Susan Chun Cultural Heritage Consultant

In reviewing portions of the Denver IMLS Conference today I was struck again by Susan's words as something I have thought and said a hundred times to what seemed to be deaf ears.

Gaining Intellectual Control

25:10:

"Your decision about which standards to apply should and will be your own. Institutions should, in adopting data and content standards, should embrace these standards because doing so will enhance their ability to manage store or find data either in house or online. They should reject standards that make their cataloging processes too costly or too time consuming..."

she goes on to define several different facets of data standards that are explored and applied for best practices, and then makes this point,

"you may want to keep in mind that the same philosophies and methods that are used to create standards to support interoperability between institutions and communities, can also be used effectively within your institution, to support interoperability between multiple collection types or departments. You can choose to apply standards locally but not adhere to external standards and vice versa."

I am sure this went right over the heads of many of the participants but listen to what she is saying. A national standard is only as good as the paper its written on unless that standard makes your collection(s) WORK. During my work here in the Architecture and Design Collection as part of an IMLS grant to digitize the Irving J. Gill collection and the Kem weber collection, I am adhering to the standards of the SAA in processing architecture collections. Yet, I can see that this institution would benefit dramatically in many ways, from an expansion and modification of those standards, a modification that would highlight the collections contents according to its exhibition worthy content, and divide and sort it by thematic datatypes. This is a museum, relying on its permanent collection to provide background and content for the gallery year in and year out, and all of its finding tools should support that constant. Unfortunately, the external standards seem to be dictating the pragmatic cataloging of the institution and there is a serious and inflexible barrier to modifying those standards. There must be a way to impress on institution managers when and where to break out of the box. I just need to find it.

It can not be overstated: modification of externally accepted standards does not predicate a rejection of those standards!