An international survey of museum computer activity

Abstract

Given the high cost of computer use relative to the modest funds typically available to the museologist and his understandable opposition to machine intervention in the performance of his traditional functions, it is not at all surprising that museums have been rather slow to awaken to the evident potentialities of this new technology as a tool for research. Yet the emerging need for more efficient management of the burgeoning store of information charged to their custody and the coincident strides in adapting the computer to the diverse requirements of the museum profession have brought us quite suddenly to this frontier. As the museum audience everywhere continues to grow, we are coming to recognize that the textual and visual data descriptive of our public collections of art and of scientific and historical material must be made more accessible and employed in far more imaginative ways than are possible by conventional means. Museums are fast approaching the point of stagnation in serving their own requirements for information, not to mention the intensified demands made of them by the scholarly community and the public. In an effort both to keep abreast of the information relating to their expanding collections and improve their research and educational services, museums everywhere are looking in increasing numbers to computer techniques for the storage and manipulation of the data to be found in their libraries, files, and catalogues. The pioneer work which has been done thus far in computeroriented documentation and research for museum purposes seems to fall into three principal classes: I. the assembly and maintenance of a comprehensive "data bank" at the regional or national level, embracing a distinct class of museum information or the holdings of a particular group of institutions; II. the reduction of a single and unusually large museum collecEverett Ellin is the director of the Museum Computer Network. This paper was prepared for the 8th General Conference of the International Council of Museums, and delivered before the session on Collections and Research, Munich, August 7, 1968.