CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group
Chair: Richard Light (richard@light.demon.co.uk).
This working group is a merger of two earlier groups: the Data and Terminology Working Group and the Data Model Working Group.
Work plan for 2007-2010
At our meeting in Vienna we discussed the general position of CIDOC in the standards landscape, and decided that our main task for the coming year would be to start work on an overview of standards relevant to museum documentation. This project is described in more detail in a separate section.
Other tasks that we plan to undertake are to:
- review and promote the new publication Statement of Principles of Museum Documentation
- continue and extend our existing liaison with bodies such as the TEI and MDA, and additionally offer CIDOC as a neutral "place" for discussions on standards between relevant national and international bodies
- ensure that existing CIDOC standards and guidelines are, as far as possible, available on the CIDOC web site
If you are interested in helping with any of these tasks, please contact me.
Richard Light
The Documentation Standards Working Group is developing a Statement of principles of museum documentation. The current draft is available for comment. This document has been discussed and updated at the last two CIDOC meetings (in Zagreb and Gothenburg), then tidied up by Andrew Roberts. Once the Principles have been finalized, we intend to offer guidance based upon them. Where possible, this guidance will use existing authoritative sources, such as the U.K. Collections Trust's SPECTRUM framework.
The working group aims to act as a point of liaison with relevant bodies and initiatives which develop standards of relevance to museum documentation. Examples of such bodies are the Text Encoding Initiative, CCO and MICHAEL. Members of the group are working on a mapping of TEI to the CIDOC CRM.
In the area of terminology control, the group plans to review technical frameworks such as the updated thesaurus standards from NISO and the British Standards Institution, SKOS and Topic Maps. In addition, it is interested in specific controlled terminology resources of relevance to museums, such as ICONCLASS.
Another area of interest for this working group is "grey literature", i.e. information which is held within museums but does not form part of their formal documentation or archive system. It can be in manuscript, print and, increasingly, electronic formats. Examples of grey literature would be wall texts from exhibitions or supporting material in object files.
Previously, the Group has produced the International Guidelines for Museum Object Information, published in June 1995. This is a description of the Information Categories that can be used when developing records about the objects in museum collections. The Guidelines can be adopted by an individual museum, national documentation organization, or system developer, as the basis for a working museum documentation system.
The Group's terminology work includes reviews of terminology resources.
The Group has published a Terminology control bibliography (1990) and a Directory of Thesauri for Object Names (1994).
The data model work included developing a theoretical data model, preparing publications and training workshops concerning the model and advising other projects about the application of the model. The files making up the data model itself are available on-line and in print (updated 1995), but the model itself has largely been superseded by the Conceptual Reference Model.
The Group has also issued a Data modelling bibliography, published in 1994 and compiled by Jacqueline Zak and Linda Kincheloe (Getty Conservation Institute), with the help of Pat Barnett, Janet Goman and George Hickman.