Lifting the painted veil: museum information in the 21st century

Paper to be delivered by Ian O. Morrison as part of "Los Museos en Mayo", in Murcia on 16 May 2001

Abstract: Museums are becoming involved in collaborative projects with partners from other sectors. Are we creating virtual communities where virtual museums are going to be virtual keepers of the collective virtual heritage? If so, can we provide the kind of information needed in this new role? Or should we continue to direct most of our effort into documentation for collections management? I shall look at how cultural heritage information is currently accessed by different groups of people and at how existing object records can be re-purposed effectively to meet the likely needs of users in the future.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Sonnet", c1819

Introduction

Buenos días. Me llamo Ian Morrison. I am afraid that is the limit of my Spanish!

When Maria Teresa contacted me, I was delighted to be given this opportunity to come to Spain and deliver a paper on this subject, which is very close to my heart. I chose this sonnet by Shelley as the source of my title, because I believe that his "painted veil" is a very good description of what has been used to conceal the problems museums have with their information (or, as some prefer, knowledge) management, and especially documentation of our collections. Most of these problems are not of our own making, but reflect under-funding and under-staffing over many years, or even centuries.

Shelley's contemporary, and friend, the half-Scottish George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) suggested that "the best of prophets is the past". How much his daughter, Augusta Ada, believed this when she became the World's first computer programmer, I do not know.

The past is all we have to go on for guidance as we enter the 3rd millennium, which is precisely why, I believe, museums are now more important than they have ever been. Some museums and great collections of artworks have now been around for hundreds of years. My own institution, the National Museums of Scotland, has been in existence for well over 200 years, whereas Scotland's new Parliament is less than two years old. Already, however, our representatives there have accepted a National Cultural Strategy for Scotland, in which museums are to play a major role, especially in the areas of "lifelong learning" (adult education) and "social justice" (equal opportunities) for all.

One of the first objects to be acquired by the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which in 1985 became part of the National Museums of Scotland, was the "maiden" - a device for executing those convicted of capital offences, last used in the late 18th century, and used as model by the French. As Voltaire is supposed to have said "we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization".

According to the 1892 catalogue of the museum, the maiden was "used for beheading criminals in Edinburgh, and by which many persons were executed, including Regent Morton in 1581, Sir John Gordon of Haddo (perhaps one of Byron's ancestors) in 1644, President Spottiswoode in 1645, Marquess of Argyll in 1661, Earl of Argyll in 1685 etc. - Lord Provost and Magistrates of Edinburgh, 1797." The latter group were the donors - they were not themselves executed by the device!

In the new Museum of Scotland the maiden is interpreted by a multimedia presentation, which simulates the method by which it worked, including audio effects. I, personally, think this presentation trivialises capital punishment. Homicide by the state has been made into entertainment for the masses - exactly the effect public executions had in the past. Have we not advanced? Have not museums, in the last 200 years, helped to civilize people? To mix metaphors, Shelley's "painted veil" is, indeed, a very thin veneer. In this paper I hope to show how this is also true in more mundane areas, such as the uses and abuses of museum documentation. In this talk I hope to "lift the painted veil" and strive to find the truth about developments in museum information and communications.

Biography

Immediately after graduating in Geology from Edinburgh University in 1973, I started my museum career working for the small local authority museum service in Kilmarnock, Scotland (where the poems of Robert Burns were first published in 1786). Although employed as a geologist, as the only professional, I also had to look after all the other collections, from fine art to social and industrial history. In 1975 I moved to Southport, 30 kilometres north of Liverpool on the coast of north west England, where I was responsible for a small museum specialising in local history. This was also a time when the first documentation aids were being produced - the widely distributed (and still widely used) MDA cards. In the UK we also had rapidly rising unemployment and the government introduced Job Creation schemes to help young people gain experience in real work. Many museums, including mine, employed jobless youngsters on documentation projects, eventually producing millions of completed MDA cards, many of which are now completely worthless, due to lack of adequate supervision and agreed standards on how to complete them.

In 1981 I moved back to Scotland - this time to Moray, in the north. There I continued to specialise in documentation, and in 1986 acquired my first computer and a copy of the dBase software, which I used to construct a complete database of my collection - around 15,000 records by the time I took up my present post in 1989. In this post I am responsible for advising museums in Scotland on how to use information and communications technology, and also to find ways of building a national database of collections. I am a member of the Board of the mda, the government-funded agency which promotes standards in collections management for UK museums. Those standards are described in a range of publications under the name of "Spectrum", and I have been involved with that project since its conception, ten years ago. At the other end of the scale, I am a Trustee, and Curatorial Advisor, of the very small, independent, Bennie Museum in Bathgate, near where I live. This is very useful in enabling me to keep in touch with the issues that affect the very small museums with no professional staff, of which we have about 300 in Scotland.

Objects and records: the scale of the problem

In 1989, after I was appointed to the new position of Scottish Museums Documentation Officer, one of my first tasks was to establish how museums had been using computers. Very quickly I discovered that, as a curator, I had been almost unique in my dedication to computerised documentation (there was one other who had achieved comparable results). This made it very difficult to build a national database of museum collections in Scotland!

I soon established that there are around 14,000,000 objects in Scottish museums, the vast majority held by a handful of museums, including the National Museums of Scotland (4,000,000), the Hunterian Museum of the University of Glasgow (2,000,0000) and Glasgow City Museums (1,000,000).

There are approximately 1,000,000 computerised records of these museum objects, a number which has not been growing significantly in recent years.

The European Museums Information Institute has recently collated comparable figures for several other European countries, though, sadly, Spain is not involved.

These figures show wide differences of approach in different countries. Sweden has computerised about 65% of its records, and the records are far more detailed than average, but less than 50% all objects are documented.

In the UK, about 80% of museum collections are documented, but about 75% of the records are at a very basic, inventory, level,

and only about 40% of the records are held on computers [GRAPHS]. France, Iceland and Portugal fall somewhere between these extremes. Most other European countries (including Spain?) simply do not know the extent of their problems.

These are some of the excuses Scottish museums have given for not doing their documentation. I am sure they are also used elsewhere.

from the "Basic Museum Documentation" training course CD-ROM (c) Scottish Museums Council/National Museums of Scotland

Who wants the information?

Another important question to be answered is to determine whether anyone is interested in accessing museum records, other than museum professionals. I started by examining the literature. There is very little. In an attempt to find the answer, I set up a project in conjunction with Museum nan Eilean in the Western Isles.

. This was called the Western Isles National Database Evaluation Exercise (WINDEE). Ultimately it involved touchscreen installations located in three public places within the Western Isles. Two were housed in community schools, and one in a public library. Each installation allowed users to access a database of 8,000 records of museum objects from a wide range of institutions both within the local area and elsewhere. These objects all had a connection with the Western Isles, and we were fortunate to obtain copies of records from the British Museum, the National Museums of Scotland, Glasgow Museums, St Andrews University Library and many others. Access to the databases was by means of an interactive map,

which users could simply touch and this led to records of objects from that particular area. There were also screens of general information about the area,

and simple quizzes. These were included for comparative purposes. The entire cost of the project, including the employment of a researcher for a year to create records of objects in local collections, programming (by myself) and purchase of equipment, was £25,000. Half of the funding came from a European Union fund to promote the use of minority languages, because we included a bilingual, Scottish Gaelic/English, element.

The WINDEE project demonstrated convincingly that many people are interested in access to basic museum records of objects from their local area, at least in the Western Isles.

WINDEE was one of several projects that enabled us to win £7,500,000 from the Millennium Commission to set up the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) in 1996.

It was also important to look at the types of conventional enquiries received by museums. The project we called catechism was a survey of museum enquiries that I conducted in conjunction with Helen McCorry, Data Manager for the National Museums of Scotland. We obtained over 1000 typical enquiries from 100 museums, of all types, and classified these with a view to determining whether or not they could be answered by reference to typical databases of collections. We found that around two thirds of enquiries related to collections and we then proceeded to divide these up by the type of information requested. The results can be seen in our joint paper Report on the catechism project, which is available on my website.

I also analysed the first data logs from the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) project after its database was put online. This chart (above) compares the results of catechism and SCRAN, and shows the categories of information requested in each case. It is significant that most enquiries, in both cases, are about specific types of object ("sword", "painting"), or specific subjects of interest ("emigration"). People ("Mary, Queen of Scots", "Percy Bysshe Shelley") and places ("Edinburgh", "Highlands") are the next most requested kinds of information. Time periods ("19th century", "Iron Age") are used much less often as the basis for searches.

What lies behind the painted veil?

Comprehensive, and probably reasonably reliable, statistics for internet usage and penetration worldwide are easily accessible. The total number of people with internet access in at the end of 2000 was estimated at 407 million (www.nua.ie) and this month an estimated 211 million people are using it regularly from home (www.nielsennetratings.com). South Koreans are most prolific in terms of webpages visited, with an average of 2164 pages seen per month. However, each South Korean visitor spends an average of only 28 seconds per page, compared with the Australians and Americans, who have the longest attention span at an average of 54 seconds. South Koreans, and users from Hong Kong, are the most likely to click on banners, though it is only a small proportion who do so. This is one of the main factors in the disappointing results of e-commerce so far. According to recent forecasts, the number of internet users in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, will increase from 64 million in 2000 to reach 240 million by 2005, and exceed the number of users in the USA for the first time. 167 million internet users are located in the USA and Canada, with around 113 million in Europe, including nearly 20 million in the UK (www.nua.ie), and 14 million in Spain. 59% of those on-line are English speakers, 26% speak other European languages and 10% are Japanese speakers. This leaves many people - several billion worldwide, including about 40 million in the UK, with no access to the wonders of the World Wide Web.

Lifting the veil a little more, it can be seen that internet trends are not necessarily as predictable as is sometimes claimed. In April 1999, Web traffic actually declined (http://www.mediametrix.com). Four of the top five "portals" - AOL, Yahoo, Lycos and the Go Network recorded a decline that month, with only Microsoft showing an increase. This little-reported blip was ascribed to a "seasonal adjustment", though oddly it was the first such ever noted. A significant, though possibly local, drop in web usage of 9% was recorded in Sweden in July 1999 (http://www.sifointeractive.com), and this was amongst the remarkable 44.3% of all Swedes who accessed the internet that month. The only groups who increased their usage were young men and single-person households. The only types of site that recorded increased usage were business-related ones, pornography sites and chat lines. The Web obviously still has an appeal for the sad and lonely, relatively high income, young Swedish male.

In the first quarter of 2001 there has been a dramatic reduction in new domain name registrations. Just over 1 million new domains registered in the first quarter, in comparison with over 4 million during the first quarter of 2000.

This slump in domain registrations is beginning to cause difficulties for many domain name registrars, with some being forced to layoff staff and others finding it difficult to retain top-level employees.

But are these signs that internet usage is reaching saturation point among the rest of us? Only time will tell.

73% of web surfers use a version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, with just under 25% using versions of Netscape (according to 1999 figures). Most of the remainder access the web with Web TV, a proportion which does not seem to be rising dramatically. WAP mobile telephones are used even less frequently. The most popular operating systems, by a huge margin, are various versions of Microsoft's Windows (3.1, 95, 98, 2000, NT), totalling over 90% of all users, with Apple Macs lagging far behind, with 5% at most.

How do users find what they are looking for? A very large majority use one or more of the "portal" sites, such as Yahoo (33 million visitors in June 1999), AOL (30 million) and MSN (23 million). When it comes to search engines, usage rates are much lower. People seem to prefer to be guided to sites of possible interest rather than to conduct a freewheeling search across the web as a whole (as I, for one, prefer).

Museums on the Web

Thousands of museums now have a web presence, but few seem to have any clear idea of why. With a few worthy exceptions, statistics of usage are sadly lacking. Museums and museum-related sites can be split into the following categories:

• Basic information about a large number of museums (the 24 Hour Museum and Virtual Library - Museum Pages)
• Individual museum web sites (examples used here are the Science Museum, National Museums of Scotland and the Bennie Museum, Bathgate)
• On-line museum collection databases (Hampshire, Moray, the Whitworth and others)
• Collaborative projects offering mediated information (FENSCORE and SCRAN)

One problem with looking at the available statistics for these websites is the lack of standardisation in what is recorded. Hopefully the museum community can soon establish standards so that meaningful comparisons can be drawn. Perhaps when the new .museum top level domain name comes into being, hopefully later this year, we can begin to address this issue.

Bearing in mind the non-standard nature of the raw data for museum websites, some interesting information can, be derived. I shall be looking, in particular, at the statistics for the National Museums of Scotland, where I am based, and at the Bennie Museum, which is typical of the vast majority of small museums in the UK, in that it is operated entirely by volunteers on a very slender budget (about £6000 per annum).

I set up a basic website for the Bennie Museum in 1998, adding statistics collection in March 1999. Later, I added simple listings of the entire collection (between 5000 and 6000 objects), though it is difficult to draw any conclusions about usage of the database pages.

The website has been attracting about three visitors a day. It is not promoted, except by inclusion in the VLMP and 24 Hour Museum listings, and by links from my personal webpages (which attract rather more hits) and those of West Lothian Council. About a third of accesses are from .uk top level domains. Over 60% of visitors found the site by using a search engine, with Alta Vista being the most popular (with 41% of all hits coming from search engines). 14% of visitors came via local gateways - SCRAN and various other Scottish sites, 11% from the local authority website and another 11% by means of the VLMP. Just 3% of hits were derived from the 24 Hour Museum.

It would be a mistake for a museum to rely entirely on search engines finding their site. Recent figures (again from www.nua.ie) show that the volume of the web actually indexed by the leading search engines varies from just over 15% for Alta Vista to 34% for HotBot. Including appropriate metadata, such as Dublin Core, or at least some relevant keywords, in the HTML header code might make all the difference for very little effort. There are also agencies which will submit details of your site to the major search engines, sometimes for a fee.

By comparison with the Bennie, the National Museums of Scotland website gets about 30% of its million or so annual visitors from the .ac.uk domain alone, with another 17% from other .uk domains and 10% from other country-specific domains, the remainder being made up largely from .com and .net domains. The number of visitors from any particular country, such as Spain (less than 0.5% of all visitors), varies dramatically from month to month. Just one visitor accessing a number of pages may well account for all the hits from any one country in a particular month. Looking at other UK museum web statistics, such as those for Hampshire County Council's HantsWeb site, shows a similar pattern, with by far the heaviest usage coming from the organisation's own top level domain. This might well be inevitable in a large organisation, where the corporate website is used as much for internal communication as for external, whereas it clearly does not apply to small museums, such as the Bennie.

The Bennie Museum website at the moment does not offer much scope for finding out what visitors to a small museum website want to access. The larger museum websites can provide some indication. 64% of all hits on the NMS website, for example, are simply to pages about displays in our various individual museums, suggesting that many visitors just have a quick look then go off somewhere else, without digging any deeper. Just 8% of all visitors are interested in collections information, and 5% access the museum shop pages. The most popular museum in the NMS group is the Museum of Flight, with over 40% of all hits, followed by the Museum of Scotland (which "shows Scotland to the World") and the Royal Museum (which "shows the World to Scotland"). The museums of war, agriculture and costume attract insignificant numbers. It should be noted that the NMS does not, as yet, offer on-line access to collections databases, just a considerable amount of mediated information about the collections in general and a focus on a few selected objects. This, so far, does not seem all that popular with visitors.

There are few individual museum on-line databases, the first in the UK being that of Hampshire County Council's museums service in southern England, closely followed by the much smaller Moray Council Museums, from the north of Scotland, and a handful of others. There are several possible reasons why more museums have not made their databases available (yet):

• they do not have the necessary records
• they have the records, but not the technology
• they have the records and the technology but have higher priorities

The Hampshire database does not seem all that much accessed in comparison with other parts of the County Council's website. Figures for the Moray database are not yet available, but I have been informed that it is not much accessed either, though the website as a whole does generate two or three enquiries a month from overseas regarding the collections, many of which are genealogical in nature. Such a level of interest hardly justifies a big investment in the technology, though it is a useful adjunct to the other work of the museums service.

Perhaps collaborative database projects will prove to be the way forward for museums wanting to give wider access to their records? The Federation of Natural Science Collections Research Units (FENSCORE) database, which has been on-line since early 1999, is proving very useful for natural sciences research, and usage has been quite encouraging. One could hardly argue, however, that such usage is by the "socially excluded", unless one includes all natural scientists in that category! In fact, users of the FENSCORE database follow much the same pattern as those of the National Museums' websites, with .ac.uk domains dominating.

One factor which affects museums' presence on the Web is the lack of availability of appropriate technology in the museums themselves. EMII investigated this across a number of European countries, and in many cases, including France, Italy, Norway and the UK, museums have less access to the internet than the population as a whole. In the UK, for example, less than 20% of museums currently have any kind of internet access, compared with over 30% of our population.

The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) was set up with a view to channelling money via digitisation projects into museums. Just how far it has succeeded in this is moot, but at least we now have some indication of how people are using such resources.

There are some important lessons to be learned from the early years of SCRAN, I believe. The project has naturally evolved from its original inception as simply a means of channelling lottery money into museum documentation projects. As a result, our original data standards, based on SPECTRUM and the Dublin Core, had to be modified quite considerably.

The expected museum content has not always materialised, mainly because museums in Scotland have spent the past few years struggling to stay afloat in the midst of local government reorganisation, and consequent massive cuts in funding and staff. It has been estimated that there has been a cut of over 30% in the funding of local authority museums in Scotland, across the board since 1996.

The focus of SCRAN has shifted dramatically towards providing material suited to the school curriculum. If we stick to basic facts about our objects, we are accused (wrongly, I believe) of keeping aloof. On the other hand, anything more discursive has a tendency to date much more quickly, and is more prone to distortion. There are many examples of this in a Scottish context, illustrated by the problems the new Museum of Scotland suffered over a supposed lack of information about our great national hero, William Wallace ("Braveheart"), in the new displays. Of course museums have always had to deal with such issues, but in the anarchic world of the internet things can quickly get out of hand.

I do not believe that too much emphasis can be placed on the need to evolve standards which are compatible with emerging "industry standards" and those in other sectors, such as Z39.50 and the Dublin Core. These ensure future-proofing and a certain amount of credibility for our information.

I also believe that too much effort cannot be put into documenting collections in the traditional ways. This information can then be used for a variety of purposes, from collections management to multimedia essays. Without it, nothing can be done.

We are currently being told that e-commerce will be a big moneyspinner for museums, yet there is little evidence so far that this is likely to be the case. The internet is much used for buying travel tickets, and on-line auction sites, such as eBay, which has recently overtaken Amazon, the books and music site, are proving very successful. Otherwise, the most popular purchases are of cars and car parts, followed by books, toys and CDs. The Natural History Museum picture library received just one order a week directly from its website, according to a paper delivered by its manager at the Museums Computer Group meeting held there in 1999.

There is a great deal of money currently going into content creation in the UK, mostly for our "National Grid for Learning". The New Opportunities Fund (NOF), next month, will award another £50 million to worthy projects in our field. Baroness Pitkeathley claimed at the launch of the NOF-digitise Programme on August 31st 1999:

"We are looking for new and exciting ways of using technology to enable people to access and learn to use information. This is an opportunity for libraries, archives, museums, galleries, education sectors and many other organisations to make their resources and information available to a much wider audience including many people who may previously have felt excluded from the learning process."

The process of inviting applications, then assessing them both for business sustainability and technical merit (I have been involved in the latter), has now taken almost two years, with a further two, or even three, years for some of the projects to achieve their goals. I do not believe that this sort of lengthy timescale was expected by our government when they allocated the funds, but museum professionals, in particular, are all too aware of how long it takes to compile authoritative information in a readable format.

NOF-digitise obviously has worthy objectives, but just how realistic is it to expect that digitisation of museum information will help deal with the problems of social exclusion? Museums themselves, at least in the UK, have been shown to socially inclusive, but how much longer can they achieve this while, in many cases, their core funding is becoming progressively more constrained?

Projects such as SCRAN and NOF-digitise, no matter how much funding they receive and disburse, cannot operate successfully unless the external environment is a healthy one. Many museums in Scotland and elsewhere simply do not have the staff resources to spend time doing SCRAN or NOF projects. The core funding for core activities, such as collections management, in museums must be in place before we can play a full role, in the Brave New World of global information networks.

General interest

My website

mda

European Museums Information Institute

National Museums of Scotland

Museum directories

Virtual Library: Museums

24 Hour Museum

Some on-line UK museum collections

Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network

National Museum of Science and Industry

Tate

Forster Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Hampshire County Council Home