Event-driven Access to Heterogeneous Distributed Museum Collections

This demonstration is the first prototype of the event-driven collection browsing platform that is being developed within the Agora project. In this demo, we show how museum collections can be accessed by users based on historical events.

We have enriched the collections of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision with information about the events that are depicted in or related to the object (for details on that, see our MW2011 abstract). The event information provides us with meta-data about participants, dates, locations and event types, which can all be used to browse collections in a more context-driven way than unstructured collection meta-data can provide.

Not all meta-data elements are to be treated equally. In the demonstrator, alongside each object we show the object information along four dimensions: biography, material, semiotics and associated events. The biographical and materiality dimensions contain the information on the object as present in most collection databases, e.g., creator, time period, type of work, technique. The semiotic and event dimensions are the novel collection access dimensions added by Agora. For expert users, such as historians, the combination of the four dimensions provides finegrained access to collection objects that allows them to gain a deeper understanding of the provenance of the object. The interface also allows them to discover related objects in the collection along any of the dimensions in a fast and automated way, which was previously a time-consuming manual process. For lay users, such as secondary school students, the event-driven browser can help educate them about the way objects in museum collections are related, and illustrate multiple facets of historical events as expressed through the objects. Whenever the user wants to know more about an event, she can bring up information about the event that is automatically linked to the objects from external sources. These types of automatic enrichment provide museum collections with more grounding in history than they were previously unable to provide on a large scale. The event information provides users a handle to the history behind the object. It also provides yet another exploration path of the collection, as other objects that are also related to this event can be accessed directly.

Finally, the event browser keeps track of the objects viewed during a session and how the user went from one object to the other (i.e., through which dimension the user browsed). This navigation history forms the personal context to the objects the user viewed, creating a personal narrative that can be shared by users and will be studied by (art)historians to investigate the meaning of historical narrative in the modern Web-based collection access.