Survey of standards of relevance to museum documentation

The aim of this work is to provide an up-to-date survey of standards which might be helpful when developing or running a museum documentation system. We aim to add value to this list of standards by categorizing them by scope, purpose and intended audience. We also hope to produce case studies which demonstrate their practical utility.

Initially we will invite the developers of standards themselves to provide a description of their standard, and will offer them the chance to update this description whenever necessary. In this way we hope that the information in the survey will be kept up-to-date.

Once we have some standards to compare, we will develop a framework of categories (scope, audience, etc.). We will also invite Working Group members to submit case studies of the application of standards. These case studies will be peer reviewed, and where appropriate will be generalized so that they represent a group consensus.

We will write introductory material on how to choose a standard for a particular project. This could include a "decision tree" to guide readers to the appropriate standard for their circumstances.

We hope at some point in the project to write an article for ICOM News describing this work.

Finally, we intend to develop a training course which encapsulates this information, and to run it as a pre-conference workshop before the 2008 CIDOC conference in Athens.

The "champion" for the standards survey is Gordon McKenna of Collections Trust. Please contact him if you are interested in helping with this project.