Welcome to the Digging Digital Museum Collections blog
series! The Alexandria Archive Institute and Open Context advocate for
data sharing, data literacy, open access, and community collaborations.
In this series, we explore user experiences with online museum
collections and question what we can do to use museum collections data
in more accessible, inclusive, and efficient ways.
We will highlight how different museums are sharing their
digital collections, interview users of digital content, share “how
tos” about using online collections, and try our hand at integrating
content from different institutions.
When my friend and colleague Zach Rubin reached out to me to ask about activities students can do in his Meeting with Mesopotamia
course, I was excited. “Why don’t they search for museum objects in
online collections?!” is, of course, one of the things I immediately
suggested. (You can find more virtual museum activities in this resource.)
His course looks at important Mesopotamian objects and monuments and
questions how they have been used and abused in historical and modern
contexts. The online collections search activity would be the perfect
opportunity to discuss why objects from ancient Iraq are now on display
in the British Museum, for example.
An activity like this would require a guideline for students because
1) not every museum has objects from Mesopotamia, 2) every museum has a
different online collections search. Even when museums use the same
collections management software (such as TMS, Argus, EMu, PastPerfect, or MuseumPlus), the online public version may look different.
This is a problem for many students, educators, and researchers: “I
falsely assumed that tracing objects across different digital platforms
would be relatively easy,” says Emily Mazzola,
a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture Program at the
University of Pittsburgh. “It quickly became apparent that this was not
the case.”
Sophia Walker, Learning and Community Programs Project Manager for
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, informs me that MFA Boston is also putting
together a resource on how to do a search in their collections. This
resource, Sophia says, is a result of conversations that happened in
their teaching workshops and is based on the feedback teachers provided.
It is a collaborative effort where the library, accessibility,
education, visitor service, and curatorial departments of the museum
have contributed. Keep an eye out for MFA Boston’s search guide coming
out by the end of February 2021!
Such guidelines are very helpful in figuring out how the online
search in that specific museum collection works. On the other hand,
these guidelines are often institution-centered, meaning that the
guidelines may work perfectly for searching one museum’s collections,
but not so much for searching across different museum collections.
There are efforts to compile museum images through platforms like Mirador, CLEO or APE. Soon we can also find educational museum resources streamlined through Museums for Digital Learning
(MDL), which we are very excited about! At the moment, educators and
students teaching and learning remotely need easy to access tools to use
online museum collections and resources.
A two-year study by the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access showed that a brief and effective training —even a one-hour orientation—improved digital museum use. You can read more about this study here.
Based on this study and testimonials by students like Emily and
educators like Zach, we created a video to get searchers started on
their online collections journey.
You can read the transcript of the video here or turn on the close captions on Youtube.
While watching the video consider the following:
The key is “keywords”
Finding the right search words is key to getting your desired
results. If you don’t want to spend too much time trying out different
keywords, you may want to invest some time in gathering contextual
information. The easiest way to find the related keywords is to look up
“who, what, where, when” and use those as keywords (bolded). For
example:
Who/artist: “Frida Kahlo”
What/artwork: “Self-portrait”
Where/culture-place: “Mexico” (you can add this in the geographical location filters)
When: 1940 (some museums have era/period filters as well)
Alternative search terms: “surrealism” (in other collections: Mexicanidad)
Even though there are standardized vocabularies, each museum categorizes and tags its artworks and objects differently.
Dr. Yelena Rakic,
Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Ancient Near
Eastern Art Department, says that one of the advantages to using online
museum collections searches is that you can often sort your results in
multiple ways. If you are getting too many results, try an “advanced
search.” This means using filters by geographic area, period, material,
or department. Many museums provide these general categories as
suggestions in their collections search (such as MFA Boston). The Walters Art Museum has extra suggestions such as “artwork of the day” or “community collections.”
Dr. Rakic notes one big difficulty of using online museum
collections: the inconsistencies in cataloguing terms across
institutions but also within an institution. Being patient and prepared,
therefore, is the second key to achieve the best search results. When
searching for a place name, try its ancient (or modern) name if nothing
is coming up. If the term is in an ancient language, one may need to try
different spellings.
Alternative spellings and words are therefore useful: If your search
on “vessel” is not bringing up the desired results, try keywords such as
“vase,” “pottery,” “ceramic,” “bowl,” pot,” or culturally-specific
terms such as ”lekythos.”
You can use general search engines to prepare for your museum collections search. Luiza Osorio G. Silva,
a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, says her first instinct
is usually to do a more general search to bring up as many objects as
possible. Then, once she has narrowed down the search, she looks into
museum collections searches “because the information they provide is
generally superior to anything else one might find on the internet
(other than academic or scientific articles).” The reason for this is
because database entries and object descriptions are almost always
written by curators, collection managers, researchers, and other
experts.
In the video, we used the example of a Google search, as it is the
most commonly used search engine. But there are some ethical issues
surrounding Google, such as privacy concerns and biases in the algorithm,
especially against women and People of Color. Read more about how
search engines reinforce racism in Safiya Umoja Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression. Alternatively, you can use other search engines such as DuckDuckGo or StartPage to gather contextual information and find good search terms.
Look out for outdated language and information
Make sure to check if there is a date on your collection search
results or object information pages. Double-check the dates of museum
blogs, articles, and resources such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History
essays that we point to in the video. Some of the information in these
pages may have been written and entered into the database a long time
ago and may include outdated, offensive, and racist language. It is
important to address these issues in a way that is visible on object
pages. The Harvard Peabody Museum acknowledges on their collections search page that:
“Collections records may contain language, reflecting past
collecting practices and methods of analysis, that is no longer
acceptable. The Peabody Museum is committed to addressing the problem of
offensive and discriminatory language present in its database. Our
museum staff are continually updating these records, adding to and
improving content.”
If you are an educator, it is a good idea to do a little bit more
research on the appropriate terms that scholars and communities use
today and suggest those as keywords to your students. You can point out
to students why these terms or ideas are outdated, racist, colonial, or
orientalizing. If you feel inspired to do the work, you can contact the
museum and let them know. Museums often have a general contact email,
commonly found under “Contact us.”
Don’t be afraid to expand your search
One of the most exciting things about online museum collections is
that there is no end to exploring and discovering. We tried to give some
suggestions to aid you in finding specific results. But looking through
seemingly unrelated results may inspire your research in unexpected
ways. Eric Kansa,
the Program Director at Open Context, once made the point that getting
lost in search results is like getting lost in a library. You never know
what exciting book you will find on the bookshelf just across the book
you are actually looking for.
To keep things short and sweet, we limited the number of museum
collections represented in the video to the highest voted ones on the Art History Teaching Resources
Facebook poll. But there are small museums out there that have
wonderful resources and interesting collections. Don’t limit your search
to the big encyclopedic museums. Find out what your local museums have
in their collections. And feel free to reach out to these museums or
your school librarians to help you with your search.
Make sure to visit our Resources page for a printable worksheet on searching online museum collections and more pedagogical materials.
Keep an eye out for our future blogs on using museum collections for
research and using museum images. Let us know if there are any other
blogs or resources you would like to see.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
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