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Somewhere in a drawer lies the fossil your museum visitor wants to see —
somewhere in one of a few hundred drawers of neatly labeled, but similar looking
specimens. Not to worry: far in the past, a meticulous curator had arranged
all of the specimens in this collection alphabetically by genus and species.
It should be just about … here!
Only, perhaps it’s not. Unbeknownst to you, your visitor has requested
the fossil under its new name, assigned in a paper only last year, instead of
the old name under which it was cataloged 60 years ago. A quick trip to the
library reveals the change and, sure enough, there is the specimen, seven cabinets
away and four drawers down.
As any collector knows, managing the information associated with large groups
of objects is a difficult chore. When you are charged with managing and preserving
an ever-increasing amount of data — and are legally bound to do so in perpetuity,
as museums are — the chore takes on an entirely new dimension. How do you
plan for future expansion? How can you make sure that information stays up-to-date
year after year? How will important institutional knowledge be maintained as
different staff members with different specialties come to care for varied collections?
And, most importantly, how can this store of information be made accessible
for public benefit?
These problems are not new for museums, nor are they uncommon.
The Illinois State Museum maintains a sizable collection of fossil plant and
animal specimens from the famous Mazon Creek area of northeastern Illinois.
This collection is important for two reasons. First, it contains numerous type
and figured specimens — those first examples used to describe a new species
or illustrate it in a scientific paper. Also, some of the specimens are among
the museum’s founding collections, received from the original Geological
Survey of Illinois in the late 1800s.
These collections have supported considerable scholarly work. Unfortunately,
in recent years, work on the museum’s geological collections had shifted
to other areas and the Mazon Creek materials were falling into disuse. With
the recent retirement of a curator expert in these specimens, it has been difficult
to keep catalogs updated and to provide interested researchers access to the
collection.
I was asked to devise a plan for revitalizing the collection by increasing its
availability and utility to researchers and the public. By trade I am a technologist,
not a geologist, and I opted to hit the problem with the largest hammer at my
disposal: the Internet. Museums have been experimenting with online technologies
since the early days of the public Internet because constructions such as “virtual
exhibits” and online collections databases are ideally suited to meeting
museums’ two primary, and sometimes conflicting, duties: preserving objects
for posterity and making them available for the public to use. Access via the
Internet to digitized collections often can provide enough information to answer
a question without requiring a researcher to handle the actual objects, thereby
avoiding risk of damage. The same technologies allow information to be disseminated
to a global audience, instead of only people living near a museum or having
the means to travel there.
At the same time, I wondered whether an online database could also provide a
third function: assisting in the upkeep of collections information by allowing
users to add new information or commentary about existing information in the
digital collection.
A project such as the one I undertook has three components: identifying the
information that the system must hold; designing and implementing an appropriate
architecture for the system; and, digitizing the collections objects and their
associated information.
I began with part of the third component. In this early phase of the project,
I chose to work with only a portion of the Mazon Creek materials: the George
Langford Collection, 1,672 Pennsylvanian fossil specimens from the Francis Creek
Shale of Will and Grundy counties in northeast Illinois given by a single donor
in 1938.
Fossils from this area are notable for the level of fine anatomical detail preserved,
even in soft-bodied organisms. The collection is mostly botanical, but does
include some animal fossils. The specimens themselves are mostly in the form
of split ironstone concretions, with the fossil revealed in part and counterpart
along the plane of separation. They range in size from small buttons to large
dinner plates, and in weight from a few grams to several kilograms.
My intent was to provide a digital image for each specimen at about 600 dots
per inch, sufficient detail for figuring or presenting an argument about taxonomic
description. I tried digital photography and scanning prints of conventional
photographs, but the method that rendered the specimens in the best detail and
at the most efficient cost and schedule was to scan the specimens in directly
on a flatbed scanner. For all but those specimens with very irregular surfaces,
where more than a centimeter lies between high and low surface points, direct
digitization produces fine results. Color fidelity and contrast in these images
are as good as or better than the results achieved through conventional photography,
and reproduction of details is excellent.
Determining what information to include in the database was not difficult, because
the museum already maintained a thorough paper record of cataloging information
about each specimen. I duplicated this paper record in the database design,
making alterations at certain points in order to form a more flexible, relational
structure among the data. I also surveyed records pertaining to specimens outside
the Langford Collection, so that data not needed initially, but necessary for
future expansion, could be included early. To this basic database structure,
I added facilities for referencing any literature where particular specimens
had been published. Finally, and unusually for museum collections databases,
I added a tool whereby users of the database could annotate the records where
they wished to provide additional information about a specimen or dispute the
existing information. Users are not able to alter the existing data, but their
comments will be permanent.
The architecture I designed for the system has three layers. The top layer is
the code forming the Web interface and is what the user actually sees. The middle
layer is an intermediate database, accessed by the Web interface and containing
the collections information to be served online. The bottom layer is the database
used within the museum, configured to provide the intermediate database with
information automatically. This structure shelters sensitive information in
the internal database, such as appraisal values, from the Web interface. It
also makes it possible to expand the scope of information available through
the system, simply by connecting additional collections databases to the middle-layer
database as necessary.
The most difficult part of this architectural design was selecting a suitable
data model for the intermediate database. A data model, in database parlance,
is the framework used to arrange the information and link it relationally. I
investigated several existing models from large museums and universities, but
was not entirely satisfied with any of them. Ultimately, I had to construct
one from scratch that was based on the museum’s record keeping practices.
It is flexible enough to accommodate all of the information identified for inclusion
in the database, and expandable enough to accept data from the museum’s
other collecting areas, if required.
The Mazon Creek Collections Database made its first appearance on the museum’s
Web site in early 2001. It quickly has become one of the most frequently visited
portions of the site. Visit the database.
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