JISC

The Accessing the Virtual Museum project has catalogued, prepared and imaged objects from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London to enable them to be shared digitally and made available to wider audiences using the Open Archives Initiative protocol.  The project also carried out an initial examination of the use of virtual handling techniques to facilitate access to the objects from afar by using images to allow viewing from different sides.  The major issue addressed has been the creation of metadata for museum objects that required transliteration from original Coptic and Islamic scripts and which do not naturally fit with the Dublin Core requirements of the OAI protocol.  Subject classification has also been examined and the use of collection descriptions investigated. 

Further information is available via the JISC project page and the project website. 

Outputs from the project include experience in the systems used, the enhanced content produced, subject vocabularies to support access, an issues paper on metadata requirements for museum objects, as well as the results of the virtual handling evaluation and a journal article describing the project. Subsequent work has also benefited from the project. 

Contact details

Sally MacDonald
Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
University College London
Malet Place
London WC1E 6BT

Email: s.macdonald@ucl.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7679 2825

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Systems used

The project has made use of the existing Adlib collection management system used at the Petrie Museum, which has OAI-compatibility incorporated as part of the Internet Server module. All records and associated images have been made available and can be accessed by selecting 'Search the online catalogue’ from ‘The Petrie Museum’ menu. 

Content

In total, 5000 database records of museum objects from the Islamic and Coptic collections were created and enhanced. Each of these had an image record included as part of this. The work was carried out by specialists from Egypt and Reading University. Links with museums in Egypt have been opened up as a result of this collaboration that will enable the further enhancement of the collections in the future.

Subject classification

A specialist egyptology thesaurus was developed to support and describe the records created.  This is made up from four separate vocabularies covering object names, place names, dates (and mechanisms for describing these), and material types. Details of these vocabularies are available from project staff.  They can also be seen in action through the Petrie Museum search page, which can be viewed at http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk/index2.html and selecting 'Search the online catalogue’ from ‘The Petrie Museum’ menu.  From the search form the vocabularies can be browsed to select a search term.  The use of such vocabularies was found to be essential in allowing useful access to objects through the assignment of specific metadata to describe them.  This was particularly the case when considering the use of Dublin Core for disclosing metadata using OAI, where many of the fields are not applicable to museum objects.

Report

An Issues Paper on Metadata is available, and was produced under the auspices of the FAIR Museums and Images cluster group. 

Virtual handling evaluation

This theoretical evaluation of virtual handling raised a number of issues related to the use of this technique to view museum objects over the Internet.  Overall, the technique was felt by those questionned to be a valuable one that would enhance the use of the museum as a whole.  The following documents are available as a result of the evaluation.  Please contact project staff for copies and further information.

• Evaluation report
• Guidelines on virtual handling
• Virtual handling questionnaire

Subsequent work

The Accessing Virtual Egypt project is adopting the outputs from the Accessing the Virtual Museum project, particularly the thesaurus, in order to provide access to Egyptology collections across the Petrie and four other UK museums holding major egyptology collections.  Work is also being scoped with a range of partners to investigate further the use of collection descriptions and how the thesaurus might feed into and enable this.

Publication

McKeown, R., Accessing the virtual museum: bringing museum information into cyberspace, New Review of Information Networking, 2003 9(1): 40-53.

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See also

BioMed Image Archive

Harvesting the FitzWilliam
Hybrid Archives