Sunday April 1, 2001

12:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m.

• Daniel Starr, Chief Librarian, Technical Services and Planning, Museum of Modern Art

  Sponsors:

• Museum Library Division

Abstract:

Jonathan Franklin/ Cyndie Cambell: Exhibition History Records at the National Gallery of Canada

New ways are being sought to share historical information about exhibitions. The National Gallery of Canada’s Library and Archives have developed two projects in this area: the Exhibition History Project, which compiles MARC catalogue records for research material in the Library and Archives relating to Gallery exhibitions since 1880; and the Nineteenth Century Index Project, which indexes works contained in 19th century Canadian exhibitions (including non-Gallery exhibitions). The paper presents a survey of these and comparable projects in other museums, providing a practical investigation of the challenges of integration.  Pointers may emerge for the SHED (Shared Exhibition History Database) project currently under discussion.

Douglas Dodds: Documenting Collecting, Publishing, and Exhibition History at the Victoria & Albert Museum

In the early 1990s, the National Art Library embarked upon a project to create full bibliographic records for all publications produced by, for, or about the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was clear that there was also a need to establish a related database of all exhibitions held at the Museum, linked to the records for the publications. A draft list was disseminated via the Library's web site, and a printed bibliography and exhibition chronology was subsequently published in 1998. The exhibitions and publications are cross-referenced in order to facilitate the development of further links within the Library catalogue and elsewhere. The exhibitions data is currently held in a simple database program, awaiting integration with other related records inside and outside the V&A. The proposed SHED project is therefore of real relevance to the Museum.

More recently, the Library has also started to create full-text records for early documents relating to the Museum's own collecting history. Among other things, the NAL holds the papers of J.C. Robinson, who was responsible for many of the Museum's most significant acquisitions in the mid-19th century. In collaboration with staff and students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, we are using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) and eXtensible Markup language (XML) standards to capture the information and preserve its original context.  The data will be accessible via the Library's catalogue and may also be linked to other sources of information in the V&A. The methodology will be outlined and the potential for collaboration with other institutions holding comparable records will also be explored.

Related web sites:

• MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) <http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/marc.html>
• Encoded Archival Description (EAD) <http://lcweb.loc.gov/ead>
• Extensible Mark Up Language (XML) <http://www.w3.org/XML>
• The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) <http://www-tei.uic.edu/orgs/tei>
• Computer Exchange of Museum Information (CIMI) <http://www.cimi.org>
• OCLC’s Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) <http://www.oclc.org/oclc/corc/index.htm>

• Jonathan Franklin, Head of Collections and Database Management, National Gallery of Canada Library, "Exhibition History Records at the National Gallery of Canada" (paper jointly written with Cyndie Cyndie Campbell, Head of Archives, Documentation, Visual Resources, National Gallery of Canada Library)

• Douglas Dodds, Head of Collection Management, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, "Documenting Collecting, Publishing, and Exhibition History at the Victoria & Albert Museum"

• Tony Gill, Program Officer, Research Libraries Group, "The Research Libraries Group Cultural Materials Initiative"