costis dallas (1992) information systems and cultural knowledge: the benaki museum case

8/7/2019 Costis Dallas (1992) Information systems and cultural knowledge: the Benaki Museum case

1/12

Authors post-publication version of: Dallas, Costis (1992) Information systems and cultural knowl-

edge: the Benaki Museum case. Computers and the History of Art Journal, 3.1, 7-15.

1992-2010 Costis Dallas. Some rights reserved. Work licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution -Non Commercial -No Derivatives 2.5 License. Electronic

version:

Information systems and cultural

knowledge: the Benaki Museum case1

Costis Dallas

IntroductionThis paper presents an overview of documentation activities and plans inthe Benaki Museum, a very young participant in the museum automationarena. It is organised in three parts. Firstly, an account is given of theBenaki Museum's distinctive physiognomy and of its information strategy,suited to its character and mission. Secondly, the activities of the pilotdocumentation programme and the present activities of the newly-founded Documentation Department are presented. Lastly, the plannedMITOS information system of the Museum is introduced, preceded by adiscussion of some pertinent aspects of the complexity of cultural knowl-

edge, which must be captured by the system. Acknowledgements for helpand stimulation with ideas presented here are due to the staff of theDocumentation Department, to the researchers of ICS/FORTH, and to mycolleagues in the Documentation Committee of ICOM.

The Benaki Museum and its information strategy

The Benaki Museum was founded in 1930 by Anthony Benaki, who for thispurpose offered to the nation his art collections and Neoclassical residencein central Athens, and continued to care for the Museum's well-being untilhis death in 1954. In the sixty two years of its history it expanded consid-erably through the support of numerous benefactors, who offered their

1 This is the authors post-publication version of the paper published in CHArt Journal in1992. Pagination differs from the published version. The MITOS information system men-tioned here is also known as CLIO, and was subsequently deployed by ICS/FORTH in sev-eral other institutions; conceptual work for MITOS/CLIO was a foundation for the subse-quent development of the CIDOC CRM international standard (Authors comment, 2010).


2/12

2 COSTIS DALLAS

1992-2010 Costis Dallas. Some rights reserved.

private collections or contributed to its acquisition fund. It is today thelargest independent museum in Greece, receiving financial support fromthe Greek Ministry of Culture and recognised as a cultural institution ofnational status. Representative collections in the Benaki Museum demon-strate the continuity of Greek civilisation from the Bronze Age to the pre-sent. Unique examples of ceramics and jewellery, of exceptional artisticvalue, represent the Geometric, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods,and the Roman and Byzantine eras. The transition from the ancient to theByzantine world is illustrated in the collections of Alexandrine clay figu-rines, oil-lamps and bone carvings, as well as in a rare group of Copticworks of art. The collections of Byzantine and post-Byzantine icons and ofecclesiastical embroidery and metalwork reveal the impact of Christianity

in the art of the times. The basement of the Museum is occupied by theunique, in their completeness and quality, post-Byzantine collections ofsecular art: costumes, jewellery, embroideries, ceramics, wood-carving,painting and metalwork, flourishing in the different regions of the Greekworld from the 17th century onwards (Delivorrias 1980).

The Benaki Museum cannot be classified solely as a museum of decorativearts, a fine arts collection, a historical or an ethnographic museum. By vir-tue of the strength and complementarity of its collections, it purports to bea comprehensive museum of Greek cultural identity, presenting Greek art

and material culture within both its geographical context and its historicalcontinuity. Currently in the course of a building expansion programme de-signed to double its gallery space, the Museum has organised and partici-pated in a large number of special exhibitions, highlighting different as-pects of the Greek cultural and artistic identity. Apart from exhibition cata-logues, it implements a policy of producing detailed scholarly publicationsof its collections.

The information strategy of the Benaki Museum is conditioned by currentinternational trends in museum documentation, but also by its distinctivecharacter and mission. Thus, it shares the concerns of other institutions in

Europe and North America for improving accountability in its collectionsmanagement practices, and recognises the importance of keeping adequateand up-to-date records in order to ensure the proper care of its objects(Roberts 1985). Currently, Benaki Museum inventories are divided be-tween several different hand-written registers, some of which followdocumentation conventions and numbering systems fallen out of use; dueto the lack of up-to-date indexes, access to the information in the manualrecords is severely limited. The forthcoming re-organisation linked withthe building expansion programme will require the re-shelving of all ob-


3/12

INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE:THE BENAKI MUSEUM CASE 3


jects, both in exhibition and in storage, an operation not devoid of dangersand pitfalls.

Establishing effective control over the collections is, therefore, the first tar-get of the Benaki Museum's information strategy. It involves in the shortterm comprehensive retrospective inventorying, checking the identity andlocation of all objects and aiding their safe movement, and requires in themedium term the development of an automated collections managementsystem capable of supporting adequately all important everyday opera-tions.

Collections management systems replaced documentation systems as thestate-of-the-art only recently, during the mid-eighties. Such systems offer

obvious benefits for improving museum procedures and increasing ac-countability for the care of collections, and for this reason they are fa-voured by many museums (Miles 1988; Dallas 1990). Typically, however,they are used by specialist documentation and administration staff ratherthan by curators vested with research responsibilities in collections. One ofthe reasons curators are not motivated to use collections management sys-tems is that such systems often exclude most of the scholarly informationabout objects, their history and cultural associations, and thus are of littledirect value for research. Yet, ironically, in many museums microcomput-ers are now commonplace as personal productivity tools, used by curators

for word-processing and note-keeping, preparation of indexes and bibliog-raphies, and for personal research data bases.

The "primacy of the object" issue is often considered to be of fundamentalimportance for determining the role of contemporary museums. At oneextreme, some museums (typically art) regard themselves primarily astrustees of treasures of artistic, historical or cultural value, and adjustmuseological practices accordingly: "collecting" is interpreted as referringto acquisitions; "preserving" is limited to object care and conservation; and"disseminating" focuses on the scholarly research, publication and exhibi-tion of objects. At the other extreme, museums (typically ethnographic)

consider themselves mainly as educators: "collecting" and "preserving" takesecond place to "disseminating", which encompasses a broad range of edu-cational and exhibition activities whereby contextual information often dis-places original objects to a secondary role.

While some think that information technology will lure people away fromoriginal museum objects -- a view that does not seem to be supported bythe experience of well-designed interactive exhibits such as the LondonNational Gallery application -- the "primacy of the object" issue itself intro-


4/12

4 COSTIS DALLAS


duces an opposition between the research and educational missions of mu-seums.

The idea of incorporating all relevant knowledge about a given domain inan integrated information base is already implemented in academic pro-jects such as Perseus, an electronic optical disc "sourcebook" on ancientGreece, which provides a comprehensive array of tools and facilities forinformation access tailored to the needs of the serious student of ancientGreek literature, art and history (Crane 1992). Perseus demonstrates thatthere is no inherent contradiction in sharing the educational and researchfunctions within the same system; indeed, to enhance its value for schol-arly research, there are plans to make it available as a standard format for

the electronic publication of archaeological material (Smith 1992). On theother hand, while emerging multimedia technologies are also used by mu-seums for successful public access applications, these applications are as arule conceived as one-off projects, based on analogue or digital optical disctechnologies, and unrelated to the museum information systems proper,which hold the dynamic information about the objects. This is partly due tothe fact that, despite the recent flood of the museum automation marketwith image storage and retrieval add-ons, commercially available systemsprovide little effective support for anything but formatted data, accessiblestrictly by means of Boolean query rather than associative navigation typi-

cal of multimedia applications.Curators in the Benaki Museum dedicate a large part of their effort in re-search: collecting information, writing texts and preparing exhibitions,publications and educational material about the Museum's collections. Inthe current manual information system of the Museum belong, in fact, notonly inventory registers, card records and indexes, but also a large collec-tion of research notes, realised exhibition layouts, catalogues and publishedtexts. On the other hand, the manual information system does not concernonly museum objects, but also a broad spectrum of historical and socialsubjects related with their creation and use: places, events, people, ideas

and associations. Due to the nature of humanistic research, the same in-formation resources are reused in the full spectrum of museum tasks, fromscholarly publication to education and exhibition: labels and texts are con-sulted and revised in order to suit a specific purpose, existing images areincorporated in different presentations, associations between objects areselected to suit a specific exhibition purpose. As things stand at the mo-ment, however, assembling relevant information about a specific subjectinvolves major effort, both by curators and by the public.


5/12



The second target of the Benaki Museum's information strategy is, thus, tointegrate all museum information resources into a single system. In theshort term, this task involves the provision of the necessary support so thatall new information about museum objects, including images, be collectedin machine readable form, and so that existing photographic and printedinformation be converted for use in an automated system. In order to allowthe integration of museum information resources in the medium term, it isalso necessary to design and implement an automated system capable ofstoring a broad information range and providing structuring mechanismsand tools for effective multimedia information access.

Pilot programme and current documentation activitiesIn 1989, the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Benaki museum re-ceived a grant from the Greek Ministry of Research and Industry in orderto create an automated inventory of 18th and 19th century prints belongingto the museum. Financial support by the "Friends of the Benaki museum"association allowed the purchase of two IBM-compatible microcomputers,and a pilot documentation programme was started. Information from thecollection's manual catalogue cards was input into a data base using CDS-Isis software, in close cooperation with the curator of Prints and Drawings,Dr. F.M. Tsigakou.

Although the data base is implemented as a flat file with repeatablegroups, it is based on a relational conceptual schema of inventory informa-tion. The CHIN data dictionary definitions and codes were used (Delroyand Jewett 1988), with minor alterations to suit internal documentationpractices. Inventory information, split in the manual record into a smallnumber of headings, was subdivided into minimal logical units, to im-prove reusability and flexibility in data retrieval and report generation(Sarasan 1984). The data entry application consisted of ten screens, corre-sponding to relevant information areas. Syntactic control was maintainedon most formatted fields, and controlled vocabularies were used for fields

such as object name and technique.

After the completion of the pilot programme at the end of 1990, the database of prints contains a large number of fields (some repeatable) on ca.3000 works, including inventory number, title, other/disused object num-bers, location, data on photograph(s), material, dimensions, category, objectname, technique, artist, engraver and printer, printing details, date, datestring, last owner, mode of acquisition, price (if relevant), and credit line.The CDS-Isis program can be used to produce printed "replicas" of the


6/12

6 COSTIS DALLAS


original manual catalogue cards, indexes according to a variety of sortingcriteria (e.g., artist or chronological indexes), short object captions, andother forms of printed documentation. It can also be used for interactiveBoolean retrieval of prints according to a combination of query fields.

The collection of prints of the Benaki Museum is a comprehensive icono-graphic source of information on the emergence of modern Greece,monumental topography, historical subjects and everyday themes of eth-nographic interest. In order to aid the use of the data base for iconographicretrieval, a thesaurus of subject terms was built in conjunction with the in-ventory of prints. Each subject term was standardised and related to itspreferred (USE) and non-preferred (UF) synonyms, to a scope note (SN)

where necessary and to its narrower (NT), broader (BT) and related (RT)terms. The ISO-standard thesaurus thus created uses the CDS-Isis thesau-rus-building facility, provides hierarchies for geographical places, monu-ments, people, historical events and social activities, and includes morethan 1200 subject access terms.

The Documentation Department of the Benaki Museum was officially setup in 1991. Its mission is to create and maintain computerised inventoriesfor collections management, to build documentation standards and author-ity files, to support computer-based cataloguing undertaken by collectionsstaff, and to supervise the development and operation of the museum's in-

formation systems. The Department now employs four people, with aca-demic qualifications in archaeology, history of art and psychology, and is inthe process of further expansion to catch up with the increased work loadand broader skills necessary for the discharge of its duties. Due to the gen-erosity of the I.Ph. Kostopoulos Foundation, computing facilities were sig-nificantly enhanced by the purchase of a UNISYS U6055 minicomputer,running UNIX and ORACLE DBMS software and connected with several386SX microcomputers over an Ethernet TCP/IP network.

In this first period of the Department's operation priority was given, firstly,to achieving control of basic inventory information and allowing retrieval

of objects according to a few core inventory fields. Object name, prove-nance, date and artist were identified as the attributes used in most queriesby museum central services. Therefore, a retrospective automated invento-rying project was undertaken, restricted to a core record involving thosefour fields. So far, the object names of all 40,000 objects from museum col-lections of Greek art and material culture have been recorded in an auto-mated index, and the retrospective inventorying of provenance and datinginformation is also nearing completion. Data were collected from three dif-ferent museum inventory registers; in the next stage, data will be checked


7/12



against catalogue card records and printed documentation, where avail-able; finally, the core inventory data base will be reconciled with the con-tents of museum stores, to establish identity and location control over thecollections (cf. Roberts 1985: 116-117).

The second task given priority was to study museum needs and preparethe ground for the development of an integrated information system formedium term use. Two pilot projects were undertaken by DocumentationDepartment staff, in order to study specific problems of museum data andthe resulting requirements of system architecture. Firstly, a data base wasdesigned for the inventory of the Embroideries collection, which includesobjects entirely different from Prints and Drawings.

This project was also based on the CHIN data dictionary and was imple-mented using CDS-Isis. Secondly, an object name hierarchy was developedfollowing an inductive methodology. The object names of all 40,000 mu-seum objects recorded from the general inventory were transferred into anoutline structure, using a word-processing program. The structure was re-fined by moving object names to the appropriate outline positions accord-ing to their hierarchical sub-categorisation relationships, and by identifyingthe semantic domain from which each object name was derived (form,function, material, subject-matter). Apart from the insight these experi-ments provided for our future plans, this hierarchical thesaurus of object

names is already a useful, semi-intelligent tool for the retrieval of objectcategories from the Benaki Museum inventories.

A knowledge-based museum information system

From our experience so far, it is clear that the hererogeneity of Benaki Mu-seum collections makes it impossible to catalogue all objects according to afixed set of attributes. While all objects share a subset of common attributes(e.g., their inventory number, accession date and common object name),specific groups of objects need additional attributes to be described fully.For example, for objects that can be characterised as representations (e.g.,dolls, figurines, pictures, photographs) it is necessary to record their repre-sentamen or figurative subject; correspondence letters from the historicalarchives have a sender, a dispatch date and one or more addressees; forprints it is necessary to specify attributes to indicate the names of the en-graver and the printer. Also, it is clear that the description of objects such asprints displaying a figurative image should be augmented by additionalattributes from more than one sub-categorisation class. The exact attributesrequired depend on the sub-categorisation of objects according to their


8/12

8 COSTIS DALLAS


form, function or subject, and may also be assigned to classes (e.g., meas-urements, names, etc.). Among current museum documentation initiatives,the Data Model under development by the Reconciliation of StandardsWorking Group of CIDOC includes a small number of museum object sub-types, and the SWETERM data dictionary developed by Swedish museumsproposes an attribute naming convention based on attribute sub-categorisation.

Another issue, concerning the description of many museum objects, is partcomposition: apart from a global attribute set, adequate description ofcomposite objects such as costumes requires the specification of named ob-ject parts (e.g., a vest, shoes, headgear), which should be described in their

turn, according to a variable set of pertinent attributes. An adequate ac-count of part composition should preserve relational information about thestructural relationships between (physical or conceptual) object parts (Dal-las 1992a). For example, the formal description of a painting should ac-count not just for the presence or absence of image parts (subjects, motifs),but also for their relative position in the image field, so that meaningfulquestions about iconographic structure can be asked (Dallas 1992b).

An important part of museum information, appearing in sources such asdocumentation records and printed catalogues, does not represent neutraldata, but beliefs concerning museum objects, their style and function, and

their interrelationships. It is remarkable that even attributes commonlyagreed to belong in the minimal inventory record, such as artist, date orprovenance are not neutral facts, but opinions expressed by scholars on thebasis of historical evidence, stylistic analysis or, sometimes, flight of fancy.These opinions maybe seen as classifications, connected with the objects'form, style, function and (figurative or symbolic) content. It has been notedthat such classifications cannot be handled adequately by traditional databases, but require a knowledge-based component (Rold 1990). Equally, ob-ject names and terminologies cannot be expressed as simple facts, sincethey depend on cultural context and scholarly tradition. For example, the

same item of female costume may have different local names in differentvillage communities; the appropriate local name should be used for eachobject according to its provenance. Named periods, such as "Iron Age", cor-respond to different time ranges, depending on the provenance and cul-tural group to which an object belongs.

Some of the problems presented above could be avoided by restricting ei-ther the domain coverage, as in museums with homogeneous collections,or the functional depth of information systems, as in collections manage-ment applications used mainly for administration. Yet the emphasis of the


9/12



approach selected by the Benaki museum is to provide decision supportacross its heterogeneous collections for research-related activities, such asthe preparation of exhibitions and the compilation of catalogues, as well asfor public access to information. In order to be accepted by curators and tobe usable by visitors, the information base should be of sufficient detail andit should provide a adequate model of the descriptive, terminological andsemantic complexity of material culture.

Since January 1992, the Benaki Museum is involved in the development ofa prototype museum information system codenamed MITOS (MuseumInformation Technology Open System). The project, whose 2-year pilotphase is financially supported by the European Community, involves the

cooperation of Greek museums, leading information technology compa-nies and academic research centres (MUSIC/FORTH et al. 1991: pp. 47-55).Like Ariadne's thread, MITOS will help its users find their way through thecomplex maze of museum information, by providing an adequate datamodel for the description of widely different classes of complex artefacts,and alternative querying and browsing tools for accessing the informationbase. It is intended to support a wide range of museum functions, from ar-tifact inventorying and collections management to art historical research,the preparation of exhibitions, multimedia presentation and disseminationof information, and educational activities.

The technology to be employed in the project includes multimedia data s-torage, editing and display, knowledge-based information systems, ad-vanced hypermedia browsing and querying mechanisms and multiplemass storage media (optical and magnetic). The collections managementfunctions will be implemented as a relational DBMS application, in linewith current museum automation practice (Dallas 1990). Substantive cul-tural knowledge about museum objects, on the other hand, will be storedusing an object-oriented information kernel supporting user definablemetaclasses, multiple instantiation and multiple inheritance; a version ofthis kernel is already available as a result of another project undertaken by

the Institute of Computer Science of Heraklion, a major partner in the de-velopment of MITOS. The cultural information system will have a neutralinterface to both the relational collections management system, but also toa hypertext interface, to allow the display of multimedia presentations forpublic access.

Data modelling will be done according to an innovative object-orientedmethodology, which constitutes a significant extension of entity-relationship approaches currently pursued by other museum documenta-tion projects. Information will be represented using Telos, a frame-based


10/12

10 COSTIS DALLAS


knowledge representation language (Koubarakis et al. 1989). Work has al-ready started in data modelling, concerning the definition of general enti-ties, abstractions, relations, context, uncertainty, conditionality and tempo-ral predicates. Among museum objects, costumes and pottery were se-lected as the pilot domains for the definition of the classification, since to-gether they offer a representative view of modelling problems, such asthose mentioned above.

The knowledge-based nature of the information system blurs the distinc-tion between information structure and content. Refinement of the datamodel should be seen as a dynamic process, with new object classes de-fined as documentation of the Benaki Museum collections progresses. The

information kernel is designed from the start to support a large amount ofcomplex, contextually dependent knowledge. It is natural that this knowl-edge should include information now contained in controlled vocabularies,authority files and thesauri. Therefore, apart from hypermedia browsingand query tools designed for interactive information retrieval, an object-oriented data entry module, and import and export facilities to relationalcollections management system and to hypertext authoring facilities, thesystem will be enhanced by a tool for the dynamic development of con-trolled vocabularies and thesauri.

ConclusionComputers were introduced to the Benaki Museum only three years ago,yet the small experience assembled so far points to an information strategyrelevant to its character and special needs. Current documentation activi-ties aim to address both the short term practical problems of inventoryingand of achieving control over the collections, and the medium term issuesof integrating all museum information resources into a unified system. Forthe former aim, relatively low technology solutions are employed, with theemphasis on achieving control over the Museum objects for practical col-lections management and basic data retrieval purposes, and on facilitating

the provision by collections' staff of as much machine-readable informationas possible. In parallel, work has started to develop a medium and longterm solution for the Museum's information needs; this solution is basedon a knowledge-based information system capable of storing multimediainformation, and of providing facilities for art and material culture re-search, for education and exhibition support.

As the project progresses, the Benaki Museum hopes to benefit from theexperience of other museums using similar approaches for their informa-


11/12



tion needs. In the meantime, the Museum is committed that its informationsystems should be harmonised with emerging national and internationalstandards, such as the CIDOC data model and the international AAT pro-ject.

Harmonisation, however, does not imply uniformity. In fact, the informa-tion system of a museum, manual or computerised, is both a reflection ofand a constitutive factor for its intellectual foundations, distinctive charac-ter and aspirations. After a period when information control was the key-word in museum documentation, now at last the importance of knowledgesharing is widely recognised. The planned Benaki Museum informationsystem intends to be a tool for sharing museum knowledge by doing jus-

tice to its complexity and heterogeneity: a servant of curators and visitorsalike, an instrument for research and education.

References

Crane, G., ed. (1992) Perseus 1.0: Interactive Sources and Studies on AncientGreece. Hypercard application, inc. CD-ROM, videodisc and user's guide.Yale University Press: New Haven.

Dallas, C.J. (1990) Acquiring an automated museum documentation sys-tem: a report. Archaeological Computing Newsletter, 23, 1-11.

Dallas C.J. (1992a) Formal description, similarity and classification of com-plex archaeological entities. In Lock, G.R. and Moffett, J. (eds.) CAA91:Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. InternationalSeries, British Archaeological Reports: Oxford, 167-178.

Dallas, C.J. (1992b) Syntax and semantics of figurative art. In Reilly, P. andRahtz, S.P.Q. (eds.) Archaeology and the Information Age: A Global Perspective,Routledge: London, 230-275.

Delroy, S.H. and Jewett, D.F. (1988) Humanities Data Dictionary of the Cana-dian Heritage Information Network. Documentation Research Publication, 1,

Documentation Research Group, Museum Services Division, CHIN: Ot-tawa.

Koubarakis, M., Mylopoulos, J. et al. (1989) Telos: Features and Formalization.Technical Report no. 18, Institute of ComputerScience, Foundation of Re-search and Technology Hellas (ICS/FORTH): Heraklion.

Miles, G. (1988) Conservation and collection management: integration orisolation. International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 7,159-163.


12/12

12 COSTIS DALLAS


MUSIC/FORTH et al. (1991) Hellenic Action for Multimedia Information Tech-nology and Applications, Technical Annex. STRIDELL project no. 158. June1991.

Roberts, D.A. (1985) Planning the Documentation of Museum Collections. Mu-seum Documentation Association: Cambridge.

Rold, L. (1990) Applications of computer science in museums and human-istic research. In Roberts, D.A. (ed.) Terminology for Museums. MuseumDocumentation Association: Cambridge, 557-560.

Sarasan, L. (1984) Visual content access: an approach to the automated re-trieval of visual information. In Corti, L. (ed.) Automatic Processing of ArtHistory Data and Documents, vol. 1, Scuola Normale Superiore: Pisa.

Smith, N. (1992) An experiment in electronic exchange and publication ofarchaeological field data. In Lock, G.R. and Moffett, J. (eds.) CAA91: Com-puter Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, International Se-ries, British Archaeological Reports: Oxford.