Beyond the Gallery Walls: Tools and Methods for Leading End‐Users to Collections Information

The library and archive communities have a long-standing history of organizing and managing their information in a way that facilitates access to their holdings, both within their home institutions and via union catalogs and consortial bibliographic utilities such as the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) and OCLC's WorldCat. Metadata element sets and information protocols, such as MARC and the Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and controlled vocabularies and authority files, such as the Library of Congress name and subject authorities, the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Art it is serving the larger purpose of aggregating all relevant information about the works in a collection and preparing that information for delivery or publication in a variety of environments and to a variety of users, both internal and external. In addition to the Web, another area that museums are exploring as a means to providing greater access to their collections is with public access or kiosk systems. Until a decade or so ago, many museums and cultural heritage institutions packaged selective information about their collections on a CD-ROM, which was then made accessible from a kiosk station within the museum itself. This kind of closed, hard-coded system also gave museums a product to sell; but updating the CD-ROMs to account for changes in attribution or to include new acquisitions was so costly as to be infeasible. Museums are now creating models and processes in which a collections information system serves as the starting point for publishing selective information to a content management system, or a set of content management and manipulation tools that make it possible for data to be edited and enhanced to better fit the needs of the audience(s) using the public access system or the institution's Web pages. The benefit of this model is that it creates the opportunity to change, update and add additional information about the collection in a dynamic way, rather than producing CD-ROMs, which, for many if not most institutions, become out of date the moment they are produced. Creating access to a museum's collection on the Web opens up a whole new level of complexity that requires careful thought, for users can no longer be simply identified as museum staff or museum visitors, nor can their needs be neatly categorized. Making collection information available on the Web means that everyone with access to a computer that is connected to the Internet is a potential user, regardless of age, educational and cultural background or native language. There are two common misconceptions that many museum professionals have about making their information available to larger audiences and both have the potential to create significant setbacks for advancing the ability of museums to better share and disseminate information on their collections. The first is that making collections available on line or in a public access system is a discrete, finite project that will sooner or later come to an end. In most cases, this approach involves seeking grant money or other sources of financial support in order to fund the project. In recent years, many museums have made their collections, or at least portions of them, available on line. While grants have played a large part in making this possible and this is a pragmatic approach given the limited financial resources available to most cultural heritage institutions, one negative aspect of this approach is that many museums tend to see the process of making their collections accessible on the Web or in kiosk systems as "one-off' projects, rather than as an ongoing part of their core mission and activities. When museums take this kind of approach, the lion's share of the resources tend to go to the activities strictly related to creating digital images of collection objects, while activities such as creating additional content and contextual tools, building access points based on data standards and controlled vocabularies, and identifying audiences and their needs and behaviors are all relegated to "phase two" or "we'll deal with that later." The authors of this article can't count the number of times that, after trying to convince colleagues from other institutions that they need to invest time and labor in building good data and implementing standards and controlled vocabularies on the back end, they have received the response, "We don't have time to deal with that now." A museum might be able to boast that it has its entire collection of art works available on the Web and to say to the philanthropic agency that funded the project that they have fulfilled their grant by making their collection accessible on line, but what exactly is meant by accessible? Can a teacher preparing a class on women artists find all the works in the collection by female artists? Can a scholar or researcher find the history of the ownership of a particular painting in the collection? Can a curator from another institution identify the 17th-century drawings by French artists in the collection without calling the museum's curator of drawings? Can a student find the ritual vessels depicting warriors in the collection? For the purposes of this paper, we are defining access as "the ability of a user to find and use information in electronic form." (See also Joan M. Reitz's excellent Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science for definitions of accessibility, authorities, etc.) The second misconception about the work involved in making collections information available to larger audiences is the notion that this can be an added responsibility to the registrar's position or to some other position within the institution. While smaller institutions may have no other choice than to give this extra set of tasks to the registrar, institutions need to start facing the fact that the cluster of activities related to creating, managing and publishing collections information will require new people, new skill sets and, yes, new positions. Increasingly, as Ken Hamma has also noted in his article in this issue, museum positions include job titles such as Data Standards Administrator (J. Paul Getty Museum) and Manager for Information Standards (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and departments such as Collections Information and Access (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). To better understand the scope of the responsibilities associated with these positions and how they differ from the role of a registrar, we need look no further than the job descriptions. an experienced, full-time registrar responsible for all aspects of registration, including accessioning, incoming and outgoing loans, traveling exhibitions, document management, and inventory maintenance. The registrar is responsible for maintaining the inventory control for all objects in the museum's collection and an accurate record of the location of each object in the museum; arranging the packing, transportation, and insuring of all objects passing into and out of the museum; and coordinating the de-installation of all objects for exhibition. develop metadata standards for a wide range of collections; develop guidelines and document best practices for the development of metadata; analyze and evaluate metadata in collections; oversee and coordinate the work of catalogers creating, revising or enhancing metadata and create a quality control process for such work; collaborate with other staff in the development of the database architecture and features of the software environment; and serve as the principal liaison to metadata standard developers and cataloging authorities in the educational, cultural and scholarly communities. While ARTstor is not a museum (but does — or should — depend on museums for a good portion of its virtual collections), the scope of this position could easily be applied to museums with diverse collections or to institutions managing art collections as well as collections that fall under archives and library holdings. The goal that underlies these new kinds of positions is to make collections information more readily accessible for a variety of audiences and uses. Data and metadata standards and controlled vocabularies are crucial in making this possible. There are three types of standards pertinent to the proper management of museum information: data structure standards, data value standards and data content standards or guidelines for how to format the data values that are used to populate the data structures. Data structure standards often take the form of metadata element sets. Categories for the Description of Works of Art developed by the Art Information Task Force under Getty sponsorship and the Visual Resources Association's VRA Core Categories are two widely used meta-data element sets for describing cultural objects and their images. Fortunately for museums, the use of collections management software typically provides a structure for managing and documenting objects in an organized and meaningful way. But simply having a collections management system will not guarantee easy access to the works in a museum or other cultural heritage repository. The words and terms (known as data values in the information science realm) that a museum uses to document works of art are of great importance. Once again, the cultural heritage community is fortunate to have a variety of tools, in the form of controlled vocabularies, classification systems and thesauri, to help with the proper selection of data values for cataloging. These include, but are certainly not limited to, the Art this is where the data content standards or guidelines come in. As mentioned above, it is now common to find a variety of staff involved in entering descriptive data about a collection in a museum's database. Ensuring that this level of cataloging across departments and by diverse staff adheres to a set of guidelines is crucial for creating consistent, accurate access to collections. In the museum world, standards for the selection, organization and formatting of content have only relatively recently begun to get the attention they so desperately need. A new initiative to help the museum community address these issues is Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO), a Visual Resources Association project that seeks to provide standards for data content in cataloging cultural works and their images. But we must repeat that the key element with all standards and guidelines is the ability for museums to have the proper people in place to implement and support them in ways that are part of the normal workflow of the institution. Adherence to metadata standards, using controlled vocabularies and following best practices for descriptive cataloging open up numerous possibilities for re-purposing data and increasing access to collections for diverse audiences with varying needs. Access to collections should be data-driven — ideally coming from a central repository, such as a collections management system, that is maintained by key information stakeholders in accordance with a set of accepted rules and practices. This model enables the institution to efficiently and effectively manage, maintain and preserve data over time. The Getty Museum has made it a policy to re-purpose data from its collections information system to enhance access to its collection for a variety of users, internal and external; as much as possible, the content we deliver to our users on the Web, in our kiosk system and in our hand-held system is "fed" by data from our collections information system. The Getty Museum builds collection-specific thesauri incorporating terminology from existing vocabularies such as the AAT, in addition to including "local" headings that help to categorize the objects in its collection in meaningful ways for non-expert users. One of the museum's local thesauri is a vocabulary of object types represented in the museum's collection. A section, or facet, of this thesaurus deals with furniture in the collection, which is then broken down into categories such as chairs, and further by types of chairs such as fauteuils (French chairs with open arms) (Figure 1). In the museum's database, objects are linked to their appropriate object name in the thesaurus. This data is then re-purposed on the Web in two different ways. View of the Getty Museum's collection-specific thesaurus in its thesaurus manager application, a part of the museum's collections information system. © J. Paul Getty Trust. First, the structure of the thesaurus itself assists users in browsing by categories to help them retrieve information. This is particularly helpful for users who are unclear about what exactly they are searching for or for users who may not be familiar with art terminology. The Getty Museum exposes the broader, more generic categories of the thesaurus to facilitate retrieval for these types of users. For example, someone interested in chairs could select this heading as a category and retrieve results immediately without having to be confronted with a list of specific types of chairs, such as fauteuils (Figure 2). Screen capture of the Getty Museum's category for Chairs as part of its collection on line. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Secondly, the Getty Museum utilizes the specific terms from the object type thesaurus that are linked to the objects in the database to assist users who know precisely what they are interested in finding. These data values or names are brought over to the META keyword tag for the individual object records available in the Getty Museum's collection on the Web. The META keyword tag is for select words and phrases that properly describe the Web resource and are used by a variety of search engines, including the Getty's own search to facilitate For example, if a curator from another museum interested to know if the Getty any fauteuils in its collection, or could a keyword search on fauteuils and would retrieve three results (Figure The first two results are not the fauteuils on the of the Web for these objects, but the fauteuils from the local thesaurus has been in the META keyword for these Web and is by the search of a search on fauteuils on the Getty Museum's collection on line. © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty has also begun to controlled vocabularies with its internal search to the possibilities of increasing access to collections with As of this the Getty has implemented the as a searching on its search One of the of searching is that it catalogers and other data from having to the many or names to objects and as as one of the values or words used to describe a particular work or is represented in the vocabulary to which the system is the thesaurus will take of proper For example, a user a search on the Getty's for works or information about the will results with a to search for one of the (Figure the is that the search first for an on the Getty's Web and It then the name the where it a in a name on one of the of names that form the records (Figure of the names for this preferred and are then to the search which results in a on in the Web for the museum's collection. This whole process is hidden from the The search results in Getty Web that the words or by the user the opportunity to select the record for which is the name for that in most of the scholarly the user is with two from the museum's collection (Figure one a link to the of the and the other a link to a painting to Screen capture of a search for on the Getty's search © J. Paul Getty Trust. record for the © J. Paul Getty Trust. Screen capture of a search on the Getty's search © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Museum is just one of a museum that is the of managing the data about its collection in a way that is and utilizes controlled The of and implementing a model for managing data has to the ability of museums to more easily their data to new systems, to their data in a dynamic to or public access systems and to be able to their collections information to such as Museums and the Online of and the Cultural Materials project of the Libraries Museums have a way to go they what libraries and archives have been for decades to facilitate access to their holdings. But if we to implement standards and best practices for data-driven publishing of our collections, it be the archive and museum communities can create successful models of and data standards at the J. Paul Getty can be at Getty and Getty Research can be at