Comité International pour la Documentation
Call for Papers
Strategies and Policies in Documentation
Collection documentation – Relevant information – Strategies
Are the ways we document collections in museums today still very much the same as our predecessors did fifty or a hundred years ago? Which information do we capture, how do we relate the information elements among each other, how do we transform them into present-day use? Are we documenting the relevant information for present and future information needs? In order to understand the work of the earlier generations, is much wider documentation necessary? Which strategy do we follow? Museum object information versus collections management? Does CIDOC need to re-evaluate and review some of its standards and recommendations?
Processes in Museum Documentation
Museum processes – Standards – Place of documentation
These processes are based on the intellectual understanding and organisational handling of the workflows with which we manage our museum documentation. They also address key strategic issues like: What is the place of documentation within the overall museum work today? Why do we do what we do? And due to the specific scope of «museum», the processes also include: What procedures do museums need in order to enable future reliability of the information collected? How to develop and implement standards needed for this work?
Museum Documentation as Profession
Education – Professional life – Career options
Education in museum documentation varies within different areas of the world. Often, there even is no formal education at all that leads to a career in the different fields of museum work. In the ideal case, museum documentation, specifically, includes a good deal of knowledge of modern professional documentation techniques, not the least including digital education. Sometimes more selected spots of training, postgraduate courses etc. have formed in the last years and step-by-step do provide good input for the museums. What positions in museums are presently charged with documentation work? What actual qualifications are at hand with those filling these positions? What requirements do museums formulate these days for their documentation staff – and what, in turn, do institutions of museum education offer for documentation training?
Networking
Developing existing networks – Museum specific content
Today, there is a strong tendency both to interconnect information and data of museums among each other and with those of other cultural institutions, e.g. libraries and archives, for the benefit of a general audience. But data interconnection and exchange does also significantly ease practical purposes like exhibition planning, research, interlending among museums etc. What is the experience with existing networks? Which kind of networks can be developed and established? Do they need to respect the specific nature of the museum content? Which techniques have proven to be useful and should be extended?
Metadata
Content metadata – Administrative metadata – Technical metadata – Legal metadata
Good metadata are the first and fundamental prerequisite to museum documentation. Presently, the metadata used, their formation and formalization, as well as their interconnection varies greatly between museums. This hampers the exploitation and scientific study of the knowledge represented in the data. Exact and fully harmonised metadata do play a foremost role in achieving the goal of quick, complete and relevant pulling together of, and accessibility to, digital knowledge resources. How do we arrive at metadata schemes that reconcile and harmonise existing museum data, e.g. for web portals and union catalogues? What is needed to put in place “linked data” and “linked open data”?
Multilingual Terminology
Multilingual Projects – Multilinguality as a Basis of Research – Multilingual Access
For a long time, scientific research has stretched beyond national and linguistic borders and boundaries, and so does museum work today. Users should be able to access museum collections from and in different languages and these collections should be offered to users as open and accessible as possible also in terms of languages. How does multilinguality touch on the issue of encouraging clearer and more precise conceptual formulation and wording for objects held in the collections? How can multilinguality increase the knowledge in the museum concerned as well as communicate it on a broader scale to diverse recipient audiences worldwide? Thus, projects that include the presentation of vocabulary describing the holdings in several languages are welcome to be presented at this CIDOC conference, as well as issues of matching concept systems from different language communities.
Digital Long Term Preservation
Concepts – Workflows – Technical Requirements
Collection documentation, scientific research as well as museum objects are more and more characterized by their digital nature. Therefore, long-term maintenance and accessibility is becoming an essential issue for all institutions concerned. Digital long-term preservation is a continuous, long-time task – not one of individual projects alone. What are the strategies you have developed? What are the practical solutions that are at hand? And, subsequently, which technical procedures and frameworks are chosen to implement these concepts?
Intangible Cultural Heritage
Documenting the Intangible – Special Methods?
The intangible living heritage is an important factor in maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization. It includes oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices, or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts (see UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage). An understanding of the intangible cultural heritage of different communities supports intercultural dialogue, and encourages mutual respect for other ways of life. Museums can contribute significantly to the protection of intangible cultural heritage by means of recordings and transcriptions. Because museographical tools for documentation today remain somewhat limited, how do you solve this problem in your institution?
GIS-Applications in Cultural Heritage
Cross-linking with spatial data – Standards for geographical information – GIS in use
This topic covers using geographic information in museum documentation and cultural resource management. An important part thereof is the integration of geographic functionality into research and museum documentation: between free online maps and professional GIS. GIS applications greatly help to solicit additional interest of the public in museum collections, e.g. by presentation of map collections using online map services. With these features, GIS applications create added value: by performing spatial analysis and spatial investigations on object information. What are your standards and best practices to store and integrate position information on locations, sites, places, scenes, towns and villages with their coordinates and addresses?
Digital Documentation in Archaeology
Changes in documentation of archaeological cultural heritage – Large quantities of data – 3 D-modelling
The preservation of archaeological cultural heritage has greatly changed over the past years by turning to digital documentation methods. We invite contributions dealing with digital standards and data formats, data exchange crossing borders, long-term preservation and handling of large quantities of digital data, conversion of analogue archaeological archives to digital ones, «born digitals» in archaeology, 3 D-documentation of finds and landscapes.
What are the solutions for creating and maintaining order in the different types of digital archival material? How can we guarantee the sustainability of archaeological cultural heritage data – what is required and what can be achieved with the methods known so far?
Submission of Contributions
Contributions on a subject related to the theme of the conference may take one of the following formats:
• Full length paper (20 min plus question time)
• Short paper (10 minutes plus question time)
• Brief presentation (5 minutes)
• Poster presentation
We invite you to submit an abstract of your paper or poster. An international panel of experts will review all submissions. All speakers will be invited to submit a written version of their paper well in advance of the conference.
The abstract should be written in English, German or French and it must be in electronic format (preferably PDF). Abstracts should not be longer than 250 words, and should be formatted simply (preferably Times New Roman, 12pt, double spaced). Please include the following information in the beginning of the abstract: title, author(s), affiliation(s), contact information (incl. email address).
Abstract submission is open
The deadline for submission of abstracts is 20th February 2014.
Authors will be notified of acceptance not later than 18th April 2014.
The deadline for the final paper is 6th June 2014.
Please send your submission to callforpaper@cidoc2014.de
Publication policy
CIDOC seeks to make all contributions to the conference as widely available as possible. To this end all contributors are requested to sign a contributor’s agreement, which assigns non-exclusive publication rights to ICOM CIDOC. This agreement allows ICOM CIDOC to publish and use the material freely. Because it is non-exclusive it does not prevent authors from continuing to use and publish their own material as they see fit.
All abstracts of contributions that are accepted for inclusion in the conference will be collated and distributed to conference participants.
All conference papers are stored in the CIDOC digital library which is available through the CIDOC website: http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/resources/cidoc-digital-library.html.
Selected papers from the conference are included in the CIDOC Bulletin, in both French and English. http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/archives/past-newsletters.html. We reserve the right to make editorial changes and to request revisions when necessary. Preparation and publication of the CIDOC bulletin can take a considerable time, however we aim to publish the Bulletin within one year of the conference.
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