Museum Information Research Articles

Building community among museum information professionals: a case study of the Museum Computer Network

Museum information professionals meet the needs of the producers and consumers of museum information resources, yet, little is known of how their own needs are met or what benefits they obtain from being part of a broader professional community. This study presents results from a survey of 283 individuals who were asked about their relationship with the Museum Computer Network, an international professional organization dedicated to supporting the needs of museum information professionals. The results shed light on how professional organizations can meet the needs of individuals who share a common interest in museums and information technology, particularly when those individuals are professionally diverse and geographically distributed. The results can help researchers and practitioners better understand how to build community among museum information professionals, and have implications for all organizations supporting the needs of museum professionals.

Engaging the Experts in Museum Computing: Seven Years of Queries on MCN-L

MCN-L, an email listserv administered by the Museum Computer Network, is open to anyone interested in discussing information technology in museums and other cultural heritage organizations. To determine how MCN-L meets the needs of museum information professionals, this study presents an analysis of more than 6,000 emails sent to the listserv over a seven-year period (2004–2011). The results of this analysis indicate that MCN-L adds value to the online community of museum information professionals by providing an online communication channel focused on professional outreach and expert support, backed up by specific examples drawn from personal experiences. MCN-L's emphasis on personal expertise is a key characteristic that speaks to the listserv's lasting value to the museum community and has implications for researchers and practitioners as they consider the future of computer-mediated communication for all museum professionals.

Fragile knowledge and conflicting evidence: what effects do contiguity and personal characteristics of museum visitors have on their processing depth?

Until recently, museums mainly communicated well-established knowledge. Current science, however, is characterized by a rapid knowledge increase, so that we often have to deal with fragile and inconsistent knowledge. In order to develop exhibitions that encourage visitors to process information in a differentiated way, museums need to know how visitors deal with conflicting information. Furthermore, museum professionals need information on personal and situational factors that may promote the processing of such information. We tested whether conflict processing is influenced by personal characteristics such as situational interest, epistemological beliefs, tolerance of ambiguity, and self-efficacy on the one hand and by situational conditions such as the spatial arrangement of information on the other hand. In two science museums and one museum of cultural history, text pairs were displayed that described a topic from conflicting perspectives. The spatial distance between the two texts was manipulated. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires captured the personal characteristics of 323 visitors and the way they dealt with conflicting information. The results showed that a majority of the visitors perceived a conflict, and a large proportion was willing to process the information at a deeper level. Sophisticated epistemological beliefs, a high tolerance of ambiguity, and high self-efficacy were found to promote situational interest in conflicting information. High situational interest, in turn, promoted a tendency to process deeply. Placing text pairs in close proximity had a positive effect on the processing depth in science museums but not in the museum of cultural history. A possible explanation lies in the higher density of additional and potentially interfering information in the science museums compared to the museum of cultural history.

Notes on southern Africa Jerusalem crickets (Orthoptera: Stenopelmatidae: Sia).

The Old World Jerusalem cricket (JC) subfamily Siinae contains one genus, Sia, with two subgenera: Sia (Sia) with two fully winged species from southeast Asia, and Sia (Maxentius) with four wingless species from southern Africa. Because there is a dearth of published data about the behavior and biology of these insects, we present new field and laboratory research on southern African Sia (Maxentius), gather museum and literature information, and present guidelines for collecting and rearing specimens. While we make no taxonomic decisions, this review should be useful for future studies, including a needed taxonomic revision. We also compare results from these southern African JCs with recent investigations on related New World taxa, where fascinating biological traits and extensive cryptic biodiversity have been uncovered. DNA analysis reveals that these Old and New World JCs are polyphyletic.

Museum learning via social and mobile technologies: (How) can online interactions enhance the visitor experience?

AbstractKey to introducing information and communication technologies in museums is to support meaning‐making activity in encounters with artefacts. The study presented in this paper is exploratory in nature and investigates the use of social and mobile technologies in school field trips as a means of enhancing the visitor experience. It is anchored in sociocultural perspectives of learning as meaning making, with a focus on mediating artefacts in the development of understanding. The Museum of London was selected as the site of the study and the participants were a Year 9 History class (13–14 years old) in a secondary school in Milton Keynes. The paper considers evidence of meaning making from students’ online posts on Twitter (http://twitter.com) and activity on‐site. Observational data, the visit's Twitter stream and post‐visit interview data with the participants are presented and analysed. A mixed‐method approach is employed to interpret the museum visit and examine young people's experience in the museum. Such an approach allows useful insights and shapes the understanding of how social and mobile technologies have an impact on the social dynamics of a school trip to a museum. Specifically, it explains the role of such tools in fostering the social interactions around museum artefacts and ultimately the process of shared construction of meaning making.Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic School field trips are an important means of introducing young people to museum collections and have long‐term learning impact and influence perceptions. Learning in museums is conceptualised as the construction of meaning. Making meaning is a social practice—people engage with their environment and each other through “socially made and culturally specific resources, in ways that arise out of their interests” (Kress, ). Facilitating the visitors’ meaning‐making process is key to introducing new technologies in museums (Kaptelinin, ). Use of mobile tools in museum facilitates inquiry activities such as exploration, information search, communication and experience documenting (Hsi, ). Many information technologies implemented in museum and field trips fail to meet the real needs of their users (Gammon & Burch, ) and may appear to isolate visitors and inhibit social interaction (vom Lehn & Heath, ). What this paper adds Explores the use of social and mobile technologies at the interface of formal and informal contexts in K‐12 education. Provides an example of “enforced” mobile usage (Rushby, ) with empirical evidence on how social and mobile technologies could be integrated in school field trips to museums. Focuses on a learning design that allows learners to switch between different contexts (offline/online; individual/social; formal/informal) and extend the social spaces in which learners interact with each other. Employs a mixed‐method approach in analysing content generated online in a school visit to a museum. Contributes to a research agenda for mobile learning and particularly in designing and studying “seamless learning spaces”. Implications for practice and/or policy The findings will contribute to museum education initiatives for effective use of social and mobile tools within school programmes. Indicates the potential of the “interconnected opinion space” and “archival space” in designing museum programmes for meaning making across contexts. Highlights the need to develop more effective pedagogic strategies that will anticipate and encourage the ways that young people use social and mobile technologies and at the same time minimise the tension between the contexts, the content and the mediation tools.

A new era for specimen databases and biodiversity information management in South Africa

We comment on the inherited legacy, current state of, and future direction of the management of biodiversity information in natural history museums in South Africa. We emphasise the importance of training and capacity development to improve the quality and integration of biodiversity information for research.

A Strange Model Named FRBROO

Libraries and museums developed rules for the description of their collections prior to formalizing the conceptualization reflected in such rules. That formalizing process resulted in two conceptual models: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) for bibliographic information (published in 1998), and CIDOC (International Council of Museums, Comité international pour la Documentation) CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) for museum information (issued as ISO standard 21127 in 2006). An international working group was formed in 2003 with the purpose of harmonizing these two models. The resulting model, FRBROO, is an extension to CIDOC CRM. It adds to FRBR the dynamic aspects of CIDOC CRM, and a number of refinements. FRBROO lends itself well to the linked data environment.

CollectionSpace: A story of open‐source software development and user‐centered design

AbstractEditor's SummaryCollectionSpace is an open‐source, web‐based collections management system for museums. It is being developed by and for the museum community, recognizing the commonalities in collection management and facilitating museum information processes, workflows, tasks and needs. A partnership among the Museum of the Moving Image, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Cambridge, the project is dedicated to user‐centered design and has taken shape through workshops that identified five essential themes, starting with the idea that the software should be a museum's core information resource, serving all aspects of collection management. The software developed must be user friendly, support comprehensive data through resource linking, serve the outside community as well as museum professionals and encourage broad use by avoiding information silos. Though funding and participation challenges are normal for such an ambitious project, CollectionSpace is expected to change the way museums manage their collection information while promoting community ownership and development of the software product.

A rank-based Prediction Algorithm of Learning User's Intention

Abstract Internet search has become an important part in people's daily life. People can find many types of information to meet different needs through search engines on the Internet. There are two issues for the current search engines: first, the users should predetermine the types of information they want and then change to the appropriate types of search engine interfaces. Second, most search engines can support multiple kinds of search functions, each function has its own separate search interface. While users need different types of information, they must switch between different interfaces. In practice, most queries are corresponding to various types of information results. These queries can search the relevant results in various search engines, such as query “Palace” contains the websites about the introduction of the National Palace Museum, blog, Wikipedia, some pictures and video information. This paper presents a new aggregative algorithm for all kinds of search results. It can filter and sort the search results by learning three aspects about the query words, search results and search history logs to achieve the purpose of detecting user's intention. Experiments demonstrate that this rank-based method for multi-types of search results is effective. It can meet the user's search needs well, enhance user's satisfaction, provide an effective and rational model for optimizing search engines and improve user's search experience.

Digital rights management and access to information in archives, libraries and museums

Research has shown that DRMs (Digital Rights Management Systems) tend to protect the right holders at the expense of information consumers. There is widespread concern amongst consumer advocates that while DRMs are poor at preventing commercial copying, they are good at restricting consumer use thereby denying them their right to information. This article will specifically look at why creators of digital works insist on DRMs, the effect of DRMs on the public domain and privacy and finally discuss how information professionalssuch as librarians, archivists and record managers can help in ensuring that DRMs are well managed by coming up with balanced national laws.

Sociological Research and the Kremlin Museum Library

Until very recently, Russian libraries attached to museums have not envisioned the general public as potential users, but rather have focused on the information needs of museum staff and special researchers. In this article, the author analyzes some of the results of a research project that examined information expectations and needs of actual and potential visitors to the Moscow Kremlin Museums, the visitors' sources for obtaining museum information, their perceived gaps in such information, and the implications of these issues for the services, operations, and “image” of the museums' library. The project was facilitated by a public-opinion organization.

Learning from Evaluation - Institutional Change as Social (Re)Construction

Policy processes evolve in highly institutionalized environments, and policy effects are generally shaped by these environments. Policy outcomes could therefore be expected to be patterned and even predictable. In practice, however, prediction of policy outcomes is difficult. In part this lack of predictability relates to policy itself as many policies aim at institutional change: new norms, new rules, new patterns of behavior. However, policy is not the only force that is influencing such institutions. Moreover, institutional change can take place in the absence of a policy directed to it. This can happen as the outcome of interaction between many different societal actors reacting on external change or internal tensions. These societal actors find themselves in different institutional environments, which means that in explaining the outcomes of a policy process no single institutional framework can be presupposed, but rather a multiplicity of more or less connected and overlapping institutionalized patterns. Institutions ‘work’ if and when they appear as meaningful to actors. Here the term institution actually refers to two parallel phenomena: formal institutions and stabilized practice or action routines. In our view, these two phenomena come together in actors’ repertoires, defined as stabilized ways of thinking and acting. But repertoires do not fully determine thinking and acting, as there are always circumstances to which existing repertoires do not fully fit. Therefore, new sense making, and generation of new patterns of action are neede, which implies change of repertoires elicited by experience and/or reflection. We call this learning. The central question of our research, then, is how and when such learning takes place, especially by government and governmental agencies.In this paper we elaborate these preliminary notions with respect to the impact of policy evaluations by the Dutch Court of Audit. This focus combines a highly and explicitly institutionalized setting with a relatively explicit learning function. After a short introduction on the CoA we will elaborate our theoretical argument and illustrate it with examples from three case studies of the impact of CoA evaluations – State Museums, Lynx Helicopter, and Government Information Campaigns.

박물관메타데이터 표준프레임워크 CIMI가 남긴 유산과 영향력

The Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), operating from 1990-2003, was charged with creating and introducing the international museum community to the concept of adopting metadata industry standards. The CIMI consortium exceeded its original mission by; creating a standards framework, profile, testbeds, important metadata publications, free downloadable metadata software and protocols, and providing instrumental guidance and support in development of new projects. However, CIMI’s emphasis on the importance and utility of a standards-based approach and the necessity for implementing the CIMI Standards Framework is probably its most important achievement. During CIMI’s tenure, museums reaped the benefits by learning how to apply the model and standards to meet their individual needs while not having to invent new ones or bear the cost of software development. Although CIMI operations ceased in 2003, its impacts on museum related metadata application and research were unprecedented in that it provided the standards prototype and foundations on which to build. This paper discusses what CIMI bequeathed to the next generation of museum metadata field developers and describes the anticipated realm of future projects and advancement.

Recovering Memories: The New Exhibition at the Gedenkstätte (Memorial) Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen is one of the best-known concentration camps on German soil. However, it is also one of the camps which is often misremembered. It was not only a concentration camp, but also a prisoner-of-war camp (mainly for Soviet PoWs), and, after the war, a camp for displaced persons, at first mainly for survivors of the concentration camp; later it became the largest Jewish DP Camp in Germany. Of these three camps, the concentration camp existed for the shortest period of time ? yet it is the camp that most people think of when Bergen-Belsen is mentioned. The contradictions between the historical Bergen-Belsen and the public memory of the place are the result of the protracted process of forgetting and remembering over the past 60 years. On 28 October 2007, a new permanent exhibition opened at the Gedenkst�tte (memorial) Bergen-Belsen, set in a new building specifically commissioned for this purpose and deliberately not entitled museum but documentation and information centre. This exhibition intends to recover the memory of Bergen-Belsen which was all but concealed for many years at the actual historical site. The master narrative is shaped by the key aim to explain the historic site, and the exhibition documents the history of all three camps which existed there. The history of Bergen-Belsen is told as far as possible from the perspective of those who were imprisoned there, or for whom it became the place of rehabilitation after their liberation. As almost all German records on Bergen-Belsen were destroyed before the handover of the camp to the British Army in April 1945, the exhibition makes extensive use of non-traditional sources. At the same time, visitors are helped to understand the historic structures of the site by a new landscape design. The paper discusses the main principles which guided the work on this new exhibition, the decisions which the team took with regard to its design and its narrative, and the first reactions from the public since the opening of the exhibition. With fewer and fewer people left who lived through Bergen-Belsen, it becomes increasingly the task of the Gedenkst�tte and its permanent exhibition to ensure that Bergen-Belsen keeps a place in public memory. The overall purpose of the paper is to discuss how far this can be achieved through an exhibition now that more than 60 years have passed since the events.

Object-oriented democracies: conceptualising museum collections in networks

Museum collections are increasingly connected to global flows of information via the Internet. These occurrences are radically transforming the interfaces between collections, museums and communities, requiring a rethinking of how collections are conceived as markers of culture, the processes of acquisition and documentation, and the resultant meanings and significances attributed to them. Such transformations invite a more sustained analysis of how organisational structures based on hierarchical forms might operate in flexible networks and information flows. This paper discusses conceptual work undertaken for the Australian Research Council project Reconceptualising Heritage Collections. I will begin by discussing the logic that is currently shaping museums collections and information within global flows. Second, I rethink the metaphors that underpin museum collections interfaces. Third, I clarify and develop new perspectives on the relations and organisation surrounding museum collections and how complexity might be brought back into the documentation process. I then offer some possible solutions on how museums and collections might operate as a complex system in order to thrive and succeed in these flows and spaces. This discussion draws on complexity and network theory to consider all these things.

Corporate Social Responsibility of Large Urban Museums: The Contribution of Volunteer Programs

Out of a growing concern about the erosion of social infrastructure has come an increase in pressure on business to take up more of the responsibility to invest in building strong communities. While many tourism organizations have been slow to involve themselves in any long-term and meaningful way with communities, the volunteer programs of large Australian museums unintentionally create partnerships of engagement, participation, and involvement between the museum and their urban communities. These volunteer programs represent a contribution to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Drawing on the author's previous work, the CSR literature, and museum reports and information posted on the Internet, this article discusses why and how this occurs. First, the article explores the relationship between CSR and social capital. Second, the contribution that museums make to social capital through their volunteer programs is outlined. Third, it is considered whether museums could do more in terms of their CSR and volunteer programs. Finally, suggestions are made for the way in which museums can continue to fulfill and advance their CSR activities. Museums, in acknowledging and documenting the CSR activities of their volunteer programs, can improve CSR outcomes and enhance the social and economic outcomes for both the community and the museum.

African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection

“African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection.” International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036. Temporary exhibition, Dec. 9, 2005–Feb. 26, 2006. 765 sq. ft. Brian Wallis, curator. Internet: brief description of exhibition, photographs, museum information, online store, http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.1288081/k.85A7/Daniel_Cowin.htm. In “African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection,” the International Center of Photography (icp) presented selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection of African American History, a gift of approximately sixteen hundred photographs, which the center acquired in 1990. Among the sixty-six works displayed in the small exhibition space were commercial studio portraits of black slaves, performers, and community leaders; snapshots of African Americans at home and play; stereocards depicting racist humor and touristic views of southern life; and photographic documents of education reform in black communities. According to Chief Curator Brian Wallis, those pictures speak to the...

Finding the skills for tomorrow: Information literacy and museum information professionals

This paper presents results from 21 semi-structured interviews with museum information professionals who were asked about their experiences working with information resources, tools, and technologies in museums. The interviews were analyzed to develop an understanding of the information literacy skills of museum information professionals. This paper presents the results of this analysis, and discusses the state of information literacy in museums, and the increasing need for museum information professionals to possess information literacy skills. The results illustrate how information literacy is defined by information professionals in museums, and how perceptions of information literacy and its importance to museums have changed over time.

The changing nature of information work in museums

AbstractThis article presents results from 21 semi‐structured interviews with museum information professionals (MIPs) who were asked about their experiences working with information resources, tools, and technologies. Interviews were analyzed to determine (a) the challenges MIPs face as they adapt to changing technical capabilities and strive to meet the changing needs and expectations of museum users and (b) the coping mechanisms MIPs employ on the job that enable them to deal effectively with those challenges. This article explores the results of this analysis, exploring how MIPs cope with the changing nature of information work in museums by relying on thirteen different strategies including (a) assessing new technologies in relation to the museum's core mission, (b) helping museum professionals embrace new ideas about information access and provision, and (c) promoting internal practices that encourage the sharing of information and the integration of information science into museum work. This article also discusses the implications of these challenges and strategies for current and future MIPs, and assesses their impact on changing perceptions, roles, and research for information professionals in museums as they work to meet the information needs of all museum users.

VIEWER TAGGING IN ART MUSEUMS: COMPARISONS TO CONCEPTS AND VOCABULARIES OF ART MUSEUM VISITORS

As one important experiment in the social or user-generated classification of online cultural heritage resources collections, art museums are leading the effort to elicit keyword descriptions of artwork images from online museum visitors. The motivations for having online viewers— presumably largely non-art-specialists—describe art images are (a) to generate keywords for image and object records in museum information retrieval systems in a cost-effective way and (b) to engage online visitors with the artworks and with each other by inviting visitors to express themselves and share their descriptions of artworks. This paper explores the question of how effective non-specialist art keyworders can be in capturing (“tagging”) potentially useful concepts and terms for use in art information retrieval systems. To do this, the paper compares evidence from art museum visitor studies which describe how non-specialist art viewers react to and describe artworks and use museum-supplied information in their initial encounters with artworks. A theoretical model of artwork interpretation derived from art museum visitor research provides a framework with which to examine both the activity and the products of artwork tagging for image and information retrieval.