Hi Mike,

You might try getting hold of a copy of the "Canadian Parks Service
Classification System for Historical Collection", put out by Parks Canada in
1992, you can try getting it through one of the local book stores or by
going to the Canada Communication Group on (I think Queen Street and Lyon)
here in Ottawa. It has a classification system for collections, definitions
and a thesaurus to help ensure that your whatchamacallits are in the right
category and classification.

It is now being used by Parks Canada for their collections, and is being
implemented at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Canadian War
Museum. It is a very clear and logical classification system. And seeing
that you too are in Ottawa - it comes in french as well, so if you have to
have a bilingual database, just make sure you pick up both the french and
the english versions of the book.

Plus too there is the Canadian Heritiage Information Network (CHIN)
http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/index.html which offers a variety of thesauri,
vocabulary and classification standards.

Between Parks and CHIN you should be able to find something to suite your
needs.

Good luck,

Carol Reid
Ottawa, Canada
[log in to unmask]

Date:    Thu, 24 Oct 2002 21:13:02 -0400
From:    Michael and Mary Tobin Oates <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Cataloguing Advice Needed

Hello there,

I am setting about the task of cleaning up our collection database.
 Ours is not a large collection, and includes furniture, decorative arts
items, and several hundred works of art, 2-d and 3-d.
Over the years, it seems that the registrars have let errors in
classification creep in, and I am looking to remedy that.
I am looking for some help in my search for reference materials that
will define all of  the terms I will use to describe the collection.  Is
there a standard reference manual for the art items, and decorative arts
in general??  In the near future, I hope to have this data converted and
inserted into a new, more modern collection management software package.
 I would use the included dictionary to continue at that point, but this
data tune-up is the first step.   Any suggestions for me??
Many thanks in advance
Mike Oates
Ottawa, Canada

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