A new approach to automated museum documentation

Conclusions

(1) Microcomputers may render the same services to the individual museums as mainframes and/or networks. When a sizable amount of data is entered in several museums they may be integrated in ‘loosely coupled systems’, that share data as and when required.

(2) The museum staff is motivated more readily by working with a small in-house system that they may control themselves than when they have to work with a system, however extended the help and facilities it provides, that is outside their control.

(3) Data for an automated system may correspond in format to the traditional ones for manual documentation.

(4) The input format should be easily manipulable, both at programming level and from the user's point of view. This ‘user friendliness’ should provide an efficient use of manpower resources, e.g., by concentrating on a few selected fields, by copying fields with identical entries, etc.

(5) If the retrieval program incorporates three essential components—AND/OR/NOT operators, full field control and inverted file searching—a high precision-recall ratio may be expected, even when relatively few fields are used.