Background

Norwegian university museums are custodians of large bodies of knowledge and data about societies, culture, nature and the environment in Norway, both historical and current. An important role of the university museums has been the compilation and dissemination of this information. It is no accident that museums have formed the nucleus for the founding of Norwegian colleges and universities. Due to the magnitude and the organization of the university collections, they have not been readily accessible for use in research, teaching and public services or for inspection by the general public. In order to maintain their position as the country's leading institutions and information pools for object-based research, the university museums must revitalize their collections. An important step in this process is the introduction of information technology at all levels in the museums. However, this calls for an extremely costly reassessment and conversion of existing archives into a digital format, requiring extra effort and additional funding. In some cases, establishing the databases will entail a complete revision of some of the museum collections.

The project

The Museum Project (1) was established in the spring of 1998 as a national collaborative project involving all four Norwegian universities. It is planned to run until 2005 with an annual budget of 1-2 million Euro. The aim of the project is to develop common database systems for the management of collections for all the Norwegian university museums. Ideally, these database systems should be able to handle all reference information related to artifact and specimen collections inside and outside the museums. Important aspects include internal requirements regarding the management of collections, fieldwork, research and dissemination, and external demands from the authorities and the public concerning access to reference data. The work is motivated by an ambition to develop IT-based systems that will offer users centralized and efficient access to information regarding the Norwegian cultural and natural heritage. With the help of common user interfaces and links between data from different fields of study, it will be possible to generate new information combinations and new insights in the various disciplines. The Museum Project includes a systems development group that is responsible for modeling and constructing the databases. This group is a direct continuation of the systems development group in the Documentation Project (2). In addition the project employs at least one scientific consultant from a relevant discipline for each of the sub-projects. The consultant is responsible for the follow-up of the scientific aspects of the digitization process and works in close co-operation with colleagues in the relevant field and with the project's system developers. The Museum Project involves the museums of natural history as well as the museums of cultural history. It is organized in various subsections, with sub-projects in the fields of archaeology, ethnography, cultural history, botany, zoology, geology and paleontology. Each of the sub-projects is responsible for the digitization of large collections, some so complex that getting even an overview is difficult. Once the digitized material is recorded, it undergoes a quality control procedure before being entered into databases. The completed databases are all built on the same platform. This implies that while each database accommodates the specific features of each collection the different databases will nonetheless be compatible with one another. The computer programs and methods used for the electronic recording of data are determined by the structure of each collection, and to some extent by the traditions of each discipline.

Technical solutions

The Norwegian University Museums cover a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and ethnography to natural history. The project organization has taken over the responsibility for maintaining and developing the data base systems for the department of lexicography (old Norse and modern Norwegian) and place name studies. The development of the new systems has been continuous process for the last 6 years done in parallel with giving assistance to the ongoing digitization of the museum collections and various reference informations. The design and implementation of the common systems and interfaces is now completed and will be presented at the conference. To make data base systems for the large number of disciplines is a challenge for a small group. An extra challenge is the requirement for interdisciplinary searches. The number of databases and the inter-disiplinarity has forced us to try to make as generic data base solutions as possible. The new information systems replace in turn older, mostly stand alone database applications. This is fortunate since it is easier to create new interconnecting systems instead of connection old ones, although technologies like the Z39.50 standard have open for relatively easy interconnection of databases. The system group has tried to think generically along two axis:

• common interface tools and database functionality
• common database solutions for common data types like geographical data, bibliographical data, data about persons (legal and real), classification systems in cultural and natural history and so on

During the model phase, the collections of each discipline has been described as a set of different object types. We will here use a simplified model for archaeology as an example. The collections of an archaeological museum consist of artifacts, classification and acquisition catalogues, excavation and conservation reports, photos and so on. We have modeled this as object types such as:

• a type of artifact objects
• a type of finding circumstances (stray finds and excavation) objects
• a type of conservation objects
• a transportation type

The latter used to describe the movement of the artifacts inside and outside of the museum and is shared with other museums and collections. Other shared object types are persons, publications and geographical places (both natural formations and abstract geographical entities like counties and municipalities). All the object types are implemented as relational databases in Oracle8i. This is not an object oriented DBMS, but the object view of the data is taken care of by a common meta database containing a subset of the data model of each database (scheme). The user interface applications comes in two version, one advanced version implemented in DELPHI5 and a somewhat simpler WWW-interfaced based on plain HTML and Java-scripts. Both versions use the information in the meta database to automatically create a user adjustable search forms and result tables or grids. In the DELPHI5 version each object type is also supplied with one or more object viewers presenting the data connected to a given object. That is, by clicking on a line in the grid of result, a more detailed view of the data is presented. In the photo database a digital photo filing card with detailed information and a thumb is presented. In a dictionary database a formatted entry will occur. The second common feature of the system is the so called list module. The visual metaphor is the ordinary file hierarchy with nested folders and files. The "file icons" represent stored queries, hand compiled lists of parts of one or many search result. A list can consist of objects of different types, say, photos from a site, information about artifacts and excavation reports. The folder hierarchy is used to systematize the lists. The lists and the folders can be global, shared by a group or private. When opened, a heterogeneous list will be presented as a collection of icons and some basic information. Each element can be inspected by a viewer corresponding to its object type. A list of objects of the same type can also be seen as a result grid with a predefined layout.

Work with Sites and Monuments Records (SMR)

Norway has five archaeological museums. They are situated in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Troms¯ and Stavanger. With the exception of Stavanger, all are university museums. Each museum has a collection of items from its own district. Previously, however, the geographical division between the museums was not so rigid, resulting in the different museums having artifacts from other museum districts. The five archaeological museums have traditionally had the responsibility of keeping and updating the SMR for their part of the country. In 1993 the responsibility, but not the actual records, was transfered to a central body, the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU). In 1998 the Museum Project was asked to design and develop a central database solution for a national SMR. The task was completed in March 2000 and the national SRM database is now operating. The system is a client-server solution based on Oracle and a client application developed in Borland Delphi. In addition the SMR has a WWW interface used by local authorities throughout the country. The SRM system is developed so that it will be a seamless part of the information system which is the main objectives of the Project. The WWW version will be demonstrated at the conference.

Electronic exhibitions

Based on the digital collections we are building up, we have designed and authored some electronic exhibitions: a folk music exhibition installed on an ambulating Nordic exhibition celebrating a Queen Margerethe the first and the so called Kalmar union (1397 a.d.) and a exhibition over Norwegian coinage the last 1000 years originally used as an exhibition kiosk in the exhibition hall at the University's Coin Collection. The original exhibition contains video and sound which are excluded from the web-version due to copyright limitations. An English version of this coinage exhibition is available on the web and will be demonstrated at the conference. The Museum project has also developed an image database for the photo collections at the university museums, both for storing and cataloging photos. The conversion and cataloging is an ongoing process for the next decade. There are currently 110 000 images in the system. The web version of this system will be available for demonstration.