Report on Session 6, Held Saturday 7 March 1998 at the ARLIS/NA Conference,
Philadelphia, PA

Session Title:  Accessing Cultural Heritage Information Through CHIN


Session moderator Cheryl Siegal, Librarian, Vancouver Art Gallery, welcomed
attendees and, referring to CHIN  as a programme unique in the world,
briefly described its early days. Cheryl then introduced the panelists.


Panelist 1. Wendy Thomas, CHIN Project Leader.

Wendy described developments during the first 25 years of CHIN (Canadian
Heritage Information Network), from its beginnings in 1972 when Canada
created the National Inventory Programme (NIP), with a mandate to create
computerized inventories of humanities and natural science collections and
of archaeological sites in Canada.

Renamed in 1981-82, CHIN's mandate was to provide collections management
services to museums. The speaker described the collaboration of museums to
create Canada's National Inventories (containing information on 25 million
objects representing 80-90% of the objects in Canadian museums); the
formation of discipline-based working groups; the nature of their
discussions/debates; and their promotion of shared documentation standards.
The creation of CIN (Conservation Information Network) in 1987, its
partners, its mandate, and its databases, were described, with reference to
its contributions to global efforts to protect world heritage.

A host of reference database services was outlined, including the Artists in
Canada directory, the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, the Heritage Law
Bibliography, the Historic Sites Supplies Handbook, Sponsored Research in
the History of Art, Religious Objects Collections, and Sample CD-ROM
Licensing Agreements for Museums.

Access to the various kinds of information available, including Web access,
was detailed, followed by a description of new technologies tested, virtual
projects, other current projects in which CHIN is an active participant
(CIMI, REACH), and future directions. 

The speaker announced that she would outline the next 25 years in her talk
at the end of the session.

Panelist 2.  Cyndie Campbell, Head, Documentation and Visual Resources,
National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives.

Cyndie focused on the Artists in Canada database, a bilingual, union list of
Vertical Files on Artists in Canada, with information on 40,000 artists
contributed by 32 institutions and including biographical and file-location
information. 

The development of the database was outlined, with recently-added fields
noted. Reference was made to the lack of authority control and efforts to
correct this problem; and to the project's broad definitions of "artist" and
"Canadian". Reference was also made to the many recent revisions to the
command structure, made possible by the Web version.  The speaker mentioned
the increase in the number of users since the move to the Internet, and the
ease of use of the search screens.

Panelist 3.  Leslie Munro, Museum Consultant, Munro-Butler Associates, Inc. 

The focus of Leslie's talk was the museology bibliographic database BMUSE,
whose contributors are the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa,
ICOM/UNESCO Museum Information Centre , Paris, and the Direction des Musées
de France (DMF), Paris.

It was pointed out that the materials in the bibliography – books, theses,
pamphlets, periodical articles – are in the collections of the contributors
and are available to researchers. Each record includes location information,
and items may be borrowed according to the lending policies of the
particular contributor. The international scope of the collection was
emphasized, the collections including documents in many languages.

After a brief history of BMUSE, examples of searches and results were shown.
It was mentioned that BMUSE is available 24 hours a day, except during
maintenance, via the Internet. The speaker outlined how and why she uses the
database, and pointed out its value as a useful tool for museum
professionals, as well as some of its other virtues: inexpensive, easily
accessible on the Internet,  references supported by document delivery.

Panelist 4.  Vicki Davis, Reference Librarian, Canadian Conservation
Institute Library.

Vicki's talk focused on BCIN, a bibliographic database on conservation of
cultural property. She pointed out the difficulty, before creation of this
database, that conservators and conservation scientists had experienced in
locating the information they needed on materials, techniques and processes
related to their research and treatments. A transparency of a list of the
database contributors was shown, and a brief history of the development of
the project outlined. Contributors/partners included the Getty Conservation
Institute, CHIN, the library of the Canadian Conservation Institute, The
International Council on Monuments and Sites, the Conservation Analytical
Laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution, and the International Council of
Museums. 

The content of BCIN was outlined: bibliographic references to over 167,000
international documents in 6 libraries and documentation centres and the
complete citations of Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts. Formats
include books, conference papers, journal articles, technical reports,
patents, unpublished papers and audiovisual materials.

An illustrated demonstration of how to search BCIN followed, including
author, title and subject searching, and record display.

The speaker outlined plans for future development, including basic and
advanced search screens, downloading into bibliographic management software,
improvements to record display, use of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus to
allow for consistent subject access, as well as development and application
of CHIN's "Integrator" for searching across multiple databases. The speaker
concluded by pointing out the richness of BCIN as a resource.

Panelist 5.  Wendy Thomas, CHIN project leader.

In her outline of the next 25 years, Wendy mentioned CHIN's recent shift of
focus from collections management services to making museum information
available over the Internet, and referred to the CHIN website
(www.chin.gc.ca) as an electronic gateway to Canada's rich cultural and
natural heritage. She outlined some of the new services and products being
offered by CHIN, with the concept of the role of the user changing from a
passive one to that of an "involved creator". The Integrated Access pilot
project (The Integrator) was described, its aim to develop an intelligent
tool to provide "effective and enjoyable" access to online information.
Under the rubric User Interface in the National Inventories, CHIN's efforts
in examining alternate ways of bringing searchers and information together
were outlined. A significant improvement to access and retrieval was the
integration of Art & Architecture Thesaurus with the Humanities National
Inventory. Another development has been a multilingual thesaurus using the
AAT as a base, to enable access in both English and French. 

CHIN's work with the museum community on virtual exhibitions was described,
with reference to some future possibilities in this area. New developments
in online contribution (via the Internet) were also mentioned, in relation
to the closure of the mainframe computer at the end of March 1998. The final
reference was to a prototype to test image retrieval and display, developed
in collaboration with the Quebec Museums Association.



Rosemary Haddad
Associate Librarian
Canadian Centre for Architecture