Abstract
How can one best transform a paper-based publication into a living online resource? This is the theme of a project at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Norway, supported by the Arts Council Norway. The National Museum aims to create, publish and maintain an authority list of Norwegian artists, architects, designers and craftsmen. The objective is to ease the digitisation process for other museums, scholars and the public in general and contribute to better data quality in Norwegian online collections. The list will in part be based on the Norsk Kunstnerleksikon (Encyclopaedia of Norwegian Artists in English), published in 1982–1986 and subsequently digitised in 2013. With the help of other public collections in Norway, the purpose is to make the new resource as complete as possible and available in both human- and machine-readable formats. Although the original paper publication contains biographical texts as well as lists of exhibitions, education, travels, publications and more, the data in the new authority list will be constrained to a set of core biographical data. It will however carry references to online biographical resources such as Norsk Kunstnerleksikon (NKL), Wikidata, Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) and Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). This article discusses the process of defining the scope of and setting constraints for the list, how to enrich and reconcile existing data, as well as strategies to ensure that other institutions contribute both as content publishers and end users. It will also shed light on issues concerning keeping such a resource updated and maintained.
Highlights
From oral tradition to the great libraries of the ancient world, from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia to Wikipedia, people have sought to gather knowledge and craft constructs to disseminate it
When this work was concluded, it was decided that a human-readable web interface would be desirable as well and an agreement was reached with the online edition of the Store Norske Leksikon (SNL, 2018) [7] to publish the Norsk
Together with KulturIT and the art museum community, The National Museum started working on standardising art history terminology such as object types, materials and techniques, linking as much as possible to online resources
Summary
From oral tradition to the great libraries of the ancient world, from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia to Wikipedia, people have sought to gather knowledge and craft constructs to disseminate it. 16); they did not include history, people and biographies as this was the domain of a specific subtype of reference work—the historical, or biographical, dictionary One such effort was the Norsk Biografisk Leksikon (Norwegian Biographical Encyclopaedia), which was published in nineteen volumes between 1923 and 1983 (with a revised second edition published between 1999 and 2005). When this work was concluded, it was decided that a human-readable web interface would be desirable as well and an agreement was reached with the online edition of the Store Norske Leksikon (the Great Norwegian Encyclopaedia) (SNL, 2018) [7] to publish the Norsk.
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