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.

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