(paper for the Irish Museums Association Connections Spring Seminar, Ulster Museum, Belfast, 28 February 1999)

by Ian O. Morrison, Scottish Museums Documentation Officer, National Museums of Scotland & Data Co-ordinator, SCRAN

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.

Introduction

The title of this paper is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson -

The title, Villages of Ether, is intended to convey an ambiguous message. On the one hand, it is reminiscent of the fashionable terms "virtual communities" and "global villages". Taking such concepts to a ludicrous extreme, we could see a virtual museum as the virtual keeper of the collective virtual heritage of a virtual community. Absolute nonsense, in my opinion!

On the other hand, Villages of Ether conjures up a vision of a communities buoyed along by the emission of vast quantities of volatile gas. There is certainly a growing community of people developing impressive sounding projects in this field. Strangely, few of them seem to involve any evaluation, or if they do the results are usually suppressed.

I firmly believe that museums are all about real objects, and our involvement in the "virtual" world must always take second place to the need to look after those objects in the real world. I sometimes feel that I am one of a diminishing band of people who really believe this.

I am one of those people, as Michael Houlihan put it, who have been a "collector, scientist, educator and apparatchik". Most of what I shall say is based on my personal experience, as a curator and in my present post as an adviser in documentation and related subjects.

My last "real" museum post was as District Curator with Moray District Council (as was). There I acquired my first computer and database software (dBase III Plus) in 1986 and used these to build a collections management system which I then filled with records representing every object in the collection (initially about 7,500 records representing around 25,000 objects). Naively, I assumed that my counterparts everywhere else would be doing the same. In 1989 I was appointed to the new position of Scottish Museums Documentation Officer, based in the National Museums of Scotland and one of my first tasks was to establish how museums had been using computers. Very quickly I discovered that I had, in fact, been almost unique in my dedication to computerised documentation. This was quite a blow to my chances of realising the part of my job description that required me to look at building a national database of museum collections in Scotland.

I soon established that there are around fourteen million objects in Scottish museums, the vast majority held by a handful of museums, including the National Museums of Scotland (four million), the Hunterian Museum of the University of Glasgow (two million) and Glasgow City Museums (one million). There are approximately one million computerised records of museum objects. The next obvious question was "is anyone actually interested in accessing these records, other than museum folk?". I scoured the literature for an answer, with no success. To find an 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 three touchscreen installations located in Stornoway Public Library, Sgoil Lionacleit in Benbecula and Castlebay School Library in Barra. 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 be 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 Leader, because a bilingual element was included.

The WINDEE project demonstrated convincingly that many people were interested in this sort of access, at least in the Western Isles. This was one of several projects that enabled us to win £7.5 million from the Millennium Commission to set up the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) in 1996. SCRAN, for whom I worked part of my time as Data Co-ordinator until June 1999, is developing a resource base of our cultural heritage and making this available to educational institutions (mainly schools) and individuals, by means of the Internet. SCRAN is funded mainly by our National Lottery and the aim is to have a million text records, 100,000 images and 100 multimedia essays available by the year 2001.

SCRAN is collecting records and images of museum objects, historical sites, ancient monuments, documents, maps etc. These are then collated in accordance with the new curriculum for schools. There are categories for migration, transport, education and so forth.

Teachers can bring together a variety of such resources to use in a particular lesson, or just access an existing multimedia essay.

This is all very wonderful, popular with schools and much money is being spent, but the whole project depends on the quality of information supplied to SCRAN, and that is largely up to museums to provide.

SCRAN is also able to provide some indication of how people are using it, though it is very early days. The SCRAN website was launched on July 25^th 1997. Usage has been increasing steadily since then. SCRAN uses the same, Audit Bureau of Circulation, method of calculating "hits" as the big newspapers, and usage is comparable with that of the Scotsman newspaper site, one of the most popular Scottish sites on the Web. It is now, as far as we can determine, running at about 1000 hits per day on average. Analysis of the figures, though, does highlight some discrepancies. For example, the highest recorded number of hits in a single day, in November 1998, occurred the day before a big educational launch, for no obvious reason. It later transpired that the number of hits that day had been boosted by a factor of over five by a single user trying vainly to download a .PDF (Adobe Acrobat) file. The user had set up their machine to retry automatically. This is quite a common occurrence, and accounts for all the biggest peaks, thus casting serious doubt on the reliability of the daily "hit" rate.

Who are the users of the SCRAN database? This is a very difficult question to answer. Study of the statistics reveals that the biggest user, outside SCRAN, is myself! The number of users from other "domains" is dubious, because of the automatic retry on downloads. These are most likely from UK users, because the attempted downloads are mostly of a leaflet explaining how to apply for a grant from SCRAN. In fact users from the ".uk" top level domain make up less than half the total number of "hits". This includes the ".ac.uk" academic domain, ".gov.uk" (local authorities mostly) and some of the commercial sector (".co.uk"). The remainder come mostly from ".com" (which is dominated by aol.com addresses, many of which are actually British subscribers to America On-Line) and ".net" (largely subscribers to other American internet service providers).

What are the searchers looking for? This is easier to answer, because search terms used to query the database are logged. Over half the queries are for a "what" - either an object (for example, "sword") or a subject ("housing in Scotland"). The rest are split fairly evenly between "who" and "where" types, with a tiny percentage of other kinds, including "when". These categories are the ones that SCRAN records include, with an additional large number of fields to handle administrative information, including legal title, image size, and so forth.

A comparison with the results of the catechism survey is interesting. catechism was a survey of museum enquiries that I conducted in conjunction with a colleague in the National Museums of Scotland, Helen McCorry. We obtained over a thousand typical enquiries from over a hundred museums, of all kinds, and classified these with a view to determining whether or not they should be answerable with reference to the collections database. 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. I have now re-categorised these for comparison with the SCRAN figures, and the results are similar. "What" enquiries predominate, with over half of the total number again. "Who" and "where" are also significant, and "when" is, once again, well under five per cent.

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, have 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 thirty per cent in the funding of local authority museums, across the board.

The focus of SCRAN has shifted dramatically towards providing material suited to the school curriculum. This has sometimes led to the effect of the "fascism of the storyline", I believe.

SCRAN should have concentrated on building a distributed database, rather than a centralised one. Many of the records held are already out of date. It has always been the intention to have direct links to major museum databases, but for various reasons this has not been possible. One of these reasons is the nature of the funding agreement from the Millennium Commission, which is based on constructing a physical building, rather than a database. SCRAN is the only purely IT project funded by the Millennium Commission.

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.

Too much effort cannot be put into documenting collections adequately. This information can then be used for a variety of purposes, from collections management to multimedia essays. Without it, nothing can be done.

Projects such as SCRAN, no matter how much funding they receive, cannot operate successfully unless the outside environment is a healthy one. Many museums in Scotland simply do not have the staff resources to spend time doing SCRAN projects. The core funding for core activities, such as collections management, in museums must be in place first.

These, of course, are simply my views and do not necessarily reflect those of SCRAN, the National Museums of Scotland, nor anyone else.

Ian O. Morrison

revised 9 July, 1999

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