Museum inventory is one of the fundamental activities of the museum. For the institution to succeed in the aspects of exhibition, publishing, interpretation or communicating the worth of collections, it must make inventory exercise a priority. An object is only adequately protected when it is well documented. The traditional inventory has been given a pride of place to more integrated solutions.
When dealing with intangible heritage that responsibly becomes even more crucial as this kind of heritage is by definition impossible to collect in traditional form (material) terms. Inventory of intangible heritage means, necessarily, inventory of intangible heritage supports (or media, such as audio tapes, video tapes, photographs and so on). More problematic is intangible heritage that is not (at least yet) recordable as is the case for smells, tastes or feelings. Museums tend to record these by using parallel or indirect media, such as oral descriptions as well as scientific and technological involvement in the processes. Dealing with the inventory of intangible heritage is thus a significant challenge for the contemporary museum. In the last decade, Museologist and lingua interpreters have been focusing parts of their research on the application of conceptual models to museum information systems only. The main reason being that conceptual models systems can represent, extend and reason about the information they stored, making it easier to format, exchange and adapt to new constraints and requirements in this field. During this period, an important part of compulsory research effort has been dedicated to intangible heritage as it is a delicate area of inventory with much shorter tradition on standard and procedures than material objects.
However, by researching in this domain, museums have been involved in the conception and the presentation of a range of possible solutions for this intricate and complex intangible collection and inventory management. For many years, International Council of Museums and Committee on International Documentation (ICOM & CIDOC) have been coming out with recommendations and guidelines concerning the management of information. Meanwhile, different museums and cultural institutions have their various and complex requirements and they deal with very many heterogeneous domain. The cultures that we operate in Africa is not the same with America or Europe. Therefore, the extent to which we can harness our intangible cultures and represent them would definitely be different from other clients.
Meanwhile, collections we had to deal with all over include material and non-material and conceptual/interpretative ones. In developing new solutions for these inventory system, the fact that standard information models such as the Relational Model suffer from some limitations because they had to deal with tabular data. Therefore, it is not easy to represent complex relationships and hierarchies between data and the items hence the search for models that can accommodate these detailed requirement. Consequently, every data or representative must be decided based on our systems on the Conceptual Reference Model (ICOM – CIDOC ).
These were attempts to bring information models to the field recognizing the pressing need of providing a clear and shared understanding with all the expressiveness and richness these techniques can offer,while at the same time avoiding the adoption of less expressive models. Again, one may pose a question to a museologist or curator in this manner, what is it that we expects the record to achieve in terms of answering users needs? Yes!. Although conceptual modeling techniques have been proposed a long time ago, their application by the museum and information sciences community has had to overcome the analysis of the huge work and investment already made in cataloging standards electronic and information systems. Our work is based on semantic constructs such as Ontologies, which define the concepts and terms in a given domain in a way that it can be ready by non-specialists. An Ontological approach has several benefits that also apply to our work on inventorying intangible heritage.
Firstly, It is a high-level description of a domain, independent of implementation details, where Ontologies can be translated to different implementation systems and formats. For instance, when a Yoruba man lay sown on the floor to greet an elderly man or woman, it will be a very huge surprise to the Europeans or even people from other African society. If such recording is composed and showcased in the museum intangible exhibit, the demonstration should be able to capture and give an explanation of a certain pattern of behavior generally acceptable in Yorubaland which if deviated from can be compelled to as a rebel or rude with any character that portray such. The bottom line is to explain that it deals with the nature of existence. In fact, the concept is to categorise and showcase a relationship between one culture that differs from the other.
Secondly, several institutions can share and agree upon an Ontology, regardless of the specificities of their implementations.
Besides, being shared, ontologies can be reused; once a time or units of measure has been created as several institutions can reuse it without having to define themselves.
As museums move from dealing with tangible material objects to intangible entities (such as contexts, implications between entities, traditions, believes, customs, social, economic and moral concepts), there is therefore the need for more semantically powerful and meaningful display of information models. There is also a shifting role that museums are playing now, within the possibilities of the internet and the web which have opened up. In fact, our work had to face a double challenge to inventory the intangible and to make it workable and accessible on the web. Several other projects have been working towards those goals, the Europeans initiative is the most recent and probably the most ambitious project for putting heterogeneous cultural information accessible. For instance, the national projects such as the Finish Museum on the web are also underway, and it is expected that inter-operation between them will be possible in the near future.
With the amount of progress so far made regarding the presentation and users of non-material cultures across the globe, more and effective result oriented needs are to be practiced. Some of the users requirement are :
a. A web-based system accessible from any web access point both for public view and for work where all functions had to be enabled via a web access.
b. A multi-level access system allowing different types of access with specifically defined permission for typical users. This should be by a login and password code. Meaning that all registered normal functions of museum inventorying and collection management had to be included.
c. A universal system has to be adopted, that can communicate openly with main standards all over the world. This means Browsers must be Java Script enabled and support based. This will help to reduce images and graphics on the client machine who may eventually claim the originality of such inventory.
d. The software architecture of the system should be object – oriented view of the data. This is a common approach that will give flexibility of the object model and convenience. This will also allow the museum staff to monitor what goes on outside. The record files of such being created, is retrieved and accessed using the same functions and criteria as for intangible heritage.
We know that the users also required some length of time and as a result, intangible heritage can be related to the material objects by linking them as related or by using different type of interpretative linkage. This also will enable a complete comprehension of both the material and non-material culture in one piece. The first level of access only permit visitors who appear more like virtual tourists because of the restricted data not available in details, the same thing is applicable to physical visitors who may have access to the machines for viewing purpose.
The second group mentioned are the researchers who need to retrieve other kind of data where for this purpose the system administrators need to create also a temporary logins with specific usernames and password. However, researchers are not also allowed to input data or edit or change records to suit their purpose for security of all objects available in the museum. Also, for them not to lay claim as owners or originator of the collections, staff from the museum has to have personal usernames and for those allowed to creating record files such as the curator, archaeologist, conservators, ethnographers as well. All action of logged- in-username is centralized and stored so as to know exactly what was done or to be done by any of these professionals. With that, already created records that is universally acceptable cannot be changed overnight. It is a network security tight that does not permit every possibility but only by the administrators on concessions concerning objects. Visitors may search the system by entering the key words, look for the location of objects but cannot alter any record already inputted.
All functions are available for only administrators as mentioned earlier, they can see all information recorded in the system and they are the only one that can edit or change all record files. They also know who is working in the system and privilege information. If by chance, something unexpected is inputted in the web system they are able to disable them from existing. However, the system is not closed to future upgrades, there is need for adjustment as new intrinsic arise.
Another application was experimented with the Hat Industry Museum by (S Joa’o da Madeira) in the Ecomuseum of Barroso. There was this impressive collection of oral and video testimonies gathered during several years of research. With several hundred hours of recording and comprehensive groups of photographs of neighbourhoods, houses yards, local trade and the entire environment of workers, sounds from the offices were equally collected. They found old machinery dating from the early 20th Century, which were still in good working condition. Both the sound and the machines were used for the recreation of the exhibition as to how the factory used to function. Finally, smell which is the most difficult to preserve were also collected and preserved. This exhibition is one reference point in Europe on how intangible heritage is a possibility with standard material support like video tapes or digital recording or encapsulated in more innovative “Media” (Like Jars with a specific smelling substance).
Ecomuseum survey intends to address all major themes from the region to ethnographic and social issues. In this experiment, diversity is one of the richness of the Barroso region. The task of presenting a complex system where climate, geography, plants, animals and humans are part of an intricate and multifaceted organism. To achieve such a goal, they undertook anthropological, ethnographic, archaeological, zoological, botanical and even architectural research. This took two and a half years of elaborate gathering of audio-visual documents which encompass several thematic areas such as traditional, agricultural, food festivals and religious ceremonies. Human organization (such as the local football club of the village, local business, places to stay, restaurants and major traditional events) also had to have a specific record file and the correspondent virtual presence. These are to be searched so that people working in the system would not need to deal with material information in a different phase from non-material information.
It is actually called networking which saves time and effort and result in a richer and more attractive inventory. This is the global model being possible to retrieve and to access both tangible and intangible heritage in similar ways. Yet, as time goes on, each project in the museum will yield sophisticated solution. Museums world-wide will certainly connect with the latest innovation in technology which is Artificial Intelligence.
*Mobunubhata is Assistant Director (Museums), National Commission For Museums and Monuments, Benin City.
