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Date: | Thu, 13 Oct 1994 10:13:14 LCL |
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In article <[log in to unmask]> "Robert A. Baron"
<[log in to unmask]> writes:
>So far I'm rather disappointed in the ways museums have
>employed internet acces to their collection information. I've
>seen what amounts essentially to list databases. You can query
>on a single term (no fielding allowed) and obtain a list of
>items, but no other information. For example, at
>gopher.peabody.yale.edu I queried mamalian skeletons for the
>word "elephant" and obtain a record from Alaska: a wolf
>skeleton from "Elephant Point."
Regardless of the merits (or faults) of WAIS indexing as
employeed by the Peabody don't confuse the issue of fields
with queries by common names. The word "elephant" does not
appear because it not a precise way to locate biological
specimens. The data in biological collections has many uses,
but typically anyone needing that information would know to
search for the word "Loxodonta" or "Elephas".
>The Whitney Museum NYC (echonyc.com) offers some interesting
>historical data, a year by year summary of the museum, a list
>of exhibits, etc. But these are essentially text documents.
>To obtain really valuable data users must be able to do a real
>query of at least a portion of the data and be given a
>relational-like environment in which to operate. Queries for
>objects should be able to produce attribution data, history of
>use data and bibliographical info.
Well, the primary issue is that data in many museum databases is not
directly accessible from network clients. For an exception
see the WWW access to MUSE databases at http://muse.bio.cornell.edu/
for a forms/fields/hypertext approach to both specimen and distribution
data.
Julian Humphries
Cornell University
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