Subject Access to a Multilingual Museum Database: A Step-by-Step Approach to the Digitization Process

Translating visual works into verbal form is clearly a formidable task. While libraries have a century of cooperative cataloguing behind them, museums and other cultural institutions have tended to go their separate ways, believing the objects in their collections are unique. Dr. Kupietzky has put together a guide for digitizing encyclopedic, multilingual museums that promises to both standardize and streamline the process. Part I provides a review of the literature and of the problems concerning methods used in the computerization of museums. Part II offers practical guidelines for mono- or multilingual museums seeking to implement a database to aid in cataloguing their holdings. A six-step process of computerizing museum collections (the SAGE-K method) was developed to facilitate the application of these ideas by all museums and enable them to achieve the goal of digitization.

Dr. Allison Siffre Guedalia Kupietzky is Collections Database Manager for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.