Standards for access to museum content; practical solutions or technical chimeras?

摘要

The introduction of the World Wide Web has made it Possible to envision widespread availability of museum content in electronic form. The interests of both the public and the institutions will best be served by tools that facilitate integrated access to content in multiple media provided by multiple institutions. This article assesses the role and capacities of three emerging standards in addressing this challenge: Z39.50, SGML and the Dublin Core. The particular perspective will be that of the potential adopters of the standards, museums of all sizes wishing to make their collections better known and reach new audiences. Examples will be drawn from the work of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI). The presentation will argue that these standards are not yet ready for implementation in any but the largest institutions with significant in-house technical expertise and will outline conditions that need to be met in order for them to be considered practical solutions. The community-based development of these standards is both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. Strength because the standards are rooted in the content they need to support, weakness because they have become somewhat complex or over-burdened with extensions in response to community demands that they accommodate all possible situations. It is to be hoped that the market versions of these products find a middle ground between too much simplicity for the sake of achieving commonality among domains and too much complexity in order to satisfy individual communities. A key objective should be to maximize the prospect of integrating information originating in different domains.