Katalin T. BIRÓ
(Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, Hungary)
Outline: Recently developed databases in the Hungarian National Museum permit to track scientific (archaeometrical) analyses on a collection level.
The scientific analyses of Cultural Heritage objects become more and more important for collection management in general. It is, however, difficult to keep up with numerous analytical developments on the level of the whole collection. Various projects, series of analyses and even historical studies using methods of natural sciences are known to be applied, often on the same objects, for which information may have been made available in the technical literature or not.
Recently, the HNM adopted a computerised inventory system suitable to handle its collection comprising more than 2 million items (2008a). Parallel to this development of automatisation of the documentation, the archaeometrical evidence was organised into collections as well (2008b). Preparata, control samples and comparative material are stored in the Archaeometry Collection while written documents are organised in the form of Archaeometry Archives. There are also special archaeometry databases related to, but also surpassing our collections like the Ancient Charm Viable Objects Database for the inspection of internal properties of CH objects and various projects on raw material provenance.
Our aim is to develop these databases in a concordant way and connect the different data platforms for more efficient use. Such systems are partly available for the public in internet form like in the case of the British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx) The poster will presents the main elements of the system as well as state of art within the HNM collections.
Keywords: database, archaeometry, collection management