Museums do not exist in a vacuum. They have a wide range of active users, for example:
All of these users will have different reasons to be interested in the museum's holdings (their point of view). They all require some information from the museum (either standard information or a response to a specific enquiry). Some may even provide the museum with new information ("this wagon used to deliver groceries to Winnerton in the 1940s").
In addition, museums maintain ongoing dialogues with other museums, for example over loans of material for exhibitions. When recording information, they use vocabulary control mechanisms provided by external agencies, such as the Getty Information Institute's (http://www.gii.getty.edu/) Art and Architecture Thesaurus (http://www.ahip.getty.edu/gii/aat.html).
The museum community has affinities with other areas of work. Archives have similar objectives and information-handling problems; to a lesser extent there are links with the library world. One area where there is perhaps scope for more active cooperation is with the academic research community.
Also, museum object information itself doesn't exist in a vacuum. Links can be made from an object to a biography of its creator, to a description of the town where it was made, or to an essay on the object's style (e.g., "impressionist"). Like other types of museum information, these links need to be as future-proof as possible. (How many of the bookmarks in your web browser would you expect to still be valid in 20 years' time?)
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Contact Robin Cover with corrections and updates, or to submit contributions to the ISUG online document database.
