02.02.2023
Institut für Museumsforschung
Together with a number of partner institutions, the Institut für Museumsforschung (Institute for Museum Research) is organising the “GND-Forum Museen und Sammlungen” (Integrated Authority File Forum about Museums and Collections) on 6 March 2023. The event takes place online from 10 am to 4 pm. It marks the launch of efforts to identify mutual questions, ideas and needs, and is intended to promote closer collaboration between museums and collections in the GND network.
The Institut für Museumsforschung has been working successfully for many years on establishing standardised vocabularies in German museums. The absence of ambiguity is central to museum documentation and the networking of objects, persons, events, places and analogous entities. Controlled vocabulary and authority data records play an important role in this area. They include the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the integrated authority file (GND), and Iconclass. It is only with uniform references and clearly defined terms and concepts that semantic data spaces can be realised and contexts mapped.
Museums, collections and specialist communities have long been engaged in developing and using their own thesauri and jointly establishing specialist vocabularies. Ideally, in recent years these vocabularies have been made available with stable identifiers (IDs) to all interested parties as freely usable Linked Open Data. In the past, the Institut für Museumsforschung has supported many specialist communities with the development of these dedicated vocabularies. The extensive online availability of specialist terminologies builds a bridge between specialised branches of science and society, as well as between highly specialised museums and collections and numerous museums with diverse collections.
More information on the programme and registration can be found on the website of the Museumsbund (German Museum Association). If you have questions, please contact afs[at]dnb.de. The event will be accompanied on Twitter with the hashtag #GNDForumMuseum.