Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls

Get practical tools to successfully develop collaborative online learning projects!

Virtual museums provide an opportunity to spark learning through online access to multi-sensory information, and collaboration between sources is needed to efficiently and effectively catalog and present material. Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls presents respected authorities exploring the world of virtual collections, from the identification and selection of objects to be included to providing online access using common terminology. Future possibilities and problems are fully detailed, taking into consideration the need for fixed metadata, descriptive standards, and negotiated compromise. Solutions to difficult issues are provided to allow successful development of collaborative virtual museum projects of all types.

A virtual museum can provide users with direct, easy access to information, photographs, drawings, sound files, and video clips. However, discipline-based differences in terminology between collections are as much a challenge as integrating detailed locally-developed vocabularies with more general descriptors. Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls shows how to best achieve consistent information access by providing studies of successful collaborative museum projects which resulted in the creation of catalogs of material from a number of separate collections. The book helps you to understand the challenges of dealing with an unknown online user community as well as the opportunities for presenting information to the virtual museum visitor that differs from that information available during an on-site visit. Four case studies are presented in depth and highlight practical strategies on the development of collaborative common language for future projects. Extensive references provide opportunity for further research while tables clearly illustrate data.

Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls thoroughly explores:

• cataloging and the digital collection at the Experience Music Project
  
• the collaborative cataloging efforts using Dublin Core to unite local heritage organizations
  
• the compromises and negotiations necessary to build a common catalog for multiple collaborating organizations
  
• the challenges of creating contextual information that places objects in relationship to their creators and the circumstances of their use
  
• the partnership between museums with Native American collections and tribally controlled schools
  
• the types of images indexed by museum practitioners
  
• indexing procedures and systems
  
• identifying potentially sensitive information for inclusion or exclusion in online collection databases

Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls is cutting-edge information for museum archivists, librarians, collection curators, and anyone involved in creating catalogs or providing online access to existing museum collection information.

John J Riemer, Bernadette G Callery