Exploring inferences, time and space in the annotation of museum catalogues: The Sloane virtual exhibition experience

Stephen STEAD¹ / Jonathan WHITSON-CLOUD² / Dominic OLDMAN²
(¹University of Southampton & Paveprime Ltd / ²British Museum, London, UK)

Keywords: CIDOC CRM; Museum catalogues; inference mapping

Abstract:
Modern digital museum catalogues differ from historic manual catalogues in that the record boundary is virtual, in the digital and physically on the page, for the manual. The history of the edits in digital systems can only be determined if the change history is explicitly recorded or if periodic snapshots of the data are preserved (although this only gives periodic aggregates of edits). In contrast the pre and post edit states of each edit and annotation are visible on the page in a physical catalogue volume. Card index systems vary in their completeness in this respect, as in some circumstances the card is replaced rather than updated. This has the effect of producing an aggregate of edits similar to a periodic digital snapshot.
Within the catalogue entries there are many possible interpretations of the use of geographical place names. For instance they can refer to the place of manufacture, the region of use, the place of collection, the region of a particular culture or the origin of the manufacturer. Each such interpretation has a different semantic meaning and consequently a different mapping to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM).
Similarly dates and other temporal appellations can have many meanings: date of manufacture, date of collection, date of accession into the museum, date of record compilation and/or editing or significant dates in the history or provenance of the object. Again these different meanings have different mappings to the CIDOC-CRM.
In addition to these content elements, there are spatial and temporal relationships between the catalogue entries and annotations in historic manual catalogues and between annotations in card index systems. These too have particular mappings to the CIDOC-CRM.
This paper continues the work on these different CIDOC-CRM mappings in the context of catalogues of the Sloane collection. In particular it will look at harnessing the mark-up of the entries and annotations to allow the documentation of inferences made from them.