External Email - Exercise Caution
Dear colleagues

We're not there yet, but within the next couple of years (I hope), at the National Gallery here in London we’ll want to start recording detailed provenance information as structured data, not just a text field.

A detailed provenance record is effectively a series of events: not just owners and dates, but a new owner with a method of acquisition, at a place, at a date, possibly at a particular event (e.g. an auction), for a price, with another person working as intermediary (dealer / agent), all assigned a degree of certainty, with a note of whether there’s a gap in known ownership between two events, and with one or more bibliographic citations that are sources for what we know of the event. We would also want to record the fact that an object was seen somewhere (in a church or a collection say) at a certain date; or that it was inventoried in this collection or place at a certain date (and the inventory is in that archive). Exhibition histories can also be part of a provenance record.  Not all those kinds of information can be added in ex-collection Constituents links.

If you’re interested in drawing up a shared specification for this, which we could propose to Gallery Systems as an idea, please let me know – either on- or off-list.

Best wishes

Rupert

Rupert Shepherd, PhD FSA
Collection Information Manager
E [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
T +44 (0)20 7747 5921

Please note that I usually work from home on Fridays; calls to the number above should still reach me.

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