Digitizing Conservation: Developing data models for preservation data

Abstract

Conservation documentation plays a crucial role in preventing misrepresentations about cultural property. Yet conservation records often remain undigitized and unsearchable. As part of efforts to improve access to conservation documentation, members of the Linked Conservation Data Consortium recently embarked on a project to transform paper and born-digital conservation records spanning forty years into linked data. Project team members reviewed existing models for preservation data and found that only the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model would accommodate documentation of materiality, object structure, and conservation treatment events as prescribed by professional guidelines. Project outcomes revealed meaningful patterns in conservation data that may be useful in future model development as well as shortcomings in the XML technologies employed for transforming the data.