Museum Information System at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology: Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on the Planning Grant: Scholarly Access to Integrated Archival and Artifactual Collections

"Project Description: We designed a research tool for the Internet that is a template for creating online access to information about museum collections. This template, which we call the Museum Information System, allows museum staff to easily post new collections of documents, objects, artifacts, and data to their websites, revise or add to previously posted collections, and integrate both older and more recent collections and existing databases. Three collections were used to develop this template. These represent older collections (Gournia from Crete and Sitio Conte from Panama) held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and more recently acquired data (Pech de l’Azé IV in France) from collections housed in France, each with differing collections-related issues anticipated to be encountered by museum personnel when working with holdings of their institutions. The resulting template meets several fundamental goals: (1) It is versatile, flexible, and easily maintainable; (2) allows access to high-quality information; (3) permits researchers and other viewers to find, search, and browse the collections in a variety of ways, and to save the results of searches in several formats; while at the same time (4) minimizing museum staff costs"