Before getting a job at the museum, I had little idea of his inner work and the role of information resources in it. But in fact, they are extremely important for the museum. You may have heard that it takes years to watch all the exhibits of a major museum. But coming into it, this scale is not felt. Here are the halls, here are the exhibits in the halls. It seems that in a day you will see them all. Well, maybe two days. What's the catch? The fact is that visitors do not see most of the museum’s collection. Many museum items are in storage, at restoration and exhibitions in other museums. Each museum object is “assigned” to an employee who monitors its fate - sends to exhibitions, restoration and studies it - the keepers of museum objects. An account card is created for each exhibit, in which the name of this exhibit is written, the date of its creation, the author, what it is made of, how it looks, how much it weighs and a lot of other useful information. An example of a brief description can be found on the website of the State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation: https://goskatalog.ru/portal/#/collections?id=21904194. This example shows that information about a museum item is strictly divided into separate columns. That is, it is not just a catalog in the form of a book in which everything is combined into single descriptions, but each characteristic is displayed and stored separately.
Large museums use specialized software to store information about exhibits. After the museum receives a systematic electronic database, it can begin to use it to search for any information. For example, you can find all the pieces of furniture made in the 19th century that are available in the museum, make a list of them and select something that is necessary for the current task. Such automation is very important and greatly facilitates the work at the initial stage. In addition, the problem of printing various lists of museum objects and documentation for them (and this work many packs of paper annually) is being solved. In our museum, the jobs of users of this software are very fragmented. And a local area network was created for the keepers. The Internet was an expensive at that time, and accessed via dialup modems. Later, we had a fast fiber optic Internet connection and the network began to grow rapidly.
Today I will describe only the initial stage of our development and tell a little about museum objects. I'll start with a description of the museum’s local area network. When I came to the museum, it already had a twisted-pair network with a speed of 100 Mbit/s on switches (not hubs). In some places, the leftovers of coaxial cables were visible, but they were not in use. Fiber optic cables were installed between the buildings. Everybody worked in one network segment (there was no routing). To work with the “museum software”, three servers were used, which were in the offices of employees. Later, one of the server rack was moved to the corridor. For a small number of users working mainly with servers, such a structure was enough. But there were also its "dark corners" in it. It is no secret that new workplaces appear more often than you want. And you need to pull the network to them. Unfortunately, workplaces appeared extremely unevenly. As a result, some of them turned out to be “behind the switches” in the offices of other people who, when they went home, “turned off the electricity”. To solve this problem, switches at the attics were later used.
And now a little about museum objects and information about them. There are many different ancient values - furniture, paintings, coins, books. They require careful and different handling, they have a different story. Therefore, they are divided into “funds”. For each fund, a museum keeper is hired - a specialist in his field. The keeper enters information on museum objects into the database. There are requirements of the Ministry of Culture about what information the museum is required to store about each item. And there are requirements that the museum must transfer to the State Catalog. The State Catalog combines information on all museum items in Russia (at the moment it is being filled). What you see on his website is not all the information available to museums. Museum internal databases may be more complete.
In addition to studying museum objects, they are checked from time to time. We have a special schedule according to which each fund is checked by specially trained people at some intervals. They make complete lists of museum items (hello, database), come to the storage and examine each item - is it there, is it similar to its photo, is it necessary to make changes to its safety. In this important work the “museum software” helps a lot.
In the next part I will talk about the collapse of our network…
PS: Google could not translate State Catalog website AJAX content online :(
