JISC

Introduction

The project takes as its starting point a broad concept of access not simply to digital surrogate resources but also to physical museum objects, and aims to investigate a range of access modes, and associated technical and cultural issues, as part of that continuum. It envisages the development of metadata, its disclosure through the use of OAI and other relevant protocols, and its harvesting by the data service. The collaboration between the two partners will create a new and enabling access to these resources for the full community of learning, teaching and research. 

The Petrie Museum can trace its origins back to 1892 when Amelia Edwards, a Victorian Egyptophile,  bequeathed to University College the means to establish the Edwards Chair of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology.  Flinders Petrie was the first Edwards Professor and from the very beginning had a teaching resource of several hundred objects at his disposal. Over the years this was added to from a number of sources, not least his own excavations, and after his death Petrie’s own collection passed to the Museum.  As a result we now have a well-documented collection of about 80,000 objects complete with Petrie’s published excavation reports, his unpublished notebooks and journals, conservation reports dating back to the 1950s,  photographs from the 1960s onwards, current digital images of all the objects and citations for the various publications which have discussed or referred to in them from excavation reports onwards.

Petrie funded his excavations on a subscription basis so that in exchange for a contribution to expenses benefactors received some of the artefacts which he brought back. As a result there are Petrie-excavated objects in museums throughout the UK, across Europe and as far afield as South Africa. Clearly it would have been advantageous had these items not been scattered but with the advent of digital technology it became possible to re-unite them virtually and the Museum is keen to move in this direction. A first step was to gain recognition of the importance of the collection through the government’s Designation scheme and this was quickly followed up with a Designation Challenge Fund project to photograph the entire collection and make the photographs and data accessible across the web.  A component in this project was the development of a joint website with Manchester Museum intended as proof of the concept of sharing virtual resources. The results can be seen at http://www.kahun.man.ac.uk. Taking this process a step further we are now engaged with four museums in Aylesbury, Bexhill, Brighton, and Ipswich in a project which will offer them expert support in document their Egyptological collections and again make the results available as a unified database across the web, thus bringing the concept of a unified virtual Petrie collection one step closer.

However successful we may be in funding projects to bring together collections in this way it is clear that the process will be a long term undertaking and that it will not be possible in many cases to form the close relationships alluded to above.  In that case a resource discovery mechanism such as OAI offers an acceptable alternative, providing the tools for individual collections to make their collections known without all the ramifications of a full-blown project.  Additionally by making our data more available we open up the possibility of more cross-disciplinary use of our material, taking it beyond the narrow field of Egyptology into such areas as art history, design, history of medicine etc.

Issues to be investigated and resolved arise from the chronological spread of our records. Attitudes, terminology and documentation standards change over time and so it is necessary for us to re-visit our legacy documentation with a view to authentication/ verification both in terms of content and expression. Additionally there is no one thesaurus which will serve all our needs so we need to look at the terminology used in our documentation and adapt or adopt it in the light of published authorities, as a result of which we will have an evidence-based thesaurus by the end of the project.

Aims and Objectives

Our overall aim is to use OAI technology to extend access to the objects in the Petrie Museum’s collection.  Specific objectives are:

1. Review the existing data to ensure that it is current, consistent, accurate and acceptable.

2. Develop a data harvesting regime.

3. Develop a model for virtual object handling.

Overall Approach

The Museum has adopted a cumulative approach to its development of which this project forms only part. We started with legacy data which was keyboarded into database format and then made web-accessible via asp technology.  However, this is relatively crude and the current project is intended to take the service to the next stage of accessibility.

The first requirement is to re-visit the data and ensure that it is sufficiently robust to support this new use. This will be achieved by simple proof-reading in the first instance but subsequently we will be using the services of subject specialists to verify and where appropriate add to the data.

The next stage will be to map the data on to Dublin Core/ OAI record formats so that they can be made available across the web.  This will be done with an experimental subset of data in order to prove the concept while the detailed editing is in progress   As part of this process collection level descriptions will be developed and made available through appropriate portals thus completing the hierarchy of possible search strategies.

The final part of the project will investigate the issues raised by virtual handling. Having made data about the collection widely available this strand will seek to capitalise on the use of that information by making the object itself available by arrangement across the network and not just the metadata.

Project Consortium

Lead partner:
Petrie Museum. Responsible for data provision, editing at all levels and general management of the project.

Supporting partner:
Archaeology Data Service. Responsible for development of OAI harvester, for overseeing the mapping of data between data profiles and for the development of the new user interface.