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Access to art collections using Encoded Archival Description and beyond: the future of large-scale consortium projects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Richard Rinehart*
Affiliation:
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Faculty, Department of Art Practice, University of California, Berkeley, 2625 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, California, 94709, USA
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Extract

In a Herculean effort to distribute information about art collections on a previously unknown scale, museums, arts organizations, libraries, and archives have been hard at work developing standards and implementing testbed projects, large-scale union databases which integrate and disseminate information. Two such projects are ‘Conceptual and Intermedia Online’ (CIAO) and ‘Museums and the Online Archive of California’ (MOAC), both using the Encoded Archival Description to describe and provide access to art and other cultural collections. But what is the future of such collaborations and the content portals they spawn? Will they be able to scale up to include hundreds or thousands of institutions, using current models? What are the limitations for such consortia? What are the limitations for participating institutions? Several options appear on the horizon, and one simple need suggests looking to decentralization, and back to the individual institution, for the solution to sharing art and cultural content on a truly vast scale.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2001

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