It’s
an Information Explosion Age, multifarious
information around our life. Most of useful Information must be well organized
in order to permit understanding, access, synthesis, analysis, and
communication. Getting through the different ways such as collection, purchase
and transfer from other museums, Guangdong museum has possessed more than
160.000 exhibits which contain nearly 130,000 artifacts and approximately
30,000 nature resources. Meanwhile, the museum either collects ten thousands of
books referring the history and art.
For
managing its information of exhibits more effectively, Guangdong museum use its
own classification to classify all the resources. The catalogue is listed below:
The
museum also needs to record the information of collected books including
different types of contents such as history, traditional Chinese painting,
ceramics etc, to help the researchers who have the information needs in
searching relevant information regarding their research fields.
Leading in CDWA (PD)
Museums
in the other countries have used the CDWA (Categories for the
Description of Works of Art) to describe the information of artworks
by articulating a conceptual framework. While, in the past, the Guangdong
museum just used a simple catalogue to describe the information of whole
artworks with a few elements such as name, time, grade (e.g.
national grade one culture relics) and descriptions. With the
development of technology, nowadays, the museum begins to use the advanced
method, the CDWA, to record the digital information.
Comparing
the existing catalogue, the CDWA is a more detail metadata scheme for recording
artifacts’ information, which includes 532 categories and
subcategories. A small subset of categories are considered core in that
they represent the minimum information necessary to identify and describe a
work. Guangdong museum can use the
CDWA as a metadata scheme to record the information of collections, the CDWA
can deal with differences between information intended for display and information
intended for retrieval. Information for display is assumed to be in a format
and with syntax that is easily read and understood by users. Such free-texts or
concatenated displays may contain all the nuances of language necessary to
relay the uncertainty and ambiguity that are common in art information.
Hi Junyan!
ReplyDeleteYou introduced a really good system used in museum called CDMA. So do you think such information technology management applied in the organization will lead less artificial manipulation or higher requirement of staffs?
No, actually ,the CDMA will not lead less artificial manipulation, on the contrary, the staffs may need cost much time to record the information of collections in the museum. You see, the original catalog of the museum only has few elements to describe the collection, but now much more detail elements are needed to record.
DeleteSo, why does museum still need it?
By using the CDMA, the information exchange between museums will be convenient because of the uniform catalog. Simultaneously, the users who apply the database to search relevant information will get more detailed information. It's will be more helpful.