OpenCulture

What is the biggest problem with paper-based Documentation systems? The biggest problem is that they require direct manual intervention from an intelligent human being to make them useful. This places the burden of responsibility, and hence the overhead, on the side of the human and essentially places a statute of limitation on how much information we can hande.

So why is this a problem? Well, it’s a problem because we haven’t got enough time, money or people in museums to pursue a completist approach to Documentation. Our sector is suffering collectively from the indigestion of acquiring far too much stuff during the 80’s and 90’s, and it is an unfortunate fact that this means that far too much of our collections are largely unrecorded.

Machine-readable technologies such as barcoding, Radio-Frequency ID tags and event newer technologies such as DNA sprays have the potential to revolutionise our approach to this problem for one simple reason - they make objects ‘intelligent’.

If the object can shoulder more of the responsibility for describing itself, if it can literally shout ‘here I am, here’s my unique number’, then a whole raft of interesting things happen. Firstly, there can be a direct connection between the object and the database record about it - something that is still laborious in  current practice. The technologies can be used to automate important and time-intensive activities such as Location and Movement Control, Security, and even interesting in-gallery location-based services.

This thinking is not new - it has been floating around for the past 5 years at least. The Museums Association spent some time looking at it a few years ago and more recently, Julian Tomlin was commissioned to do some useful reasearch on this area by the London Hub.

What seems to be changing however, is that the traditional barriers to entry (specifically, cost) are less of a factor than they were a few years ago - the technologies are both more sophisticated and more affordable. Perhaps it is time to revisit this area and look at how these technologies might contribute to an Automation Revolution for Collections Management?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 10:50 pm and is filed under General, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.