GOING DIGITAL

By Chris Adams

Information Systems Analyst

Limited physical collections access has required the museum to expand digital access. Photograph taken in 2013.

Sharing knowledge, passion and curiosity for the natural and cultural histories of British Columbia is at the heart of the museum. It was difficult for us to close the doors to the collection in 2020 due to the pandemic, even though it was best for the community. Staff have been hard at work since then to ensure that the knowledge housed in the collections can still be part of the public sphere by increasing the digital presence of the collections in the online catalogue.

Close to 90,000 records and more than 35,000 images have been added to the public catalogue in the last year, and thousands more existing records have been enriched to provide greater details about the material. Almost all of these updates describe objects that had been in the collections for years but had not yet been added to the online catalogue. Adding them provides greater depth to the historical record of British Columbia available to digital audiences.

There are thousands of items in the collection, and to fully describe them and share their stories, we have to integrate multiple sources and formats of information. It is a daunting task to consider how to present 200 years worth of records (and millions of years

Information should be thoroughly and consistently described so that it is easy to search for by a variety of audiences. Information should be easy to retrieve by conventional means while still respecting privacy and intellectual property. Information should be easy to share and combine with other information sources. Information should be described as completely as possible to expand the ways that people can engage with the information.

Information courtesy of GO FAIR, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence.

Example of an image recently added to Modern History. Close to 10,000 item descriptions have been made publicly available to improve online representation.

(above) Over 3,000 specimen and label images from the egg collection of our ornithology department were uploaded to the online catalogue.

worth of specimens, artifacts and belongings) in such a way that modern audiences find them easy to search for, share and use. Fortunately, the Royal BC Museum is not the only institution trying to address the challenge of online access, and we can take guidance from the wider data-management community.

One framework that has gained momentum in recent years is the FAIR Data Principles. Initially published in 2016, the FAIR Data Principles provide a roadmap for making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable in an online environment. The FAIR Principles provide specific steps on how to achieve each of these four broad categories, including following community standards for recording information about the material (also known as metadata), making metadata available through common online methods and formats, and providing any necessary information on licensing or usage limitations to promote reuse of collection material, among many others.

It is early days in the museum’s journey toward an open and FAIR catalogue. At this stage, the focus is on increasing the number of items represented online, reviewing cataloguing practices to ensure the metadata is robust, and standardizing metadata already in the catalogue so that it is easier to search for and reuse. Improving underlying data quality and expanding digital representation of the catalogue is an iterative process. The work undertaken in the last year to enrich collections metadata and enhance the public catalogue has built a strong foundation for us to open up the collections in new and interesting ways in the future.

There is an unfathomable amount of knowledge within the collections that can benefit individuals, researchers, policy makers, educators, communities and anyone else who wants to know more about British Columbia’s history. By following the FAIR Data Principles as we bring more information online, we ensure that the knowledge in the collections will be increasingly available to the people who need it most—and really, doesn’t that just sound fair?

(left) Nearly 1,000 botany records have been enriched thanks to a volunteer project transcribing label images available online.