Andrea Nanetti, Paola Benussi, Andrea Erboso, Dusit Niyato
To commemorate the 700 years since Marco Poloâs death (1324â2024), the State Archive of Venice, the National Library of Saint Mark, and the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Humanities and Arts (IVSLA) are curating and editing a diplomatic codex (CDP) of documents relevant to the study of the historical figure of Marco Polo (1254â1324). IVSLA will publish the CDP as a prestigious and traditional book, and the Engineering Historical Memory initiative will publish it online. This paper presents and discusses how the CDP is exploring the use of blockchain technology among parties who might not necessarily trust each other (i.e., authors and readers) to 1) launch ongoing participatory editing by entrusting multiple users with the task of promoting substantiated modifications to critical editions of archival documents and 2) share the digital assetâs history while duplicating and reusing archival documentsâ digital reproductions. Thus, the online CDP can be construed as a practice-led research project exploring the disruption of making a critical edition of archival documents using highly participatory research powered by blockchain and distributed ledger technology.
Leonhard Balduf, Martin Florian, BjĂśrn Scheuermann
We explore issues relating to the storage of digital art, based on an empirical investigation into the storage of audiovisual data referenced by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We identify current trends in NFT data storage and highlight problems with implemented solutions. We particularly focus our investigation on the use of the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS), which emerges as a popular and versatile distributed storage solution for NFTs. Based on the analysis of discovered data storage techniques, we propose a set of best practices to ensure long-term storage survivability of NFT data. While helpful for forming the NFT art market into a legitimate long-term environment for digital art, our recommendations are also directly applicable for improving the availability and integrity of non-NFT digital art.
Open access
2 source records
Advanced Data Storage Technologies
Digital and Traditional Archives Management
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The article describes the use and possible value creation of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) in the academia and open access publishing environment. It defines NFTs, describes disadvantages and possible solutions, especially in the intended scientific environment. An overview of existing NFT service providers from the publishing environment illustrates that there is not yet a suitable one for researchers. Accordingly, three possible scenarios are shown where NFT services could be located in a science-friendly way. One would be with library- or scholarly-led university presses, repositories, and other publication infrastructures (such as OJS or OMP). Another would be to use centralizing and channelling article submission platforms with which universities have contracts, such as ChronosHub. The third and broadest approach would be through Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agencies such as ChronosHub and DataCite, although complexities come into play here due to the triangular relationship with publishers registering DOIs (some of them having exclusive usage rights transferred to themselves). This complexity could be reduced by registering NFTs only for open access publications with a Creative Common Attribution license. A summary and outlook provides an overview of open questions and initial starting points to get started.
Alexander Pfeiffer, Natalie Denk, Thomas Wernbacher, Stephen Bezzina ¡ 6 authors
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTa) can either represent an original digital artwork, or act as a digital reference to the actual work. In both as digital references to the actual work. In both cases the record in the distributed ledger, mostly a blockchain-based database, intends to serve as a proof of ownership or transfer of rights. NFTs might also add a further purpose, which in blockchain terms is referred to as âa utility", such as access to special websites, chats or clubs in emerging metaverse platforms. This use-case paper presents a first introduction of two early stage demonstrators, set outside the common use of art images or images of historical events as NFTs. The first case shows how educational credentials can be created, in which different teachers contribute to assessment achievements. We elaborate how these partial achievements are verified separately within the actual credentials. In the second case study, we build on previous research in regard to NFTs in the music industry and show the combination of physical vinyl record special editions, in our case vinyls signed by the band, and the ownership certificate as NFT. For both demonstrators we used, in different settings, the crypto art platform NFTmagic and the blockchain-token wallet Sigbro. We developed and tested the results within the setting of a roleplay as a group and show how blockchain technologies and especially NFTs can be made useful in new ways, inspired by the ongoing process of discovering risks and opportunities in âcrypto artâ, thus initiating discussion on the topic and effectively bridging the cybersecurity and (digital) art communities.
The discipline of âdiplomaticsâ â originating in the seventeenth century to systematically test the authenticity of medieval documents â has more recently been adapted to the study of digital records and their systems. In establishing the necessary elements for the long-term preservation of authentic records, archival diplomatics provides one possible (and powerful) analytic framework and methodology for analyzing the trustworthiness of records, including those to be found in blockchain and distributed ledgers. Regardless of the type of blockchain and distributed ledger system under examination, each relies upon trust in the ledger and in the records the ledger contains. Yet each type of blockchain and distributed ledger system still has limitations when judged against archival diplomatic standards of recordsâ trustworthiness, which demands the accuracy, reliability, and authenticity of records. By gaining an understanding of the elemental requirements for trust in records (and in record systems), there is hope that the designers of blockchain and distributed ledger systems might continue to improve the evidentiary quality of blockchain records and recordkeeping.
The document describes what blockchain technology is, how the federal government is exploring its use, and some of the records management implications. This document is a snapshot in time based on research conducted in 2018. It is important to note that blockchain technology is developing and being used in new and interesting ways. Blockchain could eventually transform basic government functions such as information authentication, financial transactions, and citizen identification. Changes in these areas have the potential to fundamentally impact the role of governments as trusted information repositories or record holders. NARA, agency and federal records managers will need to monitor how blockchain technology matures and is implemented over time to ensure records management issues are identified and resolved.
The DSM Directive preserves, on the one hand, the public domain, by restricting copyright in faithful reproductions of public domain works. On the other hand, there are copyright opportunities for digital art and non-fungible tokens. The Directive also creates opportunities for preservation and digitization for cultural heritage institutions. There are opportunities there that can be put to good and productive use in the interest of all parties involved. Extended collective licensing and measures for out-of-commerce works can also play a role here. And moral rights will not be a hindrance in that respect if industry standards of the digital era are observed. It is therefore important to continue and to strengthen the dialogue between the cultural heritage institution community on the one hand and the copyright and related rights community on the other hand.
In 2019, the National Archives of Korea (NAK) developed a blockchain recordkeeping platform to conduct R&D on recordkeeping approaches. This paper introduces two types of R&D studies that have been conducted thus far. The first is the use of blockchain transaction audit trail technology to ensure the authenticity of audiovisual archives, i.e., the application of blockchain to a new system. The second uses blockchain technology to verify whether the datasets of numerous information systems built by government agencies are managed without forgery or tampering, i.e., the application of blockchain to an existing system. Government work environments globally are rapidly shifting from paper records to digital. However, the traditional recordkeeping methodology has not adequately kept up with these digital changes. Despite the importance of responding to digital changes by incorporating innovative technologies such as blockchain in recordkeeping practices, it is not easy for most archives to invest funds in experiments on future technologies. Owing to the Korean governmentâs policy of investing in digital transformation, NAKâs blockchain recordkeeping platform has been developed, and several R&D tasks are underway. Hopefully, the findings of this study will be shared with archivists around the world who are focusing on the future of recordkeeping.
As a decentralized network structure based on P2P network and with cryptography as its core, blockchain technology establishes trust relationship on the network by pure mathematical method without relying on intermediate platform. There are three problems in traditional digital copyright industry: difficult to confirm the rights, difficult to authorize rights and difficult to maintain rights. This paper makes a deep research on the blockchain technology of digital copyright. With the help of self-supervision, traceability and decentralization of blockchain technology, as well as the Map function, we can improve the data transmission rate in the multi-channel model and obtain accurate time complexity values. Hence the probability of all kinds of digital copyright infringement events is greatly reduced.
Big Data and Digital Economy
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Purpose Archival repositories rely on the authenticity of records. The potential manipulation of records and information present a unique challenge to archival repositories and their mission to collect, maintain and provide access to the authentic records. The purpose of this paper is to outline the technical aspects of blockchain and describe potential records management and archival implications of the technology. The implications to consider include data management, records existing on a blockchain and records disposition. Design/methodology/approach The approach included reviews of technical literature and attendance at blockchain conferences, workshops and seminars. The literature review focused on general studies, technical publications, use cases and nascent applications for managing records created and stored on a blockchain. The approach is intended to answer the questions: what basic information do records managers need to understand blockchain? How will blockchain technology impact records management? Does blockchain shift toward decentralized records management? Findings Implemented properly, blockchain technology can immutably record transactions and provide independent verification and authentication of digital records. Given the ease with which electronic records can sometimes be manipulated, the promise of certainty and third-party verification has drawn sizeable interest and investment. This paper shows records exist on blockchains and must be managed appropriately. The distributed structure inherent in blockchains is a shift from centralized records management and will challenge the approach and assumptions of the profession. Records managers must determine recordkeeping requirements before developing a business application using blockchain and the fixed nature of blockchains means that these considerations must be included at the outset. Originality/value This proposed paper began as a blockchain white paper produced by the US National Archives for the federal records management community. It has been re-focused as a general review paper for the Records Management Journal to explain blockchain and show how it may be used to address broader records and information management concerns such as authenticity, veracity, and trustworthiness.
From its origins in virtual financial transactions, emerging initiatives are seeking to acquire a new identity for blockchain as capable of addressing anxieties over the capacity of digital media to permanently and accurately store information. In this article, we explore the ensuing mediation between blockchain enterprises and new professional communities to which they are catering. Drawing on thematic analysis, we analyze how this process is being carried out through the discursive construction of trust, leveraged rhetorically in academic, trade, and news publications to extend an application for financial transactions to cultural institutions. We describe how trust is used not only to mediate the introduction of an application that prioritizes decentralization and cryptography, but is the turf on which traditional institutions are staking a claim as the trustworthy managers of digital records through their use of blockchain. The concept of the archival imaginaryâa vision of what archives and blockchain should be and mean that pivots on imagined needs and technological capacities based on the current information ecology, institutional control, and expert systemsâoffers a way to illuminate this process.
BĂŠla Gipp, Norman Meuschke, Joeran Beel, Corinna Breitinger
The proportion of information that is exclusively available online is continuously increasing. Unlike physical print media, online news outlets, magazines, or blogs are not immune to retrospective modification. Even significant editing of text in online news sources can easily go unnoticed. This poses a challenge to the preservation of digital cultural heritage. It is nearly impossible for regular readers to verify whether the textual content they encounter online has at one point been modified from its initial state, and at what time or to what extent the text was modified to its current version. In this paper, we propose a web-based platform that allows users to submit the URL for any web content they wish to track for changes. The system automatically creates a trusted timestamp stored in the blockchain of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin for the hash of the HTML content available at the user-specified URL. By using trusted timestamping to secure a âsnapshotâ of online information as it existed at a specific time, any subsequent changes made to the content can be identified.
Open access
Archaeological Research and Protection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain, the technology underpinning Bitcoin and other digital currencies, offers promise to shift the gathering and sharing of information in profound ways. It could help form a new kind offinancial system that limits current inefficiencies, or even radically change how parties enter into contract, or monitor supply chains. The technology's distributed ledger allows users in a network to monitor and access peer-to-peer digital transactions in real time. This digital ledger allows users to maintain this information securely by encrypting and allowing access only to those who have permission, given by cryptographic keys. For the art market, blockchain offers a tantalizing possibility. a verifiable provenance research platform that would eliminate or minimize the problems with title history, authenticity, and looting, which have long-plagued the art and antiquities market. This essay examines whether blockchain might offer a chance for the antiquities market to remedy its persistent problems. The antiquities market has been beleaguered by the sale of forgeries, allowed stolen material to find a market, been hampered by market inefficiencies, and even been a haven for looted archaeological material. Distributed ledgers and blockchain could alleviate or eliminate these problems, but only if the market and those who shape it want to utilize them. No technology, no matter how ingenious or elegant, can end problems caused by the unprincipled actors in the antiquities trade. Such change has to come about with a culture shift and continued pressure by regulators and cultural heritage advocates.
This article provides a brief overview of blockchain or distributed ledger technology for archivists and records managers. While in the nascent stage, records are already being created or managed by blockchains. Therefore, it is necessary for archivists and records managers to become familiar with the basics of the technology, along with its benefits and shortcomings, in order to make informed decisions regarding the accessioning of blockchain systems and/or their use in managing record authenticity.
Mark Bell, Alex Green, John Sheridan, John Collomosse ¡ 8 authors
Archives have well-established practices which have been developed over years of working with analogue records. Now they face huge challenges due to the inexorable development of digital technologies. Not only is the heterogeneous nature of the records, their instability and the rapid pace of technological development a threat to the recordsâ survival, but the ease with which digital records can be altered has put archives in a technology arms race with those parties who would seek to falsify our digital inheritance and undermine democracy.In order to tackle these challenges, the ARCHANGEL project is breaking new ground by using blockchain to record checksums (cryptographic hashes) and other metadata derived from either scanned physical records or born-digital records to allow verification of their integrity over decade- or century-long time spans. This data is permanently preserved through peer-to-peer distribution and consensus checking without the need for a trusted third party, thereby enabling archives to prove the authenticity of the records in their custody.
This paper presents a synthesis of original research documenting several cases of the application of blockchain technology to land transaction, medical, and financial record keeping. Using a thematic synthesis of the cases, the paper describes a typology of blockchain solutions for managing current records representing three distinct design patterns. It then considers the different types of solutions in relation to implications for recordkeeping and long-term preservation of authentic records.
The institutional repositories of most university libraries in Korea are not activated due to the lack of finance, operation ability, technology, etc., and this phenomenon is especially noticeable in smallâmedium sized university libraries. Thus, as in other countries, a shared repository that multiple libraries share, based on a library network, is required. This study categorizes the typology of shared repositories, after analyzing the operational methods of managing roles, expenses and system sharing among participants in shared repositories in Japan, the UK and the USA. Based on the findings, two models that could be applied in Korea are suggested. The first is a centralized-operation model that involves a shared-system infrastructure in which the host institution takes full charge of the digitization and registration of contents, etc. This model has the potential to be developed into a regional archive center. The second model is a decentralized-operation model that also features a shared-system infrastructure but the participating institutions customize the system individually. Here, the individual institutions perform digitization of all content, daily registration, etc., which can be applied as a test bed for the creation of new technology, considering the potential for independent operation in the future.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of Blockchain technology as a solution to creating and preserving trustworthy digital records, presenting some of the limitations, risks and opportunities of the approach. Design/methodology/approach The methodological approach involves using the requirements embedded in records management and digital preservation standards, specifically ISO 15,489, ARMAâs Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles, ISO 14,721 and ISO 16,363, as a general evaluative framework for a risk-based assessment of a specific proposed implementation of Blockchain technology for a land registry system in a developing country. Findings The results of the analysis suggest that Blockchain technology can be used to address issues associated with information integrity in the present and near term, assuming proper security architecture and infrastructure management controls. It does not, however, guarantee reliability of information in the first place, and would have several limitations as a long-term solution for maintaining trustworthy digital records. Originality/value This paper contributes an original analysis of the application of Blockchain technology for recordkeeping.
My congratulations to youâor should that be my sympathies?âon being chosen as Curatorâs next Books Editor. On the positive side, youâre joining a team of thoughtful, creative editors who manage to generate sparks of camaraderie even though weâre scattered around the country. Your postal carrier and UPS driver will soon begin delivering a steady stream of books from academic and commercial publishersâreview copies and sometimes bound proofs, all with chipper press releases slipped inside the covers and publishersâ glossy catalogues spilling out of the envelopes. Your bookshelves will gradually come to resemble mine, and visitors who donât know about your editorial work will be wowed by the breadth and idiosyncratic coolness of your interests, which will appear to run from Pueblo pottery to Islamic calligraphy by way of the anthropology of worldâs fairs and the latest scholarship in cultural property law and âglass studies.â Who else, your friends will wonder admiringly, would own that gorgeous coffee-table book celebrating Traditional Archery from Six Continents? Yes, the environmentally unfriendly truth is that a fair percentage of the books youâll receive for Curator youâll have no intention of getting reviewed, for the sensible reason that theyâre not really about museumsâtheir work or history or guiding ideasâand have little light to shed on those topics except indirectly and in the aggregate. Instead theyâre about the objects that museums exhibit or the technical study and preservation of those objects. So they tend to appeal mostly to people who are already interested in and at least somewhat knowledgeable about those kinds of objects or the periods and places associated with themâwhich in many cases is a small, specialized audience. (If this sounds familiar, perhaps itâs because museums themselves have been accused of focusing on certain classes of objects largely for the benefit of people who already recognize and care about those classes. Not surprisingly, many of the review copies in this category are exhibition catalogues or scholarly texts published in association with new or upcoming exhibitions.) In other words, rather than books about museum practice, these are books ofâthat is, exemplifying or representingâmuseum practice. If museumsâ traditional activities of collection, preservation, study, and public exhibition can be thought of as a kind of object-based discourse, then what youâre looking for as Curatorâs Books Editor is a meta-discourse: stepping back from those activities in order to consider their origins, meanings, functions, and futures. Of course, a variety of those âaboutâ books will arrive in your mail slot as wellâbooks like Museums after Modernism or Museums and Community, books about trends in exhibition design, zoo history, visitor motivations, green museum construction, museum marketing, informal science education, museum philosophy, and the like. A quick taxonomy of these âaboutâ books might be organized around a distinctionâor rather, a continuumâbetween texts written by academics and those written by museum practitioners. At one end of that continuum are books from scholars in various branches of the humanities or social sciences (or, less frequently, the natural sciences) who happen to be interested in museums or museological issues from one angle or another. (Considered as a whole, the museum field is almost absurdly multidisciplinary, as East [2008] and others have reported.) Sometimes that interest is merely one among many and results in a single book about museums; in other cases the interest becomes primary and is sustained over a career. In the increasingly busy middle of the spectrum are texts by museum studies faculty. Here we may want to distinguish between museum studies programs that are . . . well, academicâtheory-oriented, historically minded, linked closely to other university departments via interdisciplinary collaborationsâand programs that keep one foot in scholarship but lean toward practice, whose faculty members often work in or consult to museums in addition to teaching. These latter programs may be interdisciplinary, but theyâre also extradisciplinary: some of their priorities have less to do with the pursuit and creation of knowledge in some recognized domain than with preparing todayâs and tomorrowâs museum professionals for the practical challenges theyâll face. Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, are books by the museum professionals themselves, including staff and consultants. Those professional books are the tip of an iceberg of museum discourse that also includes âgray literatureâ (conference presentations, blog postings, proprietary research reports commissioned by museums, and so on) as well as peer-reviewed journal articles and national research studies. Of course, many books fall somewhere between these categories. Itâs a continuum for good reason. There have been collaborations between academics and museum practitioners; volumes of essays by museum professionals who write from essentially academic perspectives; scholarly musings about the minutiae of museum practice (for purposes other than professional training); and so on. It used to be easier to see the difference between the insider view (museum professionals writing largely for each other) and the outsider view (academics writing about museums, often critically and also for each other). But over the last two decades or so, the academic leftâs critique of museums, which began emphatically outside the museumâthink of the line that runs from Michel Foucault to Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, and othersâhas been internalized (some would say co-opted) by museum studies programs and even by some influential museum professionals. What was once a disturbing attack that felt to museum practitioners âlike being psychoanalyzed in public,â as one of our book reviewers put it a few years ago (Lindauer 2007, 362), has gradually informed the professionâs own rhetoric about its challenges and ideals. I think of Stephen Weil, Elaine Heumann Gurian, Robert Janes, and Nina Simon, although the influence of the postmodern academics on these commentatorsâ work seems mostly indirect. Our taxonomy would also have to take into account these booksâ subject matter and what type or types of museums they deal with. It could draw distinctions between books by a single author, multi-author collaborative works, and collections of essays by various independent contributors. (The latter category includes the museum studies anthologies that have been published with increasing frequency in recent years.) Or between university presses, independent nonprofit presses, and commercial publishing houses. (Youâll occasionally receive an art-forgery saga or a great-man-of-science biography from the latter.) Or between museum studies programs in North America and those in the U.K. or other English-speaking countries. Constructing such a taxonomy in earnest would be a valuable service to the field, and I hope others take up the thread. My hope here is simply to give us a framework for discussing the challenge youâre undertaking. The good news, and the reason for those congratulations I offered, is that some of these museum books are terrific. The best of them may give you, as theyâve given me, a feeling of prickling excitementâa sense that something is at stake, is being risked. How they do this varies, of course. Whether or not you find a book exciting will have as much to do with you as with the book: we get most charged up about what we agree with and what weâre already invested in. (âA real book is not one that we read,â W.H. Auden observed, âbut one that reads us.â) Still, as I pass the torchâor rather, the editorâs red penâto you Iâll mention some of the characteristics Iâve been grateful to find on the page in the seven years Iâve been Curatorâs Books Editor. Good museum books reveal the ways in which the familiar ideas and practices of museology (past or present, depending on the authorâs project) are contingent rather than given. They put some critical distance between us and museums, making the ordinary seem unfamiliar, even strange. With the benefit of that distance, the authors are able to interrogate the actions, rhetoric, and structures of museums at a fundamental level. This is not easy for insiders to do; we have trouble seeing the assumptions we operate within every day. Philosopher and sometime-museum-historian Stephen Asma has likened this ability to âtasting your own tongueââan illustration of how difficult it is (Asma 2001, 154). Good museum books also manage to ground themselves in the relevant literature or practice area while also lighting out for new territory. That balance is important. Without knowledge of what museum people have been arguing about, a new perspective reads as merely naĂŻve. Conversely, without something new to say, the contribution feels like hackworkâan apologia for the status quo (a problem Iâll come back to in a moment). When good museum books do borrow theoretical constructs and examples from other domains, they do so in ways that preserve the complexity of those ideas and respect whatâs irreducibly foreign about themâaspects that arenât neatly assimilable to the museum issue at hand. More broadly, good authors of museum literature know how to sustain an argument or narrative over many paragraphs or chapters, and they understand the difference between a string of assertions and the methodical intertwining of observation, inference, reference, and persuasively articulated belief that constitutes a genuine argument. Good museum books sometimes raise questions they donât and canât answer, which can feel like a radical act in a field that is has been trying for decades to establish certainties about itself and its cultural status. By problematizing rather than tidying up, these books have the potential to influence the collective agenda and spur debate. (I say âpotentialâ because even the best books can do little good if nobody reads them. Jay Rounds has raised disturbing questions about how much of the museum literature is actually consumed and by whom [2007].) The best museum books display wit, in the sense of both mental quickness and disarmingly clever humor. These authors are confident enough to expect that theyâll be taken seriously even though they donât take themselves too seriously, and relaxed enough to let a little of themselves into their texts, acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in any human enterprise and thereby helping us account for their presence in the argument as we grapple with it. This list could go on: Iâve had the pleasure of discovering museum books that were heroically well-researched, that spun nuanced historical narratives, that offered powerfully simple frameworks for thinking about complex thingsâframeworks Iâve found indispensable and passed on to colleagues. A few have permanently changed the way I experience and think about museums. The best museum books can be very good indeed. The problemâand the reason I offer sympathies mixed with the congratulationsâis that such books are distressingly few and far between. Too many museum books that come across my desk display an intellectual thinness and logical slipperiness that limits their value to both scholarship and practice. They read as competent enough, but if you probe a little, you find they donât support real analysis. Too often Iâve found myself wondering if there isnât, at the heart of the text Iâm reading, a kind of dodge, something avoided or elided because grappling with it would have been too troublesome or destabilizing. The Duke University interdisciplinary scholar Cathy N. Davidson calls this âfudging,â which she defines as intentionally or unconsciously âglossing over the nuances of a complicated, inconvenient, or even controversial topicâ in order to fit in, as it were, within the cozy confines of oneâs discipline. She notes that the âevasions and coverupsâ of fudging âarise most often when a scholar is confronted with the most fundamental and potentially contentious concepts of her discipline.â So fudging is âemotionally fraught, making you susceptible to exposure,â and instances of it in a text tend to be heralded by a momentary grandiosity that both marks and masks anxiety (Davidson 2009). Although Davidson has in mind science, literature, and other fields, her analysis captures something all too common in museum books. Too many museum books operate within a narrow and convenient sphere of reference, drawing mostly from sources, ideas, and examples already present within museum discourse. (Such books are about museums in a much narrower sense than, say, history books are about history, because the latter is inherently outward-referring: its subjectâthe human narrativeâlies outside itself. Does an analogous dualism exist in museum studies?) This is especially true of books by and for museum practitioners, which sometimes feel hermetically sealed within the bubble of museumsâ most gratifying assumptions about themselves. Even on the academic side of the spectrum, many are rife with what has been called (in another context) âunexamined postulates that answer the question before it is askedâ (Ragland-Sullivan 1987, xvii). New or foreign ideas from various disciplines do make their way into these books, of course, but they tend to be ones that confirm rather than unsettle the ways museum people see themselves and their institutions and are often applied in reductive ways that reveal the authorâs about the in which the The is a kind of in which the text can museum or practice, even when its seems to want to or Too many museum books make they donât for argument and an of or for Those in can be of the because out that an has been before by is not the as that to it can the of Too much museum literature on this of which an of the is much I being about these If so, Iâm not I a at a museum studies to review a new written by a museum scholar at another whose work she A after the she to she think it was her to review or the museum to were in no with much The book even her wonder about the of the press in which she had already as the of some to the museum they questions have come up in book we on my although theyâve been raised In one a at the University of a museum studies that the to the had the to their own or difficult questions with . . . and and that the had to the articles with each other or the they reviewers have for intellectual and weâre at and than they found in the sometimes texts they Itâs that all of these books, including the one as were to an independent review in addition to editorial review before being for So at least two museum studies scholars or museum professionals not with the read each the authorâs sometimes with This us that people will on such is to some in the of the But it also questions about the value of the review which may display some of the as the literature whose it is to itâs the of people most of the writing for and the of for and one might expect the and to both at the level. It might be easier for one museum to another to when a than to her own writing to those but itâs that she would have in mind very in the two the that those the professionâs or of can work There are also what we might on the of the review as youâll see in the of your work with this journal articles also The review is to be but the museum is a sometimes itâs not for reviewers to the of the of the book or theyâve been or for the who those via to their The of people in those two is small, and they each in order to the they and so can work Of course, the of review are of the out the to our taxonomy of museum books and to it the distinctions been making between good museum books and their less but our continuum that runs from academic to or to practice, with museum studies programs in the It will come as no at the academic end and in some books by museum studies the critical which museums are is and the sphere of in which theyâre is than at the professional The academics are also at museums among other human and to from other disciplines to understand both of which can be of the most are and while many work in museum natural history museums, few have museum the of their of and are also on the academic side, with What the professional and research reports written by museum practitioners or least in is too many of these books are on and so they fall into the category after be the practitioners who write these books arenât trying to knowledge for its own theyâre trying to support or museums in what they often by and that can be applied So it could be that Iâm the of one type of museum literature another and with the But arenât knowledge and practice of the we to do the in order to the and a little of our and us to do some in my outsider and academic museum books as as a than those by and for practitioners, most museum professionals the academic literature because they think itâs not too theoretical and to them their practical and as and have observed, the of scholarly writing may run than museum staff are of ideas and concepts that appear to But if Iâm that books on the academic end of the spectrum are to outside concepts and to on museum then what we have is a between and breadth of in the will This is and are some of the ways new ideas a of practice, and new ideas can that with the it practitioners who academic books about museums are an to their own and I would the even in What museum professionals and museum scholars really to and books that arenât about museums but which might shed light on the museum enterprise if we can read them with our Iâm not to and although these may be relevant in certain this a of Iâm that for you work at a science museum or are how science museums their purposes and you for the recent on in or the and you might a of The of a of the and from the and and give some thought to the between an and a (If youâre like me, youâll at a science exhibit the way Or you could out another this from your into literature, at the of which the of narrative and in the of science concepts than any museum book could read and the for with its of how science from and in human somewhat to of a an on museological truth and by the of of these books raise questions about science museum and and these questions are in kind from those raised by the museum own literature on the theyâre and rather than Even by to we something about whatâs in the a science or natural history an At the I those coffee-table exhibition catalogues and technical as for a review in Curator on the that they really âaboutâ museums, but were examples or museum here Iâm for us to to books that are not âaboutâ museums. The difference is that outsider books like because of their can be read as of museum practice and for new most exhibition catalogues are assertions of the of one over another. Itâs not that we should be the outsider books of those that are about museums. should be them museum books, and we should be much to the museological questions they and the they If we can make that in our we may be able to take new in our scholarship and practice. you be able to review many of those outsider books in no matter how their for our be too busy trying to keep up with the stream of books about museums, of which seem to be published each as museum studies programs their to the new their to and museums themselves to in and around the I to seeing which you from this stream to review in Curator and which ones you to your between The of and More I to seeing how the reviewers you to write those to the and the they find in those A literature is as good as its by and can we that our books will be written and are all Your as Curatorâs Books Editor will be to museum scholars and practitioners of whatâs at each we put to or the of a
With the rapid growth in the number of electronic resources available via the Internet, a variety of methods have been developed to organize and access these objects. Librarians, scholars and computing engineers each have applied their own techniques to the process. Catalogers envision a "super-catalog"; scholars spawn encoded texts; computer engineers design robot-generated indexes. Each method has its strengths and its weaknesses, and each group casts a wary eye upon competing systems. In fact, it is unrealistic to believe that the organizational system of any one group will be adopted by all players in the electronic arena. While general principles of organization should apply to all approaches, cataloging the Internet is inherently different from cataloging a library. Libraries are systematically developing collections of primarily fixed objects usually under the control of one institution or agency. The Internet is more analogous to the ubiquitous ebb and flow of information and services appearing throughout society. The structure and content are not systematically developed and stable; there is no single user group or purpose for the Internet; and there is no single controlling agency. Thus, there is no one community, be it scholars, computing engineers or librarians, that is clearly vested with authority to decide upon the best means to bring control over this electronic chaos. Considering that the Internet has always been a decentralized initiative, it is not surprising that the efforts to organize it have been similarly independent and uncoordinated. Analogous to a loosely coupled communication system, each community working to organize the Internet is somewhat responsive but essentially autonomous. It is likely that each of these autonomous groups will continue to develop methods for description and access that best meet their own perceived needs. At best, cooperative efforts may result in some common understanding of a core set of descriptive data; but it is unlikely that the application, structure and use of that data will be identical within all communities. It is important, therefore, that each group recognize the contributions of the others and that together they provide bibliographic control methods that can be layered, interchanged and translated within a broad but loosely coupled system of organization. In this way, each community can continue to develop methods compatible with its own users' needs, while taking advantage of data and systems created by other groups. Remote electronic resources have engendered discussion of the catalog's scope and functions, the concept of a collection and the appropriateness of including bibliographic surrogates for remote resources in a local catalog. Traditionally, library catalogs have provided macro level access to whole items in the collection, relying on other bibliographic tools, such as indexes and bibliographies, to provide micro level access to bodies of literature and parts of items. One criticism of this distributed bibliographic system is its failure to provide access to everything in the library collection through one totally integrated catalog. More sophisticated computer technology offers new possibilities for correcting this problem. Electronic indexes and databases mounted on the local computer provide, if not a truly integrated catalog, a reasonably integrated interface that allows access to several bibliographic tools from one terminal. Work continues to develop more sophisticated layering systems that offer searchers the convenience of accessing simultaneously the OPAC and several other databases with a single search query. While providing the illusion of searching a single database, these systems could use both front-end interfaces that convert differing search commands into one common command language and multi-language thesauri that translate terms used by one database into those used in another. These techniques of layering, exchanging and translating data allow us to avoid the time, expense and proprietary problems involved with actually creating one large integrated catalog. This is another example of a loosely coupled organizational system and provides a model for the more complex goal of organizing the Internet. Due to the economic constraints of the past decade, most libraries have shifted their collection development focus from exclusive "ownership" to providing "access," a shift that has not only blurred the concept of "collection," but has caused many librarians and information specialists to lose sight of the beneficial service provided by the process of collection development. It is essential and desirable that the confining parameters that define a collection be expanded to accommodate documents that are not owned and physically housed within the library's walls; however, it is just as essential and desirable to continue the value-added concept of a collection as interrelated parts selected with a purpose. Remotely accessed electronic resources should not be excluded from the collection development scrutiny accorded documents in all other formats. In light of discussions on scholarly communication and the problems of electronic "publishing" without peer review, the inclusion of Internet resources in the library catalog based upon appropriate selection criteria may be even more necessary than in the past to assist users in finding relevant resources. The current organization of electronic resources can be described at two levels: the local agency's catalog and catalogs of Internet resources beyond the auspices of any one library. At level one, a description of the resource is contained in the local library catalog, along with bibliographic surrogates for all other materials for which that library provides access, artifactual and electronic. The Anglo-American Cataloging Rules have proved adaptable to new formats and have been modified, interpreted and supplemented to accommodate remote electronic resources. The existing MARC record also has been revised to provide special fields and coded data elements for the description and access of remote electronic resources. Specifically, field 856 has been added to convey information necessary to locate and access the electronic object. Thus, the current methods of cataloging continue to be used to describe resources that are in some ways fundamentally different from those currently owned by libraries. At present, however, only a portion of library catalogs are able to provide active links through the OPAC to access the electronic documents directly; but as libraries migrate to Web-based catalogs, these "hotlinks" will become more common. It is not surprising that the vanguard attempts to catalog Internet resources use current and familiar cataloging methods. But this AACR2/MARC-based cataloging system is not without problems. The MARC record is designed primarily for single object description and linear access. It cannot easily be adapted to describe adequately multi-level hypertext objects. In addition, these bibliographic records are designed to carry a large amount of carefully selected data and to allow access to much of that data. They are, therefore, detailed and complex structures which require much time to create and encode correctly. Recent efforts to save time and money by simplifying the cataloging process argue against traditional cataloging methods that create full MARC records for each electronic resource. As library administrators attempt to save money by purchasing cataloging data from outside sources, new ways of creating bibliographic records are being sought. While the library cataloging community was attempting to determine the feasibility of using traditional cataloging standards for Internet resources, scholars in the area of humanities computing concentrated on the electronic document itself and on a project to develop a text encoding scheme for complex electronic textual objects. The project became known as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI guidelines give recommendations on what features of the text to encode and how to encode them. They also include a chapter on creating a header imbedded within the electronic document that precedes the electronic text. This TEI header consists primarily of four parts: file description, encoding description, text profile and text revision history. Designed for multipurpose use, the TEI header provides metadata needed by librarians who will catalog the text, scholars who will use the text, and software programs that will operate on the text. The file description portion of the header is intended to serve as the electronic equivalent of the title page of a printed work and is the only required part of the header. When data elements for all four components of the header are encoded, TEI header structures may be as lengthy and complex as MARC records. Several groups within the library community are now examining the possibility of using TEI header information as a source of data in the automated creation of MARC records for electronic documents. Computer programs have been produced that convert TEI-tagged bibliographic headers into MARC formatted records. As research develops in the area of metadata formats, the process of TEI header to MARC data conversion may become the copy cataloging of tomorrow. At level two, the goal is to organize Internet resources independently of any library agency. Several means of organization and access currently exist, including separate catalogs of selected Internet resources, subject browsing lists and robot-generated search tools. The common feature of all these "second level" access tools is the exclusive focus on Internet resources. OCLC's InterCat Catalog is one example of a second level bibliographic tool designed through a cooperative library endeavor. Consisting of MARC records created by individual catalogers from many libraries, the database, with its Web interface, represents the beginnings of an Internet Union Catalog (IUC) that is not tied to any one library as information access provider. The database still relies, however, on individual catalogers creating and entering MARC records. The IUC, while one level above the local library OPAC, still contains many of the local OPAC's useful characteristics. The documents included have been selected by librarians for their quality and appropriateness; and bibliographic surrogates in the database contain the kinds of data and authority controlled access points that have proven useful in information retrieval. When the level two organizational goal extends beyond the library selection process to the entire corpus of information on the Internet, the task of providing description and access for these electronic resources and services becomes monumental. The amount of information requiring organization is beyond the existing methods and systems of individual professional catalogers, indexers and abstractors to manage either efficiently or effectively. Several communities have wrestled with the problem and developed different ways to provide access to these resources. Over the last few years, a dramatic increase in the amount of information on the Internet heightened the need for improved access methods. Savvy computer engineers realized they had to develop retrieval systems that could be mastered easily by the non-scientific community that now used the Internet so heavily. Their efforts resulted in three primary access methods: direct address, directory browsing lists and robot-generated searchable indexes. Direct address, i.e., entering the specific pathname, directory and filename (e.g., the URL), is a known object search and requires no organizational tools to locate the site. The two remaining methods, directory browsing lists and robot-generated searchable indexes, are organizational tools that are used heavily across all Internet user communities. Directory browsing lists help people find Internet resources by arranging those resources by subject. The most commonly used lists, such as Yahoo!, use an alphabetico-classed arrangement with verbal subject topics hierarchically ordered. This arrangement is especially useful for browsing, where the user can move from the general subject to the more specific topic and then connect directly to the resources assigned to that topic. Although easy to use, this subject arrangement presents several problems: there are few cross references; many users may find difficulty identifying the hierarchy under which their narrower topic might be found; and these lists soon become lengthy and unwieldy. Other browsing tools, created outside but influenced by the library community, such as Patrick's Subject Catalog and Mundie's CyberDewey, are arranged by classification number. This affords a more logical hierarchical subject approach that is not dependent on the vagaries of the alphabet for its arrangement. While remaining less tied to semantic content than the verbally based subject systems, some type of verbal clarification is required to interpret the notation correctly. The Dewey Decimal Classification appears to be the system of choice for most of these classification-based browsing tools and has the advantage of being familiar to many users, both within the United States and internationally. As with the other subject lists, however, classification lists also need a system of cross-referencing, and the subject lists can become lengthy and unwieldy. Directory browsing lists also have other limitations. Most require a great deal of human effort to collect, arrange, encode and annotate the list of resources. When the vast number of Internet resources to be organized is considered, this could be viewed as a serious handicap. The second type of search tool, the robot-generated searchable index, attempts to overcome many of the limitations of the browsing lists. Robot-generated indexes, such as Lycos and Alta Vista, rely on computer power to collect and index electronic resources and provide an interactive interface that allows the user to enter searches for specific terms or phrases. Many allow the user to perform very sophisticated searches employing Boolean operators, adjacency and proximity operators and imbedded truncation. As a result of the automated collecting and indexing process, these search engines provide access to a much larger volume of electronic resources than the browsing lists. These computer generated search tools also have their own weaknesses. One problem is that they frequently produce extensive lists of search results, requiring users to spend time examining a great number of irrelevant and often incomprehensible citations in order to find a few pertinent hits. Searchers familiar with library catalogs and bibliographic databases may well wonder at the bewildering content of many retrieved citations. Many confusing citations are caused by extracting data directly from the document without human review and by the lack of standardized descriptions and authority control for names and subjects. Thus, while directory browsing lists and robot-generated indexes have the advantage of providing immediate access to a vast array of Internet resources and are often easy to use, they lack many features, such as selectivity, descriptive citation data and authority control, that have made the more traditional bibliographic tools most useful. If robot-generated indexes provide too little descriptive information for effective and efficient document retrieval and manually created MARC and TEI headers contain too much information for rapid and inexpensive document description, is there some method of describing Internet resources that mediates between these two extremes? With this in mind, the Dublin Core data set was developed to perform this function by defining a core data set that could describe a wide range of electronic objects. If such a core data set were adopted as an established standard and incorporated into the electronic object at the time of creation, it would increase the amount and quality of available resource descriptions with a minimal amount of human intervention. These descriptions would improve the quality of index citations created by automated tools, while enabling MARC or TEI header based records to be developed with much less expense. The Dublin Core development workshop focused on data elements necessary for the discovery of document-like objects, with consideration given to mechanisms for extending the elements to meet specialized needs. The syntax of the Dublin Core was left deliberately unspecified so that the data elements could be mapped into a variety of more complex structures from the MARC format and TEI headers to some as yet undefined structure. It is this aspect of sharing and translating descriptive data that holds the most promise, for by creating a minimum standard for descriptive data that can be used as desired by each community, we have the basis for an umbrella organizational structure based on a loosely coupled system. Then each stakeholder can continue to develop and improve its own system and structures, while overarching structures can be created to exchange, translate and layer common data. While level two provides access to a much wider range of Internet resources than any level one catalog, most information about nonelectronic resources that is provided at level one is lost with level two access tools. Although it is possible to locate and search library OPACs on the Internet via telnet or a Web interface, OPAC searches must be performed as a separate activity. A single query will not access information found at-large on the Internet and in the library OPAC, because library OPAC databases are not included in searches performed by current Internet search engines. As we move forward with efforts to create minimum standards for descriptive data, develop ways for creators of electronic resources to provide descriptive information at the time of document creation and refine search engines to enable simultaneous searches of multiple databases, we should have as our goal the creation of a third level access tool â the metacatalog. We must develop search tools whereby a user can identify specific library catalogs to include in a search query of other Internet databases, much as some existing search engines allow a user to select Web, gopher, ftp, newsgroups or commercial databases for searching. The metacatalog should be able to translate and interpret MARC records, TEI headers, SGML, HTML and any future coding. There should be language translators built in, so that searchers can use search commands and view data labels in their language of choice and translate terms in subject browsers. Multiple thesauri could be employed to assist with vocabulary control across communities, and a high-level authority control component could transparently identify and link variant forms of names. In other words, the next generation metacatalogs should be able to access all relevant information seamlessly, no matter what format or language. In order to accomplish this each stakeholder community must stop trying to recast the tools created by others into ones of their own structure, but rather concentrate on developing ways to layer, exchange and translate data within a loosely-coupled organizational system.