> I am on a task force at the National Museum of American History trying to > define what the minimum amount of documentation is needed to make our objects > useful to the telling of our story. What do you in the field consider the > minimum? What is the "practical ideal." In the design phase you can sell yourself short by working with 'minimum' or 'core' information. I recommend you take an information modelling approach and account for every piece of information you can associate with your enterprise and its 'objects'. An entity-relationship model is relatively easy for users to understand and is a good place to start and can lead easily in to building a working database on a variety of widely available platforms - but there are other options to describe what you are interested in. Once you have defined the information requirements of your enterprize, sorted out where things fit, removed duplication and resolved inconsistencies, you can decide on acceptable levels of information to make a system work. Design for the maximum and build for the optimum within the constraints of your technology, time, people and money. If you specify a minimum, that may be all they will let you build and within a vey short time (days, hours) there will be users who ask for (no, *demand*) something your system can not deliver and that can not be easily implemented in the future. > Does information storage technology > have an impact on the data collected? How far beyond administrative and > descriptive data should we go in documenting a historic object? What is the > best means of making this collected documentation accessible to the museum's > staff, scholars and the public? Yes and no. If you are limited to paper-based technology, the design exercise is still useful but the options for retrieval and manipulation of data are extremely limited - all the information in the model could be collected and stored on forms and cards in an extremely rigourous way. Any contemporary computer system will be able to handle the information on, about and concerning your 'objects' and how they relate to the world at large. Your should go as far as your resources will allow, and even if you do not collect all the data to start with, you should have clearly identified places for it to go, either in the working system or in the design to be implemented at a later stage, so that you will be in a position to take advantage of the hugely increased resources for museum activities that are coming 'real soon now' ;-) As far as making the documentation accessible to staff and the public, I highly recommend planning at the outset to use the internet and in particular gateways to gopher and the World Wide Web. By using this system to deliver information to your staff, you have provided it to the world at no extra cost. This is an approach being taken by several natural history collections (our gopher and WWW servers, those at the museum of paleontology at Berkeley, the Harvard biodiversity gopher, the Smithsonian botany department gopher, to name but a few) > What forms might this documentation take? > Photographs? digital images? Letters? Journal articles? Catalog worksheets? > Computer files? All of the above. Whatever you have. Thes items can all be stored in databases or computer files systems and delivered to the WWW in an easy to use and visually exciting interface. Because the interface is also used for a variety of other application, user training becomes a minor component of your task. Once the database gateways have been implemented, and the user knows how to drive a stardard WWW or gopher client, they can get straight into using the system - there is no having to learn how to drive an Oracle interface, a Sybase interface, an Ingress interface, a dBase interface, or whatever - and it is all the same on all the common computing platforms in use today. > Any answers? > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- > NMAH, Dept. of the History of Science & Technology > Phone: (202) 357-2314 NMAH 5119, MRC 638 Design properly and in detail from the outset, and if you don't have any professional expertise in house, pay for it, or borrow it from a sister institution. A lot of the design work has already been done, a lot of the mistakes already been made, and it makes little sense to do that all again (after all, there are heaps of new mistakes to make). Have a look at the work done in natural history museums and herbaria - their whole enterprize is based on historical artifacts (specimens) and I do think you will find too much there that is incompatible or too far removed from what you do. A lot of work on information models have been done by a working group of the Association of Systematics Collections and the Natural History collections staff of the Smithsonian. An ASC information model for natural history collections as a postscript file is available from a number of FTP sites. The Smithsonian staff have built (or in the process of doing so) an elaborate system for the management and transactions of their collections. Information model junkie, Stan Blum, who used to work at the Smithsonian and who I think monitors museum-l, was behind both of these activities and could provide more details. jim ___________________________________________________________________________ Jim Croft [Herbarium CBG] internet: [log in to unmask] Australian National Botanic Gardens voice: +61-6-2509 490 GPO Box 1777, Canberra, ACT 2601, AUSTRALIA fax: +61-6-2509 599 URL=http://155.187.10.12:80/people/croft.jim.html ______Biodiversity Directorate, Australian Nature Conservation Agency______