Tag Archives: CIIM

News from the National Gallery – 3

Alongside the 200 online catalogue entries in 200 Paintings for 200 Years, and the bibliographies and exhibition histories I wrote about recently, the National Gallery has now put on its website a provenance for every painting in the main collection. This post talks in brief about why provenances are important, and what makes them difficult to deal with, before outlining what we’ve done at the Gallery.

A note of caution: the image above is misleading. We haven’t published provenances as structured data, let alone visualisations. It’s taken from an old screengrab of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Elysa provenance-parsing tool, and I used it because it provides a visual representation of a provenance.

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News from the National Gallery – 2

At the same time as announcing 200 Paintings for 200 Years, the National Gallery has expanded the online information it provides about its paintings to include bibliographies, exhibition histories, and provenances. This post is about the first two; I’ll write more about provenances soon. Like the 200 online catalogue entries, these are projects that my team has been working on for some time – building on work done at the Gallery years ago.

Continue reading News from the National Gallery – 2

EODEM update 8 – launch

It’s been a while coming but … today, 1 September 2023, the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group (DSWG) announced the launch of its Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model (EODEM) as a live, finalised standard. Specification files can be accessed via the project’s pages on the CIDOC website, and developers can obtain support via email.

The aim of EODEM is to save people working in museums from wasting their time continually cutting and pasting (or even worse, retyping) information between different collections management systems (CMSs) when they’re borrowing objects for exhibitions.

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EODEM update 1

I was very pleased to hear EODEM referred to last week,1 during the third Balboa Park Online Collaborative webinar on Dreaming of a New Collections Management System (a really interesting series, well worth watching if you haven’t already, and have the time). But then, as it was Richard Light speaking, and he’s been hard at work recently on building an EODEM importer / exporter for MODES, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising – but this made we realise it’s time to share where we are with the EODEM project.

Continue reading EODEM update 1
  1. EODEM is the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group’s project to create an Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model, and see it implemented in collections management systems worldwide – but then, you knew that. []

Collections Trust 2020: systems, interoperability and aggregators

Conferences have not been the same this year: I’ve particularly missed the opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues, and the random conversations and encounters in queues that compensate for the quality of the coffee one is waiting for. We have been left with the formal proceedings, and I wanted to say something about the papers presented at the (comparatively) recent Collections Trust conference, held online over two half-days on 1 and 2 October 2020.

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Dublin: kiosks, linked data, and the Dead Zoo

This April I was in Dublin for a few days, speaking at Collective Imagination 2019, the conference for users of TMS museum collection management software. This is a brief post about the conference and my lecture, and a visit to the Dublin Museum of Natural History.

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One month, five events

July was a busy month – so busy, that I’ve only now finished writing up notes from the five different conferences, workshops and meetings that I attended in just over three weeks. But why spend so much time out of the office? Continue reading One month, five events