[Koha] Musing on a museum module

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Stephen Hedges <shedges at athenscounty.lib.oh.us> wrote:

> > ... the design of a museum module. Although the
> > proprietary systems use the same or similar database this might not be the
> > best choice. It is clearly a case of shoe-horning additional requirements.
>
> I have a fairly basic question -- what do museums do with the information they
> have in the database.  I went to the SPECTRUM website (
> http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm ) and it looks like it's basically
> guidelines for describing the objects held by a museum.

There is both workflow and information description in the published
SPECTRUM manual --- some 500+pages. A copy is beside me on the desk.

> ... (I have no experience
> in museum work, so I may be missing something.)

Neither do I per se but I was regularly a living object :-) at the Science
Museum --- as an operator of their amateur radio station. However, my wife
is a professional curator.

> So I'm guessing that for you, Koha would be a way to store and retrieve
> information about the objects you've collected.

That's the fundamental requirement. But I question whether a MARC oriented
schema is appropriate? Commerical projects have seen me writing data
conversion programs reading from MARC tapes to input into text retrieval
systems. A comparison of MARC fields/sub-fields with SPECTRUM requirements
is probably needed. There is a lot of provenance information associated
with objects; I don't remember MARC having any field for that. Also
considerable descriptive inforamtion.

> ... Or do you sometimes
> loan items as well, and need to track them much as a library tracks book
> loans?

Yes. Not unknown for items to be loaned to several places in sequence,
e.g. Holland, Germany, Japan, and onto USA before being returned home.

Thinking creatively I suspect that serials management is a better paradigm
than book loans.

Regards, Trevor

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