Dissemination of Heritage: Experience of the Museu of Performing Arts (BCN)

Anna Valls

FIRT, Re-Routing Performance Barcelona, 2013

The ICT and the Dissemination of Heritage The Experience of MAE

Vision and Mission

MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts

Vision To be the reference centre for the research and information of performing arts of Catalonia Main goals To preserve the memory of the performing arts in Catalonia To support teaching and research at the various schools of our centre To disseminate our museum, archive and bibliographical collections

4 Units


Research and historical library 1968

Museum 1923

School library 1923

Archive 1978

Many kinds of documentation


Bibliographical and Media Collection


Books,manuscripts, magazines, DVDs… : > 120,000

Set design collection


Set design collection: set sketches, set models, costume renderings, backdrops… more than 16,000 items.

Archive Collection


Photos: > 200,000

Posters: 6,700

Programs: > 100.000

Costumes


1000 pieces of actors , tenors, dancers… Dresses and accessories like shoes, umbrellas, necklaces …

Puppetry Collection


The puppetry collection contains 400 pieces

We had 35,177 documents in 885 Windows folders

We had more than 50 MSAccess databases for the archive and museum collections

Our bibliographical catalogue was run by VTLS

Our digital newspaper database was run by Knossys

Our staff didn’t include any IT engineer

We used to have old tecnology and no open source We used to pay for all the IT services

Before 2008: Working without Information Technologies


Strategic Plan 2008-2013

Professionalization: two new IT engineers

Goals

Expenses reduction: open source software and our own data centre

Improve management, processes and internal communication increase efficiency

Taking advantage of IT to promote our museum collections

Human Resources

Organization

Finance

2008-2009 Project

From Puting out the fire stage to Reactive stage

2008 2009

The first computer engineer

Strategic IT planning1.0

2010

Content DM To promote museum

collections Newspaper

Data base Dspace

Hardware acquisition

Academic Internet network

MAE web Joomla

futurs students Web (joomla)

Data

Centre

2010-2011 Project

From Reactive stage to Proactive stage

2011

2nd IT Engineer

2012

‘Escena Digital’

Supporting Virtual

Campus

Anniversary

website

New backup system

Performances

Database

ECLAP European

Project

2010

Online exhibition

‘Viatge per l’escena’

Intranet

Virtualization project

Scanner II website

Strategic IT Planning 2.0

New catalogue

2012 Project

We needed an application to manage and to disseminate the archive and museum collections

We decided to develop our own application

From Proactive Stage to Innovative Stage

Proactive Stage to Innovative Stage

Partners: DuraSpace, Stanford, Virginia, Notre Dâme, Hull, etc. Main elements: Fedora, Solr, Ruby on Rails

2012 Project


2012 Project

A new single data model for all the collections with Dublin Core metadates (except bibliographical and audiovisual collections)

One single application to:

Describe documents or objects

Preserve images

Disseminate the holdings

2013

Conclusions

Weaknesses The project took much longer than we expected Some staff had difficulties to adapt the news formats and technologies of the XXI century

2013

Conclusions

Strengths

21rd Century Technology

We use one single application for all the archives and museum collections

Our information system covers: ingestion, transformation, preservation and dissemination

Our digital holdings are growing every day

We are much more efficient

2013

Conclusions

• We believe that the effort of these last six years has been worth it

• We are open to the world

• Hydraproject has asked us to become partners which makes us very


2013

http://colleccions.cdmae.cat/

Anna Valls

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Education

Dissemination of Heritage: Experience of the Museu of Performing Arts (BCN)