Amy,
 
Thanks very much for your comments.  I'd be interested in
seeing your documentation on this issue and think that GS
hosted data style/content trading webpage would be a great
idea.
 
It does seem like we are headed in the same direction with
our data entry references and, as you mentioned, achieving
parallelism between the curators and other specialists is a
particular challenge.   Toward that end, we have an
administration appointed representative from the curatorial
staff to consult and comment on TMS and public access data
content issues, so we have a liason between myself and the
curators.  The process here until recently was that
Collections Management staff performed all data entry in a
somewhat cumbersome exchange of printed reports (cataloging
worksheets) where curatorial edits were entered only by our
dept. Winning our curators over to cataloguing directly into
TMS has been a long process,  but well worth the time needed
to cultivate their participation.
 
One of our major style/content concerns, as museum(s) of
predominately Asian art, is that TMS support foreign
language characters - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic,
etc.  Are any other of you also dealing with this issue?  Up
to now we have only experimented with scanning cataloguing
sheets that contain foreign language character and attaching
those documents as images to the object records.
 
David
 
>>> [log in to unmask] 07/16/02 06:26PM >>>
>>> dave.pearce.... >snip<
I have produced a TMS data entry manual which is part
instructional guide to doing the actual data entry in TMS,
and part style guide.  As I work on this one manual it is
becoming clear that we might benefit from a data entry
manual (an extract from the TMS User's Manual) and a style
guide (Data content and formats) as separate references.
Are any other of you heading in this direction?
>>>>
 
 It sounds from these posts, that a lot of us are doing
similar things.  I wonder if Gallery Systems would be
interested in creating a place on their web site for TMS
users to post and access the various in-house documentation
many of us are creating?  Jay?
 
Parallelism in data entry between specialists:  This is
challenging.  Especially, if there's no mandate from the
top.  One thing that has helped especially in the area of
provenance is the manadate from the Association of American
Art Museums to make this information more available to the
public especially where there are gaps in provenance during
the Nazi era.
 
In this area, we started by gaining consensous between the
departments that were ready to field the information which
were, paintings and sculpture.  Those discussions included a
representative from manuscripts who were not ready, the
special projects assistant to the Associate Director for
Curatorial Affairs, a data entry operator and a staff
assistant who actually do a lot of the data entry.  It was
interesting to see the specialist's realize that what they
thought was so clear and easy to understand was not
necessarily so to those outside their area of expertise.
 
Amy Noel
The J. Paul Getty Museum