Museum Standards of Data: a Dogma or a Compromise?

During last 10 years the specialists of the Russian Ethnographical Museum works on the creation of the standard of the system scientific description of ethnographical memorial. The work is made up on the basis of complex approach, which includes

The methods of attribution, which united:

• The scientific passport – a standard document for the Russian Ethnographical Museum generated on the basis of unified structure of description;
• The general methods of information satiety practically excluding the opportunity of inadequate perception of the attribution data;
• “Particular” methods of description of various thematic groups of memorials. The versatility of ethnographical materials and specificity of their scientific processing stipulate the necessity of these methods.

• General - subject classifier and classifier of ethnic communities
• Particular – for individual parameters of description of memorial (material, technique, decoration…)

Terminological dictionaries – their main function is to provide comparability of data during searching, analytical and exchange operations:

• Dictionaries – classifiers, dictionaries of descriptive lexicon for the free text of the scientific passport fields, dictionaries of the unified terminology of “particular” methods of description of different subject groups of museum objects.

• Conceptual explanatory dictionaries giving brief monosemantic interpretation of terms used on documenting results of attribution in accordance with the certain signs.

A part of the results of work is published at the reference book “Museum Memorial Attribution: classification, terminology, methods” (St. Petersburg: Lan’, 1999. 352 c.), and also placed at the REM server “The Ethnological Museology Centre” at http://www.ethnomuseum.ru/center. The further publication is planned for 2001. The working up of the REM will be interesting and useful to the foreign experts and interpreters, as they contain traditional Russian lingual ethnographic terminology used both in the special literature and folk language practice. All materials are approved on experience of the scientific description of the REM collections. But a final goal of working up the museum standards is to find a compromise for adequate mutual understanding between the experts of different fields of knowledge in Russia and abroad.

 Irina Khurgina - Chief of the Scientific Systematization Department of the Russian Ethnographical Museum.