Museum 2015: Progress in development of collection management in Finland

1. Museum 2015: Progress in development of collection management in Finland Satu Savia, project manager Museum 2015

2. FinnishMuseums • Three national museums • The National Museum, which operates in conjunction with the National Board of Antiquities • the Museum of Natural History, which is a University of Helsinki institution • the National Gallery • 14 national specialist museums in different fields (cultural history, traffic, architecture and design) which perform duties relating to storage, research and exhibition. • Finland has 22 regional museums and 16 regional art museums, extending the network of museums to the whole country Satu Savia

3. FinnishMuseums • c. 160 professionally run museums responsible for over 300 museum sites and locations. • Their collections comprised nearly 4.5 million objects and over 286 000 works of art • Museum expenditure in Finland totalled 208.4 million euro. • The average costs per museum were 1,335,789 euro. Satu Savia

4. FinnishMuseums • Ministry of Education and Culture grants discretionary subsidies for the renovation of museum buildings, for ICT projects and the digitisation of museum collections. • It also grants state indemnities for art exhibitions • A number of museum projects have been co-financed by the EU Structural Fund. Additionally there are several smaller museums which receive discretionary subsidies from the National Board of Antiquities Satu Savia

6. Museum 2015 – backround • 300 different Collection Management Systems in Finland • IT Center for Science Ltd: “The current state of collections management in Finnish museums and how it could be developed” (2011) Satu Savia

7. Museum 2015 – backround • Pilot museums delivered data to the National Digital Library of Finland in 2011 • Pilot data pointed out: • numerous inconsistencies in the museum cataloging • different CMSs cause most of the inconsistencies in metadata • some problems solved by a harvesting tool LIDO, but not all Satu Savia

8. Aims of Museum 2015 • The main outputs 2012-2015: • Enterprise architecture for museum sector • Development of cataloging • New unified Collection Management System for Finnish Museums • Development of museum sector’s interface in National Digital Library Satu Savia

9. Working groups • outputs of Museum 2015 are made in working groups • consist of museum professionals, other specialists • comment groups Satu Savia

10. Working group for cataloging • primary aim: harmonize museum cataloging • draw up a process description for cataloging • create platform-independent and standardized cataloging instructions based on SPECTRUM • find a common consensus of classifications systems for museums to describe the objects that are chosen to catalogue • recommendations of the use of ontologies and controlled vocabularies Satu Savia

11. Working group of the enterprise architecture • create an overview of the museum sector's collection management as a whole • 4 sub-architectures: the business, data, application and technology Satu Savia

12. Working group of functional and technical requirements specifications • Aims: • System very up-to-date with the current state of progress made in information science • System follows standards • System is very easy to use • Challenges: • Variety of museums • Ease of use / CMS should be suitable for many different and complex processes Satu Savia

13. Working group for the public interface • Museum sectors own interface under National Digital Library’s national interface FINNA • Aim: create the most insightful and innovative window to museum’s collections Satu Savia

17. Thank you satu.savia@nba.fi www.nba.fi/en/development/museum_2015