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By Neil Thomson - October 2000
Neil Thomson reports on work in progress to provide information about the many and varied collections that are held at The Natural History Museum [1] in London, UK. Records from the collections management and research systems will have their core fields mapped onto the Dublin Core metadata standard, harvested and stored in a separate, publicly available, summary system. This will be complemented by a set of collection-level descriptions in EAD (Encoded Archival Description) for all collections, whether their records are in electronic form or not.
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The Natural History Museum (NHM) is well known for its world-class exhibitions in the cathedral-like Waterhouse building in South Kensington, London. Less well known is the research that is carried out by over 300 scientists, working on the huge collections also housed at the site. In addition to the 68 million specimens, there is a large library that contains nearly 1 million volumes, around 500,000 items of original artwork along with maps and manuscripts. The Museum also holds its own archives as an official Public Record Office Place of Deposit. Add to this the public exhibitions, web pages, collections of electronic images and datasets and it can be seen that a method of accurately knowing what collections exist is vital.
Only a small proportion of these collections can be on display to the public, but the NHM is keen that all its collections should be known about and accessible. To this end a new initiative, the Darwin Centre [2], is currently being constructed, with both physical and electronic components. The physical component is a new building occupying the west end of the site. This will initially focus on the Museum's zoological collections, allowing unprecedented public access to the scientific laboratories and collection stores. Future developments will focus on the Museum's entomological and botanical collections.
The Darwin Centre will also feature an extensive IT infrastructure. This will give public access to the Museum's collections database and will also provide tools such as identification guides for studying the natural world and issues relating to its conservation. This system will be available for visitors to the Darwin Centre, and also, via the Internet, to professionals, academics and general users throughout the world.
Part of the IT development work will be to create a system that will hold summary information about the Museum’s collections. The two main components of this will be:
Currently, an enquirer who wants to know what the Museum has about a particular butterfly, for example, has to make their enquiry of several systems. They might discover that we hold the type specimen for that butterfly (the ‘type’ is the specimen to which the published name of the species is tied and which serves as a reference standard for a specific taxon: the Museum holds more than one-half of the world’s currently existing ‘types’). They might discover that we also hold a watercolour painting of the butterfly; that an example of the species is on public display in the Museum’s exhibitions area; and that our Library contains a copy of the published type description. All this research, however, would need to take place in separate systems.
It was therefore decided to create a new separate system with 4 objectives:
The information architecture is based on a three-layer model.
The bottom layer contains the actual specimens, books, drawings, electronic resources and so forth that people want to see and use.
The middle layer contains the rich description systems that are tailored for use by experts for research or management purposes. For example in the library there is Unicorn to manage the bibliographic material owned by the Museum and IdeaList for the Archives. External Internet-available electronic resources are described in software provided by BIOME [5], through which the NHM contributes records to the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). Cheshire II software [6] may be used in conjunction with the EAD-encoded collection level descriptions. Many other systems are in use in the science departments, each tailored to their specific purpose. Much information is also available on the Museum’s Web site and in its exhibitions.
The top layer is the summary system, containing core data harvested from each existing rich system into a consistent format and, where feasible, pointing back to the richer information from which it was derived. This summary data is the equivalent of a person’s business card – it contains just enough information to allow the enquirer to identify whether this is what they seek and indicates where to find the detailed, richer information.
The work of CIMI, the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information [7], has been particularly valuable in testing the suitability of Dublin Core for describing not only the electronic resources for which it was initially intended, but also museum (or “offline”) objects. Participating in CIMI’s Dublin Core Testbed Project provided the opportunity to pool records with those from a wide variety of other organisations to determine the feasiblility of record harvesting, mapping and cross-domain resource discovery.
By using international standards such as Dublin Core, EAD and Z39.50, it is intended that in a similar way, the NHM can provide a resource discovery system that spans the information domains that it covers internally. This “whole-museum response” could also become the NHM’s contribution to the “whole-community response” when enquiries can be directed to multiple organisations using the same international standards.
Dublin Core may provide a consistent format to hold minimal information about museum objects and collections, but the bigger problem remains of making the terminology consistent when it has been drawn from a variety of sources.
There are a few fields that, if the data they contained were consistent, would make retrieval considerably more accurate and complete. A good example is geographic place name. The two most frequently asked questions about natural history are: “Where might I find this species?” and “Which species might I find in this place?”
Fortunately, there is a very good Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) [8], produced by the Getty Research Institute. For new and future databases that are being designed in the Museum, guidance will indicate the advantages of using such sources, possibly in addition to the researcher’s favourite term, to aid retrieval by place name through the summary system.
In other cases there is no similar tool available, although efforts are being made to create, for example, standard lists of species names. The NHM is itself committed to creating a master list of all UK species as part of its contribution to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) [9].
Given the extent of the NHM’s collections, it will be many years before a database record exists for each item. A new project is being initiated that will create descriptive records of each collection as a whole, whether electronic records for it exist or not, based on a rather loose definition of a collection. When this Project is completed, enquirers will be provided with a narrative description of the contents of each collection, in addition to being able to get to item-level records, where these exist.
It is likely that EAD (Encoded Archival Description) will be used to produce these collection-level descriptions. As a result of collaboration with the Public Record Office [10], the Archives Section will use EAD and, as it is specifically designed to deal with collections and their components, there seems to be a good case for using the standard to also describe the Museum’s non-archival collections.
A major advantage of EAD is the way that it handles collections within collections, such as the bequest that contains specimens, notebooks, photographs and a database. Other advantages include the ease with which Dublin Core metadata may be extracted for entry into the summary system, the re-usability of the information for other purposes and the ability to point to related material and digital surrogates.
Once the system is running, a sample enquiry may go something like this:
An enquirer is interested in George Forster, the artist. Entering the name into the summary system provides a hit-list of results, including one for the collection-level record which describes the Museum’s collection of drawings by Forster from Captain Cook’s second voyage around the world.
Clicking on this entry in the hit-list displays the collection-level record itself, which contains the narrative description of the collection, based on that published by the Museum as part of the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) in 1978. This in turn points to thumbnail images of selected drawings from the collection. Clicking on an image may return details of how to order a high-resolution image or print from the Museum’s Picture Library.
For the first time, it will be possible to get information about all of the Museum’s collections from a single source. This should be of benefit to researchers, educators and the purposeful enquirer and start to unlock the incredible riches that are held within The Natural History Museum in London.
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Neil Thomson
Head of Systems & Central Services
The Natural History Museum
Cromwell Road
LONDON
SW7 5BD
United Kingdom
n.thomson@nhm.ac.uk
<http://www.nhm.ac.uk/>
Phone: +44 020 7942 5294
Fax: +44 020 7942 5559
Neil Thomson heads one of the four divisions that make up the Department of Library and Information Services at The Natural History Museum. The Division of Systems & Central Services is responsible for the behind-the-scenes aspects of the library, such as acquisitions, cataloguing and the development of computer-based information systems.
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For citation purposes:
Thomson, N. "Towards a Whole-Museum Response: Discovering The Natural History Museum's Collections", Cultivate Interactive, issue
2, 16 October 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue2/natural/>
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