Mexico’s Tradition and Culture Entering the Digital Age: The Mexican Cultural Heritage Repository Project

José Morales-Del-Castillo,Pedro Ángeles Jiménez,Claudio Molina Salinas

doi:10.3390/heritage2010024

José Morales-Del-Castillo, Pedro Ángeles Jiménez + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage2010024

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Abstract

Mexico is a country with a vast and extraordinary cultural heritage, which is the result of a rich history of cultural exchange, syncretism and transculturation. This rich culture has been materialized through the consolidation of a long and prestigious museum tradition, which at the same time is sadly characterized by an endemic lack of technological resources rather than professional skills. As a result, we have found that Mexican museums produce very heterogeneous forms of documentation, which are often not even managed using information technologies. Furthermore, most museums deploy ad hoc solutions that directly limit the usefulness and value of the documentation process itself. In response, the recently founded Mexican Ministry of Culture is undertaking the development of the Mexican cultural heritage data model (Modelo de Datos México), which is aimed at contributing to the cultural heritage domain of our country through the correct characterization and documentation of its cultural objects. It is the first documented experience in Mexico of a large-scale data model inspired by CIDOC-CRM, which is complemented by a set of terminological tools that attempt to capture the singularities and idiosyncrasies of the Mexican cultural sector. In the present paper, we will describe the motivations and decisions made so far to optimize the data model to the Mexican reality and the development of the project that will define a set of local terminologies built on the expertise of linguists, information architects, developers and especially, museum professionals.

Highlights

In recent years, Mexican institutions that are related to cultural heritage have engaged more frequently in digitalization projects and similar to other parts of the world, this activity has revealed how this information has been previously organized, the different ways to publish it and perhaps most importantly, the tradition of its documentation.The Mexican Ministry of Culture (Secretaría de Cultura in Spanish) is a governmental entity that was recently established in December 2015
One of the first limitations that we discovered is the low availability of thesauri as we only have a Dictionary of Materials, a Dictionary of Cultural Heritage Object Appellations, a Dictionary of Geographic Names and a Dictionary of Techniques, which are considered as part of a set called “general thesauri”
The development of the MDM represents the first effort of the Mexican cultural sector in creating a technological and methodological infrastructure capable of facing new challenges in the documentation of cultural heritage objects in the short and long term. Such a necessary change of perspective implies a transformation of extraordinary proportions since it needs to be accompanied by a modification in the documentation practice, incorporating norms and international standards, with the objective of turning the data sets managed by cultural heritage institutions into the main information source of a harvesting and aggregation system

Summary

Introduction

Mexican institutions that are related to cultural heritage have engaged more frequently in digitalization projects and similar to other parts of the world, this activity has revealed how this information has been previously organized, the different ways to publish it and perhaps most importantly, the tradition of its documentation. The Mexican Ministry of Culture (Secretaría de Cultura in Spanish) is a governmental entity that was recently established in December 2015. This ministry has started a project, which was coordinated by the Cultural Digital Agenda of the Information Technologies and Communication. The strategy to achieve such a goal consisted of selecting some national museums and other institutions from the Mexican cultural sector and decidedly encouraging them to stick to data normalization in order to properly describe the cultural heritage objects they keep; implementing different actions aimed at training and professionalizing the personnel in charge of these tasks; and developing in a formal manner a set of lists for terminological control. We introduce a short account of this experience

The First Cultural-Information Aggregator in Mexico

E52 Time-Span CIDOC-CRM

Model Overview

The Terminological Catalogues of the Mexican Repository3

Conclusions