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Published: March 15, 2001.

Russian Museums on the WEB: Problems and Experience

Nadezda V Brakker and Leonid A Kujbyshev, Centre on the Problems of Informatisation of Culture (Centre PIC), Russia

Abstract

The Russian sector of the Internet (.ru, RUNET) is growing very speedily. By the end of the year 2000 the number of the Internet users in Russia is estimated by the largest research institutions COMCON and Gallup-media that it will be 3,5 million compared with several hundred thousands at the end of 1997. The Russian Government plans to have 10 times more Internet connections in the next 3 years. What information Russian Internet users will find in the Internet, and whether this information is valuable for researches, for education, and for cultural tourism depends mostly on cultural content providers -- museums, libraries, archives, research institutions.

Types of museum Internet sites.

Booklet

Many Russian museums have no clear understanding why they is needed to be presented on the Internet. As a rule, a museum starts an Internet project just because it is stylish when it is possible to find financial support. That is why the majority of Russian museum sites are developed in the form of a booklet with several images, the list of museum collections and working hours. As a rule a museum site is designed by a technology firm without special strategy and planning; the project is finished when the site is opened on the Internet. Only one or two museum specialists who supplied texts and images to technologists know that their museum is presented in the Internet, they are not interested in visitors' statistic and do not refresh the information. More refined sites of that type contain the history of the museum, plans of museum halls etc. (for example, Museum-Reserve "Kolomenskoye", Moscow www.museum.ru/Kolomen; Museum-panorama "Borodino Battle", Moscow with surround video www.museum.ru/borodino; The Museum-estate "Archangelskoye", Moscow region, www.museum.ru/museum/archang/ and many others). Yet these sites are also static and not oriented to the user. As a rule these are sites of a museum having no Internet connection and no understanding of the Internet opportunities.

Booklet with news and tourist information

Museum sites of this type also contain a static part in the form of a museum booklet or a guide but additionally has a news section -- new expositions, exhibitions, lectures and other museum events. These sites are more oriented to the user, namely, to possible museum visitors. The best examples contain visitors information, services, business activities, rich contact information (for example, the State Museum "Tsarskoje Selo", Saint-Petersburg region, www.tzar.ru ). As a rule sites of this type are also developed and designed by a technology firm with more help and interest from museum specialists; they are better managed if the museum assigns a special person responsible for the site content and support.

Museum guide, news and museum catalogues

The sites of this type contain richer content including images and descriptions of masterpieces, illustrated exhibition catalogues, full screen images. Good examples of Russian museum sites of this type are The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (www.museum.ru/gmii ), the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (www.tretyakov.ru -- developed inside the museum), the State Russian Museum, Saint-Petersburg (www.rusmuseum.ru -- developed by museums specialists).

These sites are oriented to professionals and amateurs but as a rule do not specify their audience. Just a few museums present full catalogues of their collections; in case of full cataloguing the imaging is evidently not enough. Museum sites of this type are designed inside the museum by museum technologists with the help of museum researchers; such a museum as a rule has got good experience of museum informatics, automated registration and cataloguing of museum collections.

Distinguishing feature of museum information on the Internet is that Russian museums as a rule do not present catalogues of their collections, though exhibition catalogues could be found in the Russian Internet sector. This is caused first of all by the lack of a federal program, government decisions on legal issues, all-Russian standards of meta-data, terminology and imaging.

Secondary, more then a half of the state museums haven't got computers and do not use automated systems for collection management; just a few museums using collection management systems inputted their catalogues in full; imaging is even a greater problem. Aside from financial reasons, indifferent state institutions are to the problems of digitization of museum collections. Whether to use or not to use an automated system, to solve or not to solve the problem of full electronic cataloguing, to open digitized collection in INTERNET or not is an individual decision of each museum. Since the majority of Russian museum fund belongs to the State governmental decisions are needed.

Some Russian museums (The State Hermitage http://www.hermitage.ru , for example) started to put catalogues of their collections on the Internet. In 2000 the first museum of Russia gave Internet access to the full museum collection catalogue -- this is the 'Rybinsk State Historical and Art Museum-Preserve' (http://rmuseum.orbis.spb.ru). The catalogue contains descriptions of 45000 museum items with good search possibilities and about 3000 images, the image collection grows speedily.

This became possible with development and installation of a new version of Integrated Automated Museum Information System (IAMIS-2000) designed by AltSoft, St-Petersburg. This is a modern client-server system on Oracle software platform. Automatically designed Internet catalogue is a remarkable feature of IAMIS. Previous versions of IAMIS are installed in 35 other museums, some of them are now in the process of IAMIS-2000 installation and converting their data-bases into IAMIS-2000 structure. There is a strong hope that more and more museum catalogues will be opened on the Internet in the nearest future.

Access to museum Internet sites.

It is important which Internet server or portal a museum is linked to. Regional or city portals, educational portals, tourist oriented portals etc. brings special user groups to a museum site. If the site answers the needs of the user group it is more popular and more effective. Management of a museum site should include the strategy of adequate context for it.

For example, a new Internet server "Museums of Siberia" (www.sibmuseum.com) presents seven museums of the region and is addressed both to the public and to professionals. Each museum site has the same structure: Museum guide, News, Museum Shop, Exhibition Exchange, Contacts, Search Projects, References, Forum. The Siberian site is in Russian only but "Culture of Karelia" (www.karelia.ru) is in Russian, English and Finnish and contains information resources on education, tourism, museums sites, libraries and monuments of the region. Positioning of a museum site on a regional server into the wide context of other cultural institutions of the region gives better access possibilities for local users and for cultural tourism.

A specialised tourist server with rich tourist information gives better possibilities for a museum site oriented to tourists. A good example of a project of this sort is "Nizhny Novgorod Internet Reference on Cultural Tourism" (www.museum.nnov.ru/tourism -- in Russian) presenting a set of regional cultural tours, in which museum sites play the key role.

Professionally oriented museum sites find better context at the Web-servers of professional associations. For example, the "Association of museums of Russia" server (www.amr-museum.ru) presents (in Russian) official information, museum exhibition activities and exchange, museums and tourism pages, sites of museums-members, on-line magazine "World and Museum".

We can't give a good example of a specialized server with museum and other cultural information for educational purposes giving access to pre-developed packages oriented to different age and education user groups but we believe that this could be a good way to reach possible visitors of a museum Web-site. Students, professional and amateur researchers are need access to museum catalogues, or even wider, to cultural heritage catalogues with rich search possibilities.

Museum Internet catalogue as a part of Cultural Heritage Net

The world cultural heritage is not only museum items but also includes outstanding buildings and sites, monuments, books and documents, theatre, music, folk art etc., all these cross-linked. The concept of a Cultural Heritage Net is connected with the desire to give open access to the World Cultural Heritage in digital form using information and communication technologies.

If a user is interested in the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy and makes searches in a Cultural Heritage Net he should get information on Tolstoy's biography, Museums of Lev Tolstoy, descriptions of museum items from museum collections; bibliography; libraries, Internet-sites, CD-ROMs on Tolstoy and his works; full texts of Tolstoy's books and illustrations to the texts; theatre performances and actors; movies; monuments etc. -- full information on the subject regardless of countries and institutions where it is gathered and kept, regardless of the media (texts, images, audio, video etc), independent of the technological platforms (PC, MAC, Windows, UNIX, Linux, etc.) of the networked information systems.

From the point of view of the Cultural Heritage barriers between cultural institutions are artificial. Museums keep rare books funds and paper documents, the same could be kept in libraries or archives, some libraries organize their own museums. To achieve the goal of open access to the World Cultural Heritage, network information systems of cultural institutions need to integrate information stored in distributed data-bases on the ground of interoperability of content.

To integrate of information resources, a number of standardized descriptions and meta-data problems need to be solved.

The lack of standards for museum information and museum thesauri in Russia is a serious obstacle to development of the Russian Cultural Heritage Net. Understanding this problem the Association for Documentation and Technologies (ADIT) of the Russian ICOM initiated in 2000 four R&D projects of creation standardized descriptions of Cultural Heritage items for the Internet (museum item description, non-movable heritage description, archaeology site description and cultural landscape description), harmonized with international standards. The projects were supported by the Open Society Institute (George Soros fund -- Russia). Now the project teams are researching the possibility of making a common Internet description for cultural heritage items, this is the stage of harmonizing the four standardized descriptions which should lead to interoperability of content at least in these four sectors of the Russian Cultural Heritage.

One more problem waiting for a reasonable solution is the integration of library and museum catalogues on the ground of information search in distributed data-bases using common meta-data.

Russian museums are in a few steps behind libraries in computerization, integration of resources and presenting information resources on the Internet because:

each museum item is unique as well as each museum collection is unique when books are printed in many copies and funds of different libraries are partly the same; this results in corporate cataloguing of library funds impossible for museums;
developed co-operation of Russian libraries in pre-computer period (centralized library systems etc.); co-operation of museums was connected with common exhibitions only;
development of national and international library standards, meta-data and communicative formats; absence of national standards of museum descriptions;
primordial orientation of a library to give open access to full library catalogue; full museum catalogues as usual were published for specialists only by the largest museums and were never displayed for everyday visitors
existence of branch and federal programs and projects of library informatisation, lack of such a program in museum area

One of the projects supporting co-operation and integration of library catalogues is LibWeb (http://www.libweb.ru/index.en.html). LibWeb is a distributed library network of Russia based on the software and hardware environment being created under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Science and Technologies, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Russian Ministry of Education, the Russian Academy of Sciences in the framework of the Interagency Program for Building Computer Networks for Research and Education (1995-2000). The second stage of the project LibWeb-2 (2001 -- 2003) is intended to start experiments of integrating diversified collections of museums and archive (multimedia data - images, audio, video) with library data on the ground of international meta-data standards.

International access to Russian cultural heritage

The majority of Russian museum Web-sites are in Russian. Just a few have English pages, so there is a problem of international access to Russian cultural heritage. The problem is more complicated as there are several Cyrillic coding tables (ISO, KOI8, Windows). One of the solutions is to create English variants of Russian sites. This variant favors considerable extra expenses for museums and require a clear understanding of their goals. English and Russian pages of a museum site should be different in content as they are oriented to completely different user groups, to groups with different cultural backgrounds.

To have access to international pages of Russian museums special English language search servers or portals are needed. This concept is used on the Portal "Museums of Russia" (www.museum.ru ) which have Russian and English entrances. This Portal gives access to brief information on 2000 museums of Russia and to more then 500 Russian museum sites, some of them have English pages. It is possible to choose museum types (new sites, selected sites, official sites, unofficial sites, guides) and museum profile (art, history, natural history, military history, literature, theatre, music, ethnography, local history, science, technology, industry, memorial and multy-disciplinary museums) architecture and parks sites. Extended search possibilities include name, description, region, location, keywords. As a result of the search the user gets annotated list of museums in English even if the sites are only in Russian.

The other way to solve the language barrier problem is to use for the INTERNET search poly-lingual thesauri containing terms and concepts needed to classify and describe the World Cultural Heritage. Thesauri of this sort are created by ICOM, ICOMOS and some other international institutions. Active partnership of Russian specialists is needed to include Russian terminology into existing thesauri, for example, into Getty thesauri. Participation of Russians in creating international standards and meta-data for description of cultural objects, promotion of international standards in Russia will be of great help.

Festivals, Conferences, Seminars

The need for professional contacts, discussions of new technologies in cultural area, joint activities in information resources integration based on Web-technologies has led to organizing a number of festivals, professional conferences and seminars. The list below is not nearly complete, but it demonstrates the high level of professional activities in the field. Each event listed below had a special section for presentations of museum Web-sites, underlying common problems and specific connections of museums and other heritage institutions and sharing experiences:

The International Congress "Internet in education, economics and art" under the agis of UNESCO and Goethe Institute, January, 2000, Moscow
The second international conference "Internet. Society. Personality - IOL-2000" (Open Society Institute -- George Soros Fund), February, 2000, Saint-Petersburg
International Conference "Managing the Digital Future of Libraries", February, 2000, Moscow
The second Moscow International Festival "Intermuseum 2000", March, 2000, Moscow
The Second Conference "Information resources and Technologies for Non-movable Heritage Preserve", April, 2000, Moscow
The International Congress "Pro@Contra -- MachineMachy (MediaTechnology-MediaArt-MediaConsciousness", May, 2000, Moscow
The Fourth International Festival "Anigraph -- TV -- Cinema" and CD-ROM contest "Anigraph. Content", May, 2000, Moscow
ADIT'2000 4th Annual Conference "Museums and Information Space: Computer Technologies and Cultural Heritage" May, 2000, Vladimir
The Seventh International Conference "Crimea 2000": "Libraries and Associations in the Transient World: New Technologies and New Forms of Cooperation" under the aegis of IFLA, June, 2000, Crimea
The Second All-Russian Conference "Digital Libraries: advanced methods and technologies, electronic collections" (Protvino, September, 2000)

The events listed above are devoted mainly to information technologies in a special branch of the cultural area -- art, museums, libraries, non-movable heritage. The only conference in Russia which brings together specialists of the cultural area on the whole to discuss wide variety of topics concerning information and communication technologies for cultural heritage is EVA Moscow.

The third international conference "Electronic imaging and the visual arts" (EVA2000 Moscow http://www.artinfo.ru/eva) took place in the State Tretyakov Gallery (http://www.tretyakov.ru) October, 30 -- November, 3, 2000 with the theme "Digital Convergence: New Technologies for Museums, Galleries, Libraries &Archives". Conference topics included New information and communication technologies for cultural heritage (strategic issues; technological issues; case studies from museums, libraries, archives, non-movable heritage, modern art); Standards and Meta-data; Cultural Heritage and E-commerce; Informatisation of museum libraries; Digital cultural heritage and education; Integration of regional cultural information resources; International co-operation. The conference was organized by VASARI UK, Centre PIC and the State Tretyakov Gallery and supported by European Commission, by the Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation, by the Ministry of Science of Russian Federation, by Russian Fund of Fundamental Researches, by the Open Society Institute (George Soros Foundation - Russia). During the Conference the exhibition of Russian multimedia (on-line and off-line) on culture, art and education was organized. EVA2000 Moscow gathered more then 600 delegates, 130 speakers, 60 exhibitors.

EVA Moscow is an annual event: EVA2001 Moscow is scheduled for the first week of December, 2001 with the conference theme "Heritage for all". The delegates and speakers of Museums and the Web are invited to take part in EVA2001 Moscow with their papers and demonstrations. We believe that face-to-face contacts will speed up international co-operation.