Museum Standards - was Re: Fair Use Question?

I am glad that Craig has mentioned CIMI as one of the standards-making initiatives that are ongoing in the museum community. [Maryly, I am sure that you are familiar with this project.] The CIMI Standards Framework, however, addresses only one part of the triumvirate of standards necessary for the successful interchange of museum information - the technical standards that are required to support it at a system level. It does not deal with issues of data structure or of data values. These are still to be resolved.

In the art community, a three year project called the Art Information Task Force has developed common "Categories for the Description of Works of Art". The AITF is a joint project of the College Art Association and the Art History Information Program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. It was jointly funded by AHIP and a grant to the CAA from NEH.

The AITF Categories provide the intellectual framework within which information about works of art - broadly defined - and their visual surrogates can be exchanged between systems. It will include an annotated bibliography of controlled vocabularies, which will address the issue of common data values. Publication is scheduled for 1995 - but we hope to have the core text available via ftp this spring.

The AITF has also developed an SGML DTD based on the Categories that will be tested this summer. It is hoped that this can be the neutral interchange format for art information - flexible enough to accommodate input from diverse local systems, and to provide a bridge between them. In collaboration with CIMI, AITF also hopes to prototype Z39.50 based queries of dispersed art databases. For further information, please contact me [address below - I'll also be speaking at the CNI meeting, as part of the CIMI session].

There are many other groups that are working on the complex issues surrounding descriptive standards for "museum objects". These include CIDOC, the Documentation Committee of the International Council of Museums, the UK-based Museum Documentation Association, and the Data Standards Committee of the Visual Resources Association. Craig is right in saying that the economic impetus of shared cataloguing has not existed to drive the creation of shared systems. What we are seeing now, though, is an increased emphasis on sharing and getting access to information through the network. This may be the coalescing force that the museum community needs.

J. Trant
Consultant
Arts Information Management

48 Wolverleigh Blvd,                Phone: (416) 462 9404
Toronto, ON M4J 1R7                 Fax:   (416) 462 0960
Canada                              Email: jtrant[_at_]io.org