Hi all,

If I could interject one concern, while people/organizations may
like particular interfaces or platforms in terms of collection
database applications, the most important aspect of the entire
endeavor is the data that is created.

To have the overall effort actually be of benefit in the long term,
the data should be of an open-standards, non-proprietary nature;
every currently utilized application should be able to export that
data in a format that can be moved up the technology food-chain. In
addition, and I am thankful that the museum crowd is actually
starting to adopt this, standarized thesauri and controlled
vocabularies are available from places like the Library of Congress
(LCTGM & LCDTGM) and the Getty's (Art and Architecture Thesaurus),
so that we can all start using the same terms to describe
collections. For those really brave, MARC format is actually a
really great thing, but does require catalogers.

Standard Image formats such as Tiff and JPEG are no exception.

Mac, Clone or UNIX, as long as everyone is using similar
terminology to describe the objects and people (LC Names) in our
collections, the greater likelyhood that we will be able to benefit
from computerization now that our information is available to an
international community via the Internet.

Robert MacKimmie
Curatorial Director of Photography
California Historical Society, San Francisco
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