Overview

The Mexican museums enrolled in this project were the Museo Postal y Filatélico and Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (CCUT, its acronym in Spanish), both located in Mexico City but with their own specific characteristics.³

The first one is found in the heart of Mexico City’s historical center, in a beautiful building dating from the early 20th century. By 1907 it had become the headquarters of the National Postal Service, one of the longest-standing establishments in the country. Given the continuously growing collection of postage stamps, documents and various objects related to the postal service, the museum was founded in 1920 to preserve what is nowadays considered industrial-postal heritage.

To this day, the Museo Postal is a public organization under federal administration. Its collection of some 50 000 items is partially exhibited in six rooms, while another two rooms hold special exhibitions. The museum receives an average of 120 000 visitors per year,⁴ a figure in great contrast to the total number of staff, just fourteen. Among the staff, a librarian oversees the registrar area. Despite the institution’s historic tradition, it inevitably faces several challenges related to collection management and documentation, which will be developed further on.

As for the other museum involved in this project, the CCUT was founded in 2007 by UNAM. It was defined as a “multidisciplinary complex dedicated to the research, study, and promotion of subjects related to art, history and processes of resistance’’^{5 (CCUT, 2017)}. The museum is located on the southern side of Tlatelolco square, also known as the Plaza de las tres culturas,⁶ an emblematic site in the nation’s history.

The museum displays a diverse collection of approximately 52 500 cultural items distributed in different internal collections. For instance, it safeguards the documentary heritage of the art critic Juan Acha, as well as of the Mexican movement of 1968 (m68) ^{(CCUT, 2018)}, while also including other works of an artistic or archeological nature. The institution offers a wide range of educational and cultural activities aimed at different audiences, and continuously organizes temporary exhibitions supported by a team of 130 people.

During the implementation of this project, three people in charge of different internal collections actively followed the seminars on museum documentation. However, the initiative to promote these activities within the CCUT came from the archeologist in charge of the Archeological Collection (some 15 000 items) and she was strongly engaged in learning the Tainacan software. Therefore, the focus will be centered on her experience and the specific obstacles she faced within her department.

Documentation Challenges in the Mexican Museums

A survey was carried out to know more about the current state of documentation practices and Information Technology (IT) infrastructure in these institutions. The survey structure was based on a previously existing document known as the Cuestionario de diagnóstico para evaluar el nivel de madurez tecnológica en gestión de acervos de los museos de México ^{(Secretaría de Cultura, 2020)}, designed in the framework of a collaboration between the Tainacan team and the staff in charge of the project Mexicana: Repositorio cultural de México, in 2020. The purpose was to evaluate the degree of technological maturity developed and applied by museums overseen by the Ministry of Culture of Mexico, as part of a preliminary research phase on museum digital collections management.

The survey is divided into seven thematic axes: characteristics of the institution, information management, human resources, it infrastructure, media & communication, institutional management, and governance.

During the survey, the librarian provided information on the Museo Postal collection as a whole, whilst the archeologist only referred to the situation of the CCUT Archeological Collection (henceforth AC). Characteristics of the institution provided general information on the museums, their collections and visitors. Data collected in this part of the survey was used in the previous section to provide an overview of the institutions.

On the subject of Information Management, the Museo Postal indicated 20% progress in their objects inventory, against 26-50% in the case of the AC. The first one reported not having an established documentation system based on metadata standards, nor using any software to record their information. On the other hand, the AC has a FileMaker database; however, this application does not cover the specific needs for the desired collection management. Their electronic records are mainly carried out in Excel, where they organize their inventory, administrative information, and aspects regarding collection management, such as loans (in the case of the AC). Furthermore, the Museo Postal has not carried out any digitization of their items. In contrast, the AC states that 26-50% of their collection has been digitized.

As for Human Resources, there is an average of 4.5 people engaged in documentation practices in both institutions. Moreover, training for staff in this field is sporadic. Albeit staff in the AC present a more specialized profile, people with a university degree in the field of archeology.

Regarding it Infrastructure, the Museo Postal reported a total of nine computers, all of them in good conditions and with high-quality internet connection. Nevertheless, none of these devices is used exclusively for documentation tasks. Additionally, there is not a specific it support team charged with inquiries from the registrar collection area. There is a single team for the entire institution. Another important detail is that they do not have their own online server on which to store and protect their digital information. As for the AC, the situation is quite similar, except for their ownership of an online server.

On the axis of media & communication, it stood out that neither the Museo Postal nor the AC exhibited their collections online. This was one of the strongest motivations to consider the use of the Tainacan software. Nonetheless, both institutions are striving to share and promote their collection on social media, using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Regarding Institutional Management, it is worth noting that both museums are undertaking diverse measures on the issue of digitization of collections, mainly focused on documentation and digitization of objects.

Finally, concerning the issue of governance, the fact that the museums have an independent budget to finance their programs should be highlighted. However, the number of resources destined to keep developing a digital collection plan depends on the degree of interest of the administration in turn.

Endure Weaknesses and General First Impressions

A team was formed in June 2020 comprising the librarian from the Museo Postal, the archeologist in charge of the AC and the members of the Unidad de Información para las Artes (UNIARTE, its acronym in Spanish), at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (IIE, its acronym in Spanish) of UNAM. The goal was to provide the museum staff with methodological, practical, and theoretical tools to enhance their documentation practices. The working route, developed over three months of weekly meetings, can be synthesized in the four tasks described below (Figure 1):

(Diagram: Velasco, Lopes, Conrado, Molina & Ángeles, 2021)

Figure 1 Documentation strategy followed by the Mexican museums. 

The goals of these four tasks are:

During the implementation process, staff from the museums with the Tainacan interface defined a metadata template and selected the best option for indexing their information amongst the metadata types provided by the Tainacan repository (short text, large text area, date, numeric, selectbox, etc.). Finally, they captured certain items on the software and visualized them as if they were published online, which gave them a better insight into how their digital collections would look. The results can be seen below (Figure 3).

(Image: Velasco, Lopes, Conrado, Molina & Ángeles, 2021; courtesy: Servicio Postal Mexicano)

Figure 3 Example of the mural intitled La Tarasca by Pablo González Magaña, documented at the Museo Postal. 

Overview

According to the introductory text on its website, the Museu Victor Meirelles ^{(Museu Victor Meirelles, 2020)}, is linked to the Instituto Brasileiro de Museus (Ibram), under the Ministry of Tourism. It was founded in 1952 in the house where the artist was born in downtown Florianópolis, capital of the State of Santa Catarina.

Throughout its 69 years of existence, the Museu Victor Meirelles has been developing its history and identity. According to its website, the institution: “[…] seeks to respond to the requests from the community and the individuals who visit it to develop their critical vision, feel unique affective experiences, and trace their own artisic paths with a rich and lively aesthetic experience of life”^{8 (Museu Victor Meirelles, 2020)}.

The museum’s initial collection consisted of 27 works by the painter, donated by the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes of Brazil, which were later complemented by donations from other institutions and collectors of other works by the painter, his teachers and students, forming a current collection of 237 works produced by more than 80 artists, all of which are digitized and published in the institution’s digital repository.

The Museu de Arqueologia de Itaipu (MAI) was chosen due to the enormous differences between the types of collection, which would allow the project to analyze different situations of documentation of cultural objects. The museum’s history and the characteristics of its collection are presented on its website ^{(MAI, 2020)}. Briefly, the museum was inaugurated in 1970, a period when the oceanic region of Niterói was undergoing a modernization process and new archeological discoveries were made, such as the site of Duna Pequena. The 1,040 objects in the museum’s collection came from this location. All the objects are documented and available for public access in the digital repository that the museum published online thanks to the Tainacan software.

Documentation Challenges

The research and methodology for analyzing the technological maturity of museums were developed in Brazil, in the scope of the implementation of the Tainacan software for Brazilian federal museums linked to the Ibram ^{(Universidade Federal de Goiás & Ibram, n.d.)}. Thus, the research was carried out in Brazilian museums in the same way as was done in the Mexican museums, highlighting important results to identify the current technological situation of museums and establish procedures to improve the quality of their documentation. As in Mexico, the survey was divided into seven thematic axes: characteristics of the institution, information management, human resources, it infrastructure, media & communication, institutional management, and governance. Below, we present the summarized result for the two museums that participated in this research. The results were published and are accessible in a technical report available exclusively in Portuguese ^{(Universidade Federal de Goiás & Ibram, n.d.)}.

The MAI team developed a participatory inventory process with the local community, which represented a positive leap in terms of structuring information management at the museum. The content of this inventory, along with the inventory of archeological pieces, has been migrated to Tainacan. It does not use a metadata standard; it uses a thesaurus for the classification of collections. The collection’s document management was established based on the parameters set out by Ibram’s rules for inventory (2014). In this sense, the museological documentation covers only the basic aspects of description to identify the cultural asset. The same process was applied with videos and photographs. It was not clear whether the documentary process encompassed all stages of the collection’s management. The museum’s collection has almost been digitized completely. There are no pending issues regarding the ownership of images taken of the collection. The museum has poor it infrastructure: although all employees have computers, they are old and problematic; only two are new pieces of equipment. There is no computer dedicated to information management or collections. The internet is only one Mega, to be shared among all the units. It does not own any servers thus files are backed up to an external hard drive.

The Museu Victor Meirelles organized its document management using Tainacan, which was updated in 2019. The process of filling the individual records of the objects is practically completed. The inventory is complete (in Excel spreadsheets). It does not use a metadata standard. It has digitized images of the entire collection, including documents. Some of these images are available on the institutional website (in .png, .tiff, and .jpeg formats). Image rights have been regularized. It has a total of 10 staff working in the museum. Information management is operated by one of them, who is a museologist specialized in collections and document management. The actions are developed collectively by technicians and management, since the team is small. The museum has an it infrastructure with about 26 computers, most of which are old (only six are new). Computers are multitasking, no equipment is dedicated exclusively to information management. It does not own a server. The internet is good and its bandwidth is being expanded (10 mega, via optic fiber). It has outsourced its it support, but it operates within the museum.

As can be seen, both museums had a very fragile documentation infrastructure, without a clear metadata pattern. The use of controlled vocabularies was only present at the mai but without any specific rules or manuals to standardize cataloging actions.

Endure Weaknesses and General First Impressions

The process of working with Brazilian museums followed a slightly different path from what was carried out in Mexican museums, as the Tainacan software has already been implemented in museums since 2018. When the present research began, both museums had already created their digital repository and their updated documentation was available for consultation on internet.

The work carried out to implement the digital repository consisted of four technical stages of treatment of documentation, whose final product was used to carry out the present research of experimenting with Object ID with the museums. These steps consisted of: the migration of the existing database of museum documentation; the conversion of existing documentation to the data model used by the Ibram -a model developed locally for federal museums-; cleaning, standardization and data processing; and finally, the publication of data on the internet. In addition to these four steps carried out by the team, the present research also included a study to map the current data from the documentation of the two museums to Object ID, seeking to highlight their advantages and possibilities of adaptation, and reflect with the museums on the importance of adopting a broader standard in terms of the potential for interoperability and dialogue with other institutions. The steps are detailed below in Figure 4.

(Diagram: Velasco, Lopes, Conrado, Molina & Ángeles, 2021)

Figure 4 Documentation strategy followed by the Brazilian museums. 

The goals of these five tasks are explained below:

(Image: Velasco, Lopes, Conrado, Molina & Ángeles, 2021)

Figure 5 Example of a museum object documented at the Itaipu Archeology Museum. 

(Image: Velasco, Lopes, Conrado, Molina & Ángeles, 2021)

Figure 6 Example of a museum object documented at the Victor Meirelles Museum.