Preservation and conservation onlineFor even the most hardcore analogists, the virtue of digital information is that it can be used to accomplish a significant percentage of exploratory research. In other words, one a fragile object is represented digitally, further handling can be on a more strict need-to-see basis.Interestingly, the Conservation Information Network was one of the earliest computer-mediated professional groups, presumably because of the need to share highly specialized information with a farflung set of practitioners. An important aspect of preservation online is the preservation of the metadata about the collections. Any institution that has gone through the process of transferring data from one proprietary database to another has experienced the frustration of of losing hundreds if not thousands of hours of inputting efforts because the new system can't understand something or there were inconsistencies with the input data, etc. Organizations such as the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) are working with open standards such as SGML (Standardized General Markup Language) as a way to store data in a powerfully flexible manner that is software and format-independent, thus preserving for future uses. |
next | previous | index Coalition for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information Conservation Information Network
|