Documentation and users
CIDOC 2005

The CIDOC annual conference was held May 24 — 27, 2005 in Zagreb, Croatia. The conference theme was "Documentation and the users". The organisers formulated this as follows:

Worldwide, museums have put in and are still investing enormous efforts in the field of the expert documentation of the objects and collections that they have assembled, are looking after, investigating and presenting. The global information community expects and peremptorily demands access to the information and knowledge stored in museums. For whom are we documenting if not for this community? So let us take the time to consider museum documentation from the point of view of the user. Are the forms of documentation that we use in museums going to be just as interesting and relevant to the general public? What kind of expectations does the public have? How can we affect the museum-public relationship through documentation? From inventorisation and cataloguing to documentation for users: internal vs external documentation, professional vs public priorities, visitors vs users

The impact of users on documentation:

• Interaction, information exchange, community expectations, focusing on groups of users
• The digital heritage: new forms of museum documentation, contents management vs collection management, user-friendly knowledge systems, the Internet and electronic possibilities, digital preservation
• Problems and challenges: additional professional efforts, costs, copyright, theft, etc.