Data Exchange across Museum Platforms in Thailand

摘要

The concept of aggregating museum data to be shared amongst organizations and museum visitors is not novel one; however, it has historically been difficult to sell. Within the United States, the development of a shared network amongst nine art museums took 40 years to complete. As most museums in Thailand still operate on a paper-based catalog, we are a long way from even transitioning Thai museum catalogs into the digital era. However, the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) has initiated two platforms to begin progress towards modernizing our museum experience; e-Museum, a collection management system, and Museum Pool, a content management tool. With funding from Thailand Research Funding, we were able to implement these two platforms on six museums in Northern Thailand. To increase the success rate of this project, a standard communication protocol was required to facilitate the exchange of information between two platforms. We proposed the data exchange project and launched pilots in the aforementioned sites. After implementation, curators completed a survey regarding their experience with our web application, resulting in an average review score of 4.5 out of a 5-point scale. A particular point of note is that our model is not limited to two platforms — it is scalable with standardized metadata and standardized communication protocols. Although the concept described about is quite straightforward, we encountered some complications in deployment which will need to be adapted for diverse environments.