At 07:49 AM 18/11/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I am brand new to this list.  I am home genealogist and software developer.
> I have developed a genealogical, historical and genetic management for
>Windows.  I have tried to create a system to track not only genealogy but
>history.  In producing a data model for such a system I noticed that the
>system should include uses for historians, librarians, museum curators and
>others.  After all I am tracking history.
>
>If I run a small local museum, I'd like to track all my artifacts (i.e.
>location and other related data), but what about the history behind each
>item, the relationship between items, the people who owned them and the
>relationships of the people.  Now we'd be tracking history.
>
>Has anyone thought about these ideas.  I do not have the knowledge of how
>museums track their data (i.e. what they track and how).  I'd like to hear
>from those who are in the know.
>
>Craig

>
Dear Craig

I suggest that the people with the most sophisticated ideas about the sort
of relational databasing you are contemplating are archivists.

Australian archivists - following the lead some 30 years ago of Peter Scott
at the Australian Archives - have developed an original approach which is
being taken increasingly seriously by the rest of world archivy.
Essentially, it involves defining and cross linking personal and impersonal
record-creating entities to create a map of their hierarchical relationships
and changing organisation over time, and down-linking from those to the
records they created. The records are also crosslinked in various ways - eg
as to succession of functions, the connection of an index to what it indexes
etc. Multiple down-links are possible where a record series continues to
grow according to an enduring system and logic under a succession of
provenances/owners/ users, or perhaps is shared concurrently by more than
one owner/user.

A fairly good metaphor for this is that of a movie film recording the growth
of a tree by time-lapse photography - a hierarchical administrative tree
with branches growing and falling off and people sitting in its branches and
moving around - the records being, as it were, the leaves of the tree.

The system can also be used to track family relationships of people.

Agencies can also be related to on-going functions - eg car registration,
foreign affairs, parks administration, trademark registration, budgetting,
immigration control - and contemporary terms for these functions might also
be thesaurally related to standard modern terms (eg the C19 "public
instruction" to "education" or "training"; the '50's "atomic bomb testing"
and "rocket range" to more modern terms such as "nuclear testing" and
"missile launching facilities".)

The upper level provides the context of records, which is not only used to
identify and locate them but also to facilitate their linkage, understanding
and interpretation. Without context, Admiral Poindexters' email to Oliver
North "Well done!" could be advising how he wants his steak. In context, it
was evidence of complicity in high crimes.

Museum objects, as you are obviously well aware, have the same need of
context. An axe is just that until you know it belonged to the young George
Washington.

If this is of any interest to you I can perhaps find you some references.

Colin Smith
>