At the Walters Art Museum we had an HTML style guide as part of
the TMS HelpCenter (built very much as Jeffrey Smith noted), it was also great
to be able to hyperlink from one field to another. For example, the Dates field
contained information on how dates should be formatted. When formatting dates
was mentioned elsewhere, it needn’t contain such detailed specs, since it
contained a hyperlink back to the Dates field specs.
Here at the Musical Instrument Museum, I’m working on
developing a Style Guide and How-to notes, and am considering using a “blog”
format. This allows individual staff to post comments and feedback to case
scenarios. It’s a rough project in progress.
Chad Petrovay |
Collections Database Administrator |
MIM—Musical Instrument Museum
8550 S. Priest Drive | Tempe, AZ 85284
| 480.481.2460 main
480.481.2459 fax | [log in to unmask] |
www.themim.org
From: The Museum System
(TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Aylsworth,
David
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Data Standards Manual
Here’s
a two part (sorta) question for you all. How many of you have some sort
of data standards style manual that you use to control the types of data
entered in each field, and the style it is entered in? What I am thinking
of is something that would be institution specific that is based on the Gallery
Systems manual, but specific to your own style and methods.
I’m thinking both about points like “when do you use ‘Object
Name’ or ‘Title’ fields?” as well as “do you
capitalize more than the first letter of the medium field?”.
For
those of you who do have such a manual, would you be willing or able to share
it with me?
Over
time, we’ve made periodic attempts to make something like this, assigning
a “chapter” on “Valuation and Insurance” to one
registrar; “Medium” to another. The goal has always been to
compile these individual chapters into one huge bible for every field that we
use in TMS, and how we specifically use it here at MFAHouston.
We’re gradually opening the system up to a wider circle of users who will
be doing their own data entry, so the need seems to be even greater to have a
consistent, institutional approach to every detail, but maybe I’m being
overly dramatic and foreseeing chaos and the end of the world as I know it if
we don’t have such a document before we do this.
I
know data standards are a rallying point for a lot of TMS Administrators…
But I don’t know how you all have individually addressed the issue.
Can you let me know?
Thanks,
David
David
Aylsworth
Collections
Registar
Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston
tel:
713-639-7824
fax:
713-639-7780