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The International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums
(ICOM-CIDOC)
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Edited by Jim Bower and Andrew Roberts, this page introduces developments in museum and cultural heritage information standards. It is based on the introductory part of a brochure produced by the Getty Information Institute (formerly the Getty Art History Information Program) and CIDOC, titled Developments in International Museum and Cultural Heritage Information Standards, first published in 1993 and updated July 1995. Although now several years old, the introductory discussion of standards is still valid. Information from the brochure about specific standards and standardising organisations has been updated where necessary and incorporated in these CIDOC Web pages on standards.
As more museums, archives, libraries, and cultural heritage centers throughout the world invest in documenting their collections, often with sophisticated new technologies, the need for standards to manage the information these collections contain becomes more and more urgent. This overview of how such standards are currently being developed is the outcome of an ad hoc meeting on information standards that took place in Canterbury, England, in September 1991. Sponsored by the Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP) [now incorporated in the Getty Research Institute], an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the International Documentation Committee (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the meeting examined the present state of standards in such cultural heritage fields as the museum and archival communities, archaeology, architecture, and conservation.
Representatives from these fields looked at the growing need for standards and talked about ways to cooperate in developing them. The group agreed that a guide to some of the major standards initiatives now in progress around the world would stimulate interest in standards issues, help avoid duplication of work, and interest a more diverse set of individuals and organizations in working to help develop standards.
Agreed-upon standards are highly beneficial in all areas of civilized life, aiding nonautomated methods of information management as well as providing a sound basis for computerization.
Standards offer a model that organizations, projects, and vendors can use as the basis for creating practical systems and guidelines. Standards give the rules for structuring information, so that the data entered into a system can be reliably read, sorted, indexed, retrieved, and communicated between systems.
Probably the most compelling reason for using standards is protecting the long-term value of data. The largest investment in building a database is not the cost of hardware and software, or the consultant, system analyst, or programmer; it is the cost of assembling the data and the time required to enter them into a system. All technology will change eventually, and sooner or later systems will need to be upgraded or the data moved to different hardware and software. Data standards not only ensure that a database is internally consistent so that it can be managed effectively, but also permit data to be formatted and stored so they are easier to "export" to other systems.
Standards are an essential basis for sharing information, helping an institution not only to contribute its information to outside institutions and initiatives, but to benefit as well by drawing upon collaborative resources such as structured vocabularies that ensure consistent input and retrieval. What good is it to create valuable resources if they cannot be easily used and shared?
The use of standards helps improve retrieval -- making sure, for example, that the searcher's inquiry will yield all potentially useful information in the database.
Improved staff expertise is needed to implement, manage, and direct these efforts. Agreed-upon standards, systems, and practices make it easier to determine the requirements for training capable and effective staff. Skilled staff results in cost savings, enhanced professional contact, and greater job mobility in an information age.
The most basic definition of a standard is a mutually agreed-upon designation that helps to ensure a consistent result. Standards can vary widely, from strict forms to more flexible guidelines that take account of both the needs of individual institutions and the various constraints that may govern their operations. A report in The American Archivist (Vol. 52, No. 4, pp. 440-461) identifies three forms:
The international and national information standards that museums and cultural heritage organizations require fall into four main groups:
Information standards efforts have an important role to play in the many geopolitical changes taking place throughout the world, since effective documentation practices are urgently needed to help protect cultural property. For example, there is currently no internationally accepted set of standards for describing or identifying cultural property, which is a fundamental requisite for coping with the illicit transit of such objects.
Another factor underscoring the need for effective standards is accountability. Parent bodies and funding agencies of museums, for example, may require access to information about the objects held in trust. Professional guidelines often demand consistent documentation procedures for activities such as collections management. Visitors and scholars want more access to information about all of an institution's collections, not just those on display. Museum staff expect to obtain information from other institutions, or to contribute their own information to collaborative projects, such as cooperative inventories. By the end of the decade most European and North American museums will be actively using computerized text and image databases. An infrastructure of agreed-upon standards will make it much easier to understand and use both the systems and the information they contain, to re-use information over time, and to pass information from one institution to another.
Who will write these standards? If national and international information standards are to be effective and useful, they must be developed with the full support and participation of the community that will use them. A formal process must be established within which representative bodies work by consensus to produce draft standards, consult their constituencies about details, then seek public endorsement of the standards from potential users. Once information standards have been identified and approved, national and international standards bodies exist that are responsible for publishing and maintaining them, such as the British Standards Institute (BSI), Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR), Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This brochure is intended to help institutions become aware of information standards issues and become willing to contribute to future work in developing standards. Both AHIP and CIDOC encourage organizations and projects interested in standards to work more closely with each other in the coming years to identify the standards they need for the effective documentation of their collections now and into the next century.
The Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP), an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, has long been an active participant in the development of art information standards by means of projects such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) -- vocabulary resources published between 1993 and 1996 that will help to lay the groundwork for a common language in such core domains as descriptive terminology, personal names, and geographic names. AHIP also sponsored the Thesaurus Artis Universalis (TAU), a committee under the aegis of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA), which examined and recommended standards for developing databases of biographic information on artists and for creating historical-geographical databases. In 1991, AHIP, together with the College Art Association of America (CAA), became a sponsor of the Art Information Task Force (AITF), a project focused on developing standards for describing art objects and related images. In recognition of growing international interest in standards, AHIP convened meetings of leaders in the museum and cultural heritage communities from various countries to address documentation issues and the related need for standards.
The International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) is the international focus for the information interests of museums and similar organizations. As a component committee of ICOM, CIDOC includes information specialists, registrars, computer managers, system designers, advisers, and trainers. Benefits of CIDOC membership include receiving a regular newsletter with reports on meetings, projects, and initiatives; taking part in research organized in working groups; and attending and contributing to annual conferences. Several of the working groups, the active arm of CIDOC, specifically concern museum information standards.
http://cidoc.icom.museum/stand1.htm
revised/dernière mise à jour: 2001-10-16
editors: Jim Bower and Andrew Roberts; revised by Leonard Will
link to/passerelle vers CIDOC home page/la page d'accueil du CIDOC or
ICOM home page/la page d'accueil de l'ICOM
Original brochure copyright © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Trust All rights reserved
Web page © The J. Paul Getty Trust and the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums/Comité international pour la documentation du Conseil international des musées (ICOM-CIDOC), 1996-2001