Canadian Museum of History Visit

Our visit today to the Resource Center, and our tour of some of the museum's collections was incredibly illuminating regarding the complexity of the issue of digitizing, and making accessible, an immense amount of data. We were incredibly lucky to be given transparent thoughts on the problems the museum is facing directly from its resource center staff. With an upcoming digital transformation on the way, and the daily conundrum of assisting, and sourcing material for, researchers, it's clear that this issue is on the forefront of the resource center's members. While we hear huge numbers being thrown around by museum's regarding the size of their collections, and we hear about the storage of collections, it is an entirely different beast to actually visually taking in the massive amount of objects in a storage room. It was fascinating to learn about all of the different coding systems that operate within the museums, and their inability to always speak to each other. The issue of legacy data, and paper ledgers (which predate the previous database) are factors I hadn't considered. Despite recently working on a digital transformation in my Coop, I hadn't made that connection about the universal issue of data management until hearing about the museum's own problems. I was particularly struck by Tanya's comment about accessibility being so much more than digitization, but rather about how databases speak to users, and how to transform the user-end experience to open the museum's collections up to audiences outside of their current demographic. The language use is profound. The language used is sometimes problematic (settler names for Indigenous objects). The language used is sometimes too technical, and leaves out certain demographics as a result. The language used determines how the database can serve those in both official languages. The language creates more metadata that needs to be properly stored and associated with objects.

I was overwhelmed by all the work there is to be done, and also by all the work they have managed to do. I certainly won't be judgemental or gruff when perusing a museum or gallery's website again.

Is it possible to ever manage all of this data? How are we able to create an accessible pathway with such a ginormous amount of data and objects available to view? How do we prevent archives/objects/artworks from getting lost in the mix?