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This article describes an important project in the history of preservation of Egypt's culture heritage. Initiated by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and executed by the Cabinet Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC), the project involves the Cairo Egyptian museum that contains the world largest collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities (160,000 objects). A major problem in the museum is the lack of a standardised approach for registration, resulting in a variety of unrelated registration schemes and the non‐existence of efficient tools for information dissemination. This project aims to resolve these problems. A team of Egyptologists, museum curators and system analysts, designers and developers defined the basis for work and specified project challenges which included the indexing of all museum objects ensuring cross‐referencing between already used registration schemes. The result has involved the use of multimedia computer technology to establish a complete database of museum objects (text, image and sound) and various cultural products, in addition to the establishment of required procedures and standards to organise the internal museum workflow and the provision of training programmes for staff. The outcome of the project is expected to be profound in enabling researchers and curators to have instant access to any object in the museum and providing the museum's visitors and public with a wealth of information about ancient Egypt.

The purpose of this article is to understand the meaning of museum objects from an information perspective. Links are made from Buckland's conceptual information framework as a semiotic to museum object as “document” and finally to user experience of these museum “documents”. The aim is to provide a new lens through which museum studies researchers can understand museum objects and for LIS researchers to accept museum objects as another form of document to be studied.

A conceptual and comparative analysis of Buckland's information typology as a semiotic. Outcome of analysis forms a model of understanding the museum object as a “document” that is accessed by users on a continuum of experience.

Michael Buckland's information typology is insightful and useful for a broad understanding of what all heritage institutions have in common: the physical object. Buckland helps us see the museum as an information system, the museum object as a document, and the multidimensional use of the concept information and its semiotic ramifications.

Buckland's typology is important to an understanding of the museum system and museum object in both LIS and museum studies. The concept of “document” opens up a broader perspective, which creates, rather than limits understandings of the human relationship with information. This expanded concept of “document” as sign/semiotic helps us understand user experience in ways not previously explored in the convergence of museums and information studies, from the practical to the theoretical. In this inclusive sense, Buckland's concept of document is a unifying theoretical concept for museums, libraries, and archives.

The study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of search interfaces of Swedish online museum collections, focussing on search functionalities with particular reference to subject searching, as well as the use of controlled vocabularies, with the purpose of identifying which improvements of the search interfaces are needed to ensure high-quality information retrieval for the end user.

In the first step, a set of 21 search interface criteria was identified, based on related research and current standards in the domain of cultural heritage knowledge organization. Secondly, a complete set of Swedish museums that provide online access to their collections was identified, comprising nine cross-search services and 91 individual museums' websites. These 100 websites were each evaluated against the 21 criteria, between 1 July and 31 August 2020.

Although many standards and guidelines are in place to ensure quality-controlled subject indexing, which in turn support information retrieval of relevant resources (as individual or full search results), the study shows that they are not broadly implemented, resulting in information retrieval failures for the end user. The study also demonstrates a strong need for the implementation of controlled vocabularies in these museums.

This study is a rare piece of research which examines subject searching in online museums; the 21 search criteria and their use in the analysis of the complete set of online collections of a country represents a considerable and unique contribution to the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval of cultural heritage. Its particular value lies in showing how the needs of end users, many of which are documented and reflected in international standards and guidelines, should be taken into account in designing search tools for these museums; especially so in subject searching, which is the most complex and yet the most common type of search. Much effort has been invested into digitizing cultural heritage collections, but access to them is hindered by poor search functionality. This study identifies which are the most important aspects to improve.

The purpose of this paper is to observe the nature of documentation and the description used in object biographies by an auction house catalogue and an online museum collection database in relation opera costumes. This research aims to discuss the issues of cultural and economic value in relation to objects in the art world, and examine examples of object biographies for opera costumes that are sold at an auction and exhibited in a museum.

The object biographies are compared from an auction house catalogue and the online museum collection database, based on two factors: costumes worn by a famous singer and costumes designed by a famous designer.

This study identified the valuation methods of auction houses and museums, including accounting for the market value and fair value, as well as social and cultural values. The nature of the documentation also clearly shows the different purpose of the object biographies. For auction houses the biography needs to be short and specific as it provides sufficient information and is read out at the auction, while art catalogues can also be used by experts as part of the conversation to understanding heritage value, and will also be viewed and used by researchers, investors, other auction house specialists and art world professionals.

By comparing two institutions, auction houses and museums, this study has shown that the information that is documented and how it is presented in object biographies is determined by the goals of the institutions. These goals may vary or overlap in providing information, demonstrating cultural importance, to be spoken allowed to an audience and make sales, or to educate, conserve and preserve.

This study shows that to some extent museum online databases display their collection removed from cultural context, with an isolated image of the item, and in an organised, digitally accessible manner. A potential implication is that museums should not only digitally catalogue an item, but also provide discussion and the cultural background and significance of the item.

Auction catalogues are written for a specific event (the auction), while the online museum collection database is meant to be a permanent record, which aims to digitally preserve objects and provide access to images and information to a general audience, and further could be edited with amendments or new information when future research or events lead to potential updates.

This study adds to the discourse on approaches to the understanding of costumes as an art object of significance and their potential cultural, economic and heritage value, particularly as represented in the documentation of object biographies.

A survey of the current state of documentation practice in museums is presented. This concentrates on the broad themes of the practice, making comparisons with analogous library procedures, where appropriate. A brief introduction to museums and their organizational framework within the United Kingdom is given. With this as background, the methods of documentation used by museums are reviewed, and a survey presented of current developments on an international and national scale.

Personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach and inclusivity around “idiosyncratic” knowledges within information research. An adapted research paper format echoes the approach of personal museums: as a commentary on the limits of institutional shaping for the field.

Personal museums are conceptualized as spaces of knowing in-formation, ontological openings that are literally and figuratively entered into, that make a difference to human and material ways of knowing. Karen Barad's agential realism and Sianne Ngai's vernacular aesthetic categories provide the theoretical lenses through which the researcher's 2018 visit to one personal museum is revisited.

An ethnographic account of the author's visit to the Communist Consumer Museum (CCM) in Timişoara, Romania shows how its improvisational, friendly and intimate atmosphere exposes it as a space of entanglements in a quantum sense, emphasizing the inseparability of human and material realms and how knowledges are always in-formation. Such entanglements create atmospheres generative of different ways of thinking about information and knowledge.

Human expressions of liking reveal material agencies as ways of knowing and information beyond the realm of human experience and meaning. A vernacular aesthetics of liking is presented as a way to resist the marginalizing tendencies of knowledges classified as unconventional, idiosyncratic or eccentric. This approach is one way of resisting the assumptions of channel thinking that often shape how information is studied.

The purpose of this paper is to foreground the ways in which material objects emerged as a kind of classificatory force during a visit to a local museum in rural Romania. It considers ways in which classification both influences and is influenced by the spatio-temporal assemblages of things.

Visual and textual ethnographic field data collected to document the museum tour are interpreted using a phenomenological approach. Jane Bennett’s agency of assemblage is used to contextualize these instants of interruption within the space/time arrangements of objects within the museum.

The “marginal” category of translator commentary emerged during data coding to reveal “instants of interruption.” These instants exhibited classificatory tendencies that revealed relationships between seemingly disparate elements. As such, the translator acted as a kind of third-party classificatory force that illuminated how relationships between physical assemblages of things in the world can act as a force for new knowledge production.

This paper contributes to the literature on social classification and document theory by revealing how alternative approaches to classification can open up additional avenues for research and knowledge discovery.

This paper aims to discuss the key aspects of the international trade in antiquities and the practice of philanthropic donation of objects to museums that allow for certain types of tax deduction manipulation, using a case of tax deduction manipulation from Australia and a case of tax fraud from the United States as examples.

Two thoroughly researched case studies are presented which illustrate the particular features of current and past antiquities donation incentivisation schemes which leave them open to manipulation and fraud.

The valuation of antiquities is subjective and problematic, and the operations of both the antiquities market and the museums sector are traditionally opaque. Because of this, tax incentivisation of antiquities donations is susceptible to fraud.

This paper presents the mechanisms of the antiquities market and museum world to an audience that is not familiar with it. It then clearly demonstrates how the traditional practices of this world can be manipulated for the purposes of tax fraud. Two useful case studies are presented.

This paper focuses on the donation in 1888 of a Sèvres Vase to the Education Department of Victoria after the International Exhibition in Melbourne. Using the vase as its focus the paper reflects on what this donation may be able to tell us about the impact, primarily on education, of a series of International Exhibitions held both in Australia and internationally between 1851 and 1900. The life of the Sèvres vase highlights the potential of the Exhibitions for the exchange of ideas internationally, the influence of the International Exhibition movement on education and the links between a 19th-century gift and the teaching of Art in 1930s Melbourne.

The paper examines one object in relation to education in its wider historical context through a reading of the archival records relating to the Melbourne Teacher’s Training College and Melbourne High School.

The influence of the educational exhibits of the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition held in Melbourne are shown to have had an impact on the design of the Melbourne Teachers Training College.

This paper provides a new and original perspective on the Melbourne Teachers Training College and its foundation through its library and museum collections.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an example of how ontology, such as CIDOC, can be turned into a format from the perspective of an object. In fact, it illustrates the possible semantic analysis of an object description into a view neutral machine‐interpretable form. The aim is to show that a museum object located in a museum can be described in detail and then related to other information objects located in other memory institutions such as libraries and archives.

Studying different documents, all the information about Imam Reza's Zarih 4th was derivated. Then the most important were listed and represented in detail, according to CIDOC CRM entities.

The figures explicitly reveal the existing semantic correlations between the heterogeneous cultural heritage information in various memory institutions, such as Organization of Libraries, Museums and Documents Centre of Astan Quds Razavi.

The authors capture the knowledge from different resources and relate them in a semantic description with the aid of a semantic conceptual model like CIDOC CRM, to show more effective information integration in a cultural institution such as Organization of Libraries, Museums and Documents Centre of Astan Quds Razavi, in order to provide unified access to collection‐level information.