The online handout offers museums and collections low-threshold access to relevant international standards for the cataloguing and online publication of object information. The recommendation is intended to raise the awareness of cultural heritage institutions for data quality and to anchor the FAIR and CARE principles - which promote better findability and ethical handling of object information on the Internet - in the working methods of museums and collections. The recommendation pursues the vision that data from museums can be connected beyond individual institutions, can be found online by the widest possible audience and can be reused as far as ethically and legally permissible. In this way, more people should become aware of the work of museums and benefit from it in their leisure time, at school, at work and in research.
The Minimum Record Recommendation is aimed directly at museum employees as well as museum advisory services and actors from the fields of further education and teaching who are involved in communicating standards for the online publication of object information. In addition, providers of database software are explicitly addressed, who can incorporate the recommendation into their software products and thus be enabled to technically support the standards-based online publication of object data.
Usage scenarios for the minimum data set recommendation are the publication of object information from museums in online collections of individual institutions, but also the provision via cultural portals such as the German Digital Library and Europeana as well as via application programming interfaces. In the future, the recommendation should also facilitate the integration of object information into the Cultural Data Space and the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage.
Thanks to the compatibility of the Minimum Record Recommendation with the ICOM CIDOC standard LIDO, museums can contextualize their objects in a structured manner and describe them reliably and interoperably using controlled vocabularies. The improved data quality ultimately lays the foundation for subsequent use by AI applications in line with the objectives and requirements of museums.
The Minimum Record Recommendation Working Group was initiated in 2022 by the Museum and Image / Sound Library desks of the German Digital Library and the Digitization Working Group of the Conference of Museum Advisory Bodies in the Federal States (KMBL) and digiS Berlin. Members of the Working Group are employees and representatives of the Institute for Museum Research, the Documentation Section of the German Museums Association (DMB), the Coordination Office for Scientific University Collections in Germany, digiCULT-Verbund eG, museum-digital Deutschland e. V., NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Objects, the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the Übersee-Museum Bremen.
The Minimum Record Recommendation for Museums and Collections (version 1.0) can be accessed via the link www.minimaldatensatz.de. It will be presented at the following online events:
ICOM Germany, Austria, Switzerland
18th International Lake Constance Symposium
Workshop "Be FAIR and CARE: Tools for the online publication of object information"
24.05.2024, 14:00-16:30
Saxony-Anhalt Museum Association and Institute for Museum Research
Launch of the minimum data set recommendation for museums and collections (version 1.0)
10.06.2024, 16:00-18:00 h
Contact
Dr. Elisabeth Böhm, Museums Association Saxony-Anhalt
Sybille Greisinger, State Office for the Non-State Museums in Bavaria
Chiara Marchini, DDB Museum Department, Institute for Museum Research
Dr. Domenic Städtler, Institute for Museum Research
info [at] minimaldatensatz.de (info[at]minimaldatensatz[dot]de)
Download the German press release (PDF)