USE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN
UPDATING OF MUSEUM RECORDS

V N Singh


The Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, is one of the premier
institution of India with its very rich collection of Gandharan
sculptures, Mughal, Pahari, Rajathani and Sikh schools of miniature
paintings and established after the partition of the country in August,
1947. Before the partition in 1947, these collection were housed in the
Central museum, Lahore the then capital of Punjab.

On April 10, 1948, the division of collection took place by which sixty
percent of the objects were retained by Pakistan and the remaining forty
percent collection consisting mainly of Gandharan sculptures and Indian
miniature paintings of Mughal and Pahari schools, fell in the share of
India. Received in the month of April,1949, this collection was first
housed in Amritsar then Shimla and Patiala and finally shifted to
Chandigarh and displayed in the year 1967, at its present building which
was specially designed by Le-Corbusier, a famous French architect, who
designed Chandigarh - the City Beautiful. The museum was formally
inaugurated on the 6th of May 1968.

Museum document their collections in order to manage, exhibit and study
them. This consists of creating a group of documentation records of the
objects. The documentation records includes a series of different kinds
of information are called fields. In the beginning, for documenting
works of art, the museum was having only the main entry register. Later,
the museum's curatorial staff added the sectional, movement, reserve
collection, conservation, and photo-print record registers, catalouge
and index-cum-location cards, black and white and colour photo-print
albums and colour slides.

About three years back museum established the Data Collection Management
Section and the inputting of inventory data, object description and
conservation data of the collection was started with a Pilot Project of
six hundred and one pieces of Gandharan sculptures, which form an
important collection of the museum.

There are two fundamental aspects to the computerisation of the museum
collection:

Creating and amending museum records, and location -coding.

Creating and amending museum records is achieved by transcribing
information from the museum's documentation records in the form of main,
entry and sectional registers, index-cum-location and catalouge cards.

Location-coding  consists of noting down the location of the objects and
ensuring that they are properly marked with their accession numbers.

Up dating of museum records through computerisation is having the
following advantages:
i) it has complete inventory of collection and means of stock-checking;
ii) it is a first step towards automation of the museum's information
about the objects;
iii) it is an online system which means that the curatorial staff,
conservators, librarians, and photo and audio-visual sections can
directly interact with data;
iv) it has a flexible record structures applicable to all the collection
of the museum;
v) it supports the security of the collection, by maintaining duplicate
copies of information and enabling information to be made readily
available to the outside agencies such as police and custom in the case
of emergency;
vi) it has an easy access for researchers and scholars;
vii) it enables information to be transferred from the museum to other
museums, libraries, and art and cultural organisations and also
facilitates the development of common projects i.e. research,
exhibitions, training, ete. through fax, e-mail and internet; and image
and data of the museum collection can also be displayed on the internet.

The data field of the computer based documentation system was developed
by the museum's curatorial staff under the guidance of Dr. B N Goswamy
and Dr D C Bhattacharyya, renowned art historians with the technical
support of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Chandigarh UT Unit,
Planning Commission, Government of India and the Regional Computer
Centre (a set up of the National Informatics Centre, Government of
India), Chandigarh.

The data structure is based on after surveying the leading institutions
which are having  an excellent  computer based documentation  facilities
available in  abroad i.e. the British Museum, the Museum of Mankind and
the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National museums of
Scotland, Edinbourgh (UK); the Museum Guimet, Paris (France); the Museum
Rietberg, Zurich (Switzerland); and the National Museums of Kenya,
Nairobi, Kenya (East Africa ) and in India i.e. the Indira Gandhi Centre
for the Arts, New Delhi; the Indian Museum, Calcutta; the Indira Gandhi
Manav Sangrahalaya, Bhopal; and the Prince of Wales museum of Western
India, Bombay.

Thus the museum information card consists of all the potential fields
necessary for the documentation of the museum's collection and known as:
' MIC-GOMAG'- MASTER INFORMATION CARD OF THE GOVERNMENT MUSEUM AND ART
GALLERY, CHANDIGARH' which includes the data fields in two main
sections: academic and administrative. The academic and administrative
sections are having the following fourteen and twelve sub data fields
respectively.

A) Academic:

1. Category of object
2. Medium/material/technique
3. Provenance
4. Title
5. Date/period
6. Style/school
7. Tribe/dynasty/community/patron
8. Artists
9. Dimension/weight/denomination (coin)
10. Brief description
11. Inscription
12. Original source information
13. Published source references
14. Remarks/comments

B) Administrative

1. Unit no.
2. Entry register no.
3. Accession no.
4. Source
5. Mode of acquisition
6. Price/value
7. Photo-negative /slide no.
8. Photograph/video/audio cassette no.
9. Location
10. Condition of the object
11. Restoration done, if any
12. Last update

The Master Information Card also carry  the colour print of the image.
The data and image is stored in the Document Management System software
in the form of folder. The software allows to scan, catalouge and store
as many pages as we desire. It is also possible to define our own set of
data for a class of documents. The document stored in the system are
organised in folders. The data and image can be stored in as many
folders as required. Internally, the document is not duplicated only the
reference are maintained. The retrieval  of each document can be done in
seconds by giving a key word. For accessing these documents, we can
select a folder, look at the contents and then select the appropriate
document. The software also uses a variety of standard compression
techniques to store the document containing data and images so that they
take very little space for storage and yet there is no loss of clarity
either in data or in image. Online updating of remarks, comments or
suggestions by research scholars and field specialists are done
periodically, to keep the information of works of art update.

     Chandigarh Administration has launched its Home Page on the 15th of
August, 1997 during the occasion of the 50th anniversary  of India's
Independence on the internet, to make available the information about
the museum collection to the museologist, art historians, scholars,
researchers, art lovers, and tourists all over the world and the website
can be visited  at the following address:
http:/www.nic.in/chandigarh

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V N Singh : Director, Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh 160
011, India
Phone & Fax : 91-172-742501, e-mail : museum@chd.nic.in