Abstract
Museums currently face an enormous set of challenges in responding to their mission and social role. Their role as mediators between material human evidence, manifestations of immaterial culture and the public is put to the test every day by the growing demand for credible information based on scientific facts and by the democratisation of access to information that technology, especially relevant to the Internet and social networks, continuously improves. The response given must be up to the new demands. However, how can the museum respond fully without knowing the collections it has in its custody? Heritage documentation is fundamental and can be the most potent tool to promote change, reflection and knowledge creation. This is true for times of peace but also for times of trouble, like the ones we lived with during the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
A preliminary version of this text was published in the book: Bens Culturais e Relações Internacionais: o patrimônio como espelho do soft power, organized by Rodrigo Christofoletti and published by Editora Leopoldianum, UniSsantos, 2017. In this version, the related issues are explored in greater depth.
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Notes
- 1.
ISO 5964:1985 Documentation—Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri (http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=12159) defines the guidelines for creating this type of thesauri. This standard was recently revised, in 2011, and gave rise to the ISO 25964-1:2011 Information and documentation—Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies—Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval (http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm?csnumber=53657) which seeks to respond to the growing need for information retrieval through these complex indexing systems.
- 2.
We will talk more carefully about this topic later, but documentation work in museums, normally a technical task, visible only in internal management and in some specific moments of use of collections, such as exhibitions and catalogues, for example, is often neglected by the governing bodies due to the enormous effort it requires in terms of human and financial resources.
- 3.
Check the case of Europeana Fashion at http://www.europeanafashion.eu/portal/home.html (accessed on 25-02-2023).
- 4.
According to Jonathan McClory’s quote referred to by Gegê Leme Joseph in note 2 of her chapter in Lord and Blankenberg’s work (Joseph 2015, p. 82).
- 5.
See the case of the United States Federal Government portal at https://www.data.gov (accessed on 01-03-2023) and the one made available by the European Union at https://data.europa.eu/en (accessed on 25-02-2023) where different sources of information relevant to the study of various topics can be found.
- 6.
The Cooper Hewitt website has change on recent years and those connections are not present today. We couldn’t find out a reason for the changes.
- 7.
For a clearer idea of the values required for the ongoing digitization processes in museums, we recommend consulting Nick Poole’s important work on the cost of digitizing European cultural heritage entitled The Cost of Digitizing Europe’s Cultural Heritage: A Report for the Committee des Sages of the European Commission available at http://nickpoole.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/digiti_report.pdf (accessed on 22/02/2023).
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Matos, A. (2023). Documentation: A “Tool” of Soft Power in Museums. In: Christofoletti, R. (eds) Soft Power and Heritage. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41207-3_22
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