and archival tactics for museum collections

I was just checking out the recent postings by Seb Chan on his fresh + new(er) blog, and saw a link to the Museum Metadata Exchange, a project that started in mid-2010 (and which my friend Heath Killen has apparently been working on). The project has been “designed to harvest collection level descriptions from a number of major museums and the National Film and Sound Archive and to supply that data in a standardised format to the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).”

One of the commenter’s about Seb’s post writes:

The concept of collection-level description by and large tends to be foreign to large swaths of the museum community, whereas of course it’s a major strategy in archives. MARC collection-level records (or rudimentary EAD finding aids) can let the public know that an archive has a large collection of something, even if it hasn’t been described at a deeper level, let alone digitized. I was involved in an effort in the natural history community to create a standard for collection level descriptions (http://www.tdwg.org/activities… and at the Smithsonian, the Field Book Project has incorporated the standard into their approach (http://libreas.eu/ausgabe18/te… Don’t know of too many other projects using collection level descriptions for museum content…

This is one of the interesting implications I am curious about for changing practices within the online museum collection. Are museums now using a more archival approach to collections online as a way to make them more accessible/usable/findable to non-specialist users? Gunther’s comment that collection-level description is a major strategy in archives that we can now see being deployed in projects such as the Museum Metadata Exchange would suggest that this is a possibility.

And so I wonder whether museum collections, although created under different curatorial premises to archives, are now moving towards a more archival approach to online collection management, particularly given that the Internet is itself essentially a giant archive? And if so, is this a legitimate tactic for opening collection up more effectively to non-experts?

suse anderson Museums 1 Comment April 23, 2011 1 Minute

G’Day! I’m Suse Anderson – an Australian museum geek and academic, now in Baltimore. For several years, I used this blog to think through issues related to museums and technology. More recently, I have become concerned with investigating contemporary ethical dilemmas confronting the museum field, and plan to use this space to capture links and impressions related to ethical practice in museums. You can find links to a few of my recent projects below.

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The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations (2020) is available from Routledge.
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