A Non-Lasting Legacy?

Founded in 1854, Melbourne Museum has built up a vast collection of items over the past 150 years, some 16 million in all, ranging from tiny insects stored in jars to the 17-tonne skeleton of a blue whale that that sits near the entrance of the Science and Life Gallery. This enormous collection presents Hart with a twofold challenge: the ongoing struggle to store, maintain and catalogue all these items; as well as the sizeable task of correcting the technological detours and wrong turns taken by the museum over the years.

"From an efficiency management point of view that is a huge legacy collection," Hart says. "Over time the quality of the documentation varies. Moving from cards to computer was done in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with variable results."

Racehorse legend Phar Lap's file is a fine example. According to Hart, Phar Lap's database file only has about 20 keywords in it, but there are several kilometres of shelf space taken up by artefacts, articles and other material associated with Phar Lap. "Working out how to turn that stuff from paper files and into something that's accessible for all of us is one of my biggest challenges," Hart says.

So far only about two million of the objects are on the museum's digital database - the rest are recorded by file number on a card indexing system or identified by their place in the taxonomic system. The core databases are held on a system called KE Emu, a specialist software made by Melbourne's KE Software and used by the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of Natural History in London and the National Gallery in Canberra.

The system for identifying objects has changed very little in the past in 150 years. Each item still has a simple number, even if it was handwritten on a card in the 19th century. Currently, a new database is gradually bringing together close to 40 separate databases and cataloguing them using barcodes.

The oldest records in the database are handwritten notes from 150 years ago, but in some ways these are less problematic than more recent technologies that have since been rendered obsolete. "In the oldest part of the electronic database everything is in upper case because there weren't enough bits to do the characters," Hart says. Similarly, the museum's early attempts at digital imaging were done on an old video disc format that was of low quality and is no longer used.

"The whole issue of longevity of digital data and how to manage it is critical for us, because in one sense the paper files are really the safest - no magnet or power surge will destroy them."

Equally challenging, Hart says, is managing the information that streams into the organization from several directions at once. "The challenge from an IT perspective is based around information and knowledge management," Hart says. "The entire organization is a knowledge organization - that's everyone's business - but it's amazing how hard it is to actually keep that at the front of everyone's mind. And I think that's because everyone is an expert in their field and they tend to think: 'I know how to look after my patch'.

"Curators feel like they know how to manage their files in a way that works for them - and they do - but as a result we've got hundreds of kilometres of paper files."

Digital imaging, for instance, has brought Hart's co-workers new freedom while bringing him new headaches. There are about 70 curators and researchers on staff that are out in the field constantly collecting. "And of course everyone's got a digital camera now," Hart says. "We did a search on the network drive for jpegs the other day, and it turns out we've got three million of them," he says. As a result, Hart has initiated a project to reign in the museum's audio and visual collection and is making plans to start managing it centrally.

"A lot of it is scoping the problem and then it's all about change management, because you're changing the way people work," Hart says.

"We're an interesting mix of arch conservatism and innovation. And that's good. We're no strangers to that. It's been going on for 150 years."