Archives & Museum Data Models & Dictionaries

From the Preface:

"For the past twenty years, archives and museums have developed and implemented automated information systems. By and large, each institution has examined its own methods and data and designed a system to suit its needs. In so doing, each institution has had to address a number of similar questions regarding the best way of representing information to support the intellectual and physical management of museum collections and archival materials. During the 1980's, archives and museum information networks and vendors of archives and museum software addressed these same issues to develop systems to meet the needs of more than one organization. They identified data required for collections management, resources management, events management, procedural control, and for scholarly description and interpretation of holdings. Unfortunately, the results of these substantial intellectual investments have been largely unavailable to others either because they are proprietary, or because they have remained unpublished or quasi-published. As a consequence, archives and museum system designers continue to rediscover ways of representing data rather than learning from each other's insights and errors.

This report is a discussion of the data of archives and museums. It examines aspects of a data model (a complete logical view of the information required by some system) of a typical archive or museum. It explores some particularly problematic areas of data representation, or the way information is recorded, in archives and museum information systems. And it analyzes aspects of a few existing data dictionaries and data models, which have not previously been compared."