C. E. Ore
(The Museum Project, Oslo University, Norway)
The main source to artefact information in the Norwegian University Museums is the verbose acquisition catalogues published since 1830. Since 1992 30,000 printed pages spanning 170 years have been converted to XML documents with extensive content mark-up. The mark-up enables an automatic extraction of information into a traditional artefact database. By a semi-automatic transformation of the mark-up, we have also mapped the information into an event-oriented database based on CIDOC-CRM. In both cases there are direct links between the database and the texts thus enabling the user to check the source for the information in the database. In the future scholars may do further text analysis. However, the result of such an analysis should also be stored in the electronic text. Our work since 1992 has shown us that this is safe, flexible and enables source criticism and reuse of the material.
