Beyond the Gallery Walls: Tools and Methods for Leading End-Users to Collections Information

The library and archive communities have a longstanding history of organizing and managing their information in a way that facilitates access to their holdings, both within their home institutions and via union catalogs and consortial bibliographic utilities such as the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) and OCLC's WorldCat. Creating access to a museum's collection on the Web opens up a whole new level of complexity that requires careful thought, for users can no longer be simply identified as museum staff or museum visitors, nor can their needs be neatly categorized. The new jobs that deal with the larger scope of museum information have resulted in positions such as Director of Metadata and Cataloging at ARTstor (an initiative to make cultural heritage digital images available for educational purposes), who is tasked to develop metadata standards for a wide range of collections; develop guidelines and document best practices for the development of metadata.