Openly Available Resource for the Management and Promotion of Museum Exhibits: The Case of Greek Museums with Folk Exhibits

1.1. The Hypothesis

The increasing online presence of Greek museums results in the accumulation of digital material that is available over the web; one wonders, however, whether the outcome is indeed helpful to users – be them professionals or members of the general public – or it simply contributes to the acknowledged “pathology of information overload” (Koltay, 2017). Information overload has long been identified as being presented with “too much information” in numerous aspects and processes of management (Eppler & Mengis, 2004). As both the contents and presentation methods of online Greek museums is rather diverse, the hypothesis formed was that the required information on the contents of the museums would not be easy to locate in the plethora of websites. This hypothesis was based on the assumption that each museum would use its own classification system, which would inevitably result to lack of interoperability between different museum systems due to two problems: (1) Different conceptual density of the documentation adopted by each museum, namely whether an adequate set of categories is used for classifying cultural heritage ensuring that cultural objects are visible to different queries, and (2) Different organization of the terminologies used for cultural object documentation. As effective retrieval of information is vital to both managing and promoting any type of collection, we proposed that, provided our hypothesis was true, solving the problem of information retrieval would necessarily facilitate museum management and promotion (Tzompanaki & Doerr, 2012).

Below, we continue by discussing the methodology that the team followed (1.2) as well as the findings along with their analysis (1.3). In Section 2 we present the state of the art on standards related with museum documentation. In Section 3 we present the web editor we have developed to support and accommodate the resource we are developing in order to help solve the information retrieval problem we identify in Section 1. We conclude on the future of this enterprise in Section 4.