Greetings,
I work in a museum that was once at the forefront of using of computers for
records management in Japan, but now continues to manage its collections
using an idiosyncratic and extremely rudimentary database system.
Is this a bad thing or a good thing?
Our system lacks what I would regard as the basic requirement of allowing
new data to be added while keeping all previous data attached to the same
record (annotation). The database is really just a static, non-interactive
table. This might mean that it is unlikely to be targeted by hackers
targeting widely-used modern systems. I hope so.
Part of the database has recently been made public with a website that
introduces the collector and the collections in English and in Japanese.
See: The George Brown Collection at
Minpaku<http://www.r.minpaku.ac.jp/GBC/index.html>
Subscribers to this list might like to see how we have done this. Any
comments, on the technical or aesthetic aspects, would be very welcome.
I work at a multi-lingual museum. The problems my colleagues face when
working across Japanese, English, and many other languages led me to create The
Research Cooperative <http://researchcooperative.org>.
The Research Cooperative (http://researchcooperative.org) is an NPO and
international network with more than 3000 members (researchers, translators,
editors, indexers, IT specialists, publishers, and others) (all topics, all
languages).
Our site includes forums for translation offers and requests. The network is
unique in that we actively encourage learners to join, as well as
professionals.
The translation of records and use of multiple-languages in databases is
technically not difficult - most modern systems are designed to permit the
use of multiple languages. Nevertheless, I expect that many members of this
list will find the aims and membership of our network of interest, and I
encourage all of you to visit and consider joining. Feedback about the
network is of course also welcome.
Social networks are also record collections, and the archiving systems for
the member records of social networks are still not well-developed, it
seems.
Best regards, Peter
--
Dr Peter J. Matthews
Department of Social Research
National Museum of Ethnology, Senri Expo Park, Suita City, Osaka 565-8511,
Japan.
Tel. +81-6-6878-8344 (office).
The Research Cooperative
http://researchcooperative.org
Please visit and join!
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