PERFORMING
ARTS INFORMATION PROJECTS AND INITIATIVES
The
quest for performing arts information standards
United
States projects and initiatives
European
projects and initiatives
Australian
projects and initiatives
THE QUEST FOR PERFORMING ARTS INFORMATION
STANDARDS
Although standards for
managing performing arts information have been under discussion in Europe and
Australia for almost three decades, no single set of
national or international standards has evolved.
Commercial database
publishers, individual collecting institutions and other organisations,
however, have adopted, modified and developed generic standards for managing
performing arts information.
The New York Public Library
of the Performing Arts was one of the first specialist libraries to use MARC
specifications, develop data entry guidelines and authority files for
controlling terminology in its Dance Collection and other major research
collections.
The London Stage Information
Bank 1660-1800, managed by Professor Ben Schneider Jr,
pioneered the use of computers to document theatrical events.
The need for standards was
identified as a critical issue at a landmark international conference on
computer databases for theatre studies, held at City University’s Gresham
College in September 1985 [Herbert NTQ Vol 2 no 6 May 1986].
Almost a decade later,
Margret Schild, in her 1994 SIBMAS paper, Considerations for developing an
electronic theatre information system, echoes the sentiment when reporting
on a meeting in Dusseldorf, exploring cooperative development of
German-language theatre databases, a German language theatre thesaurus and
international standards for data entry and exchange.
On the other side of the
Atlantic in the same year, the Coalition of Networked Information in its
report, Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways, notes that
technological barriers require concerted research and common standards for
improved access. It also highlights the ‘under-capitalisation of the
impressive array of exciting projects already underway’. Although no
performing arts projects were covered by the report, work by the visual art
sector included the development of controlled vocabularies in the form of the Union
List of Artists Names’ and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus,
initiated by the Getty Information Institute.
In 1997,
Pavlicak, Ross and Henry, in Information technology in humanities
scholarship: achievements, prospects and challenges – the United States focus,
published by the American Council of Learned Societies, report on the need for
‘greater standardization requirements and computing needs in the humanities
and arts’.
Returning to the other side
of the Atlantic in 1997, we find a workshop conducted by the Arts and
Humanities Data Service, Discovering online resources across the
humanities: a practical implementation of the Dublin Core, proposing the
development of a system architecture for cross-domain discovery in the
performing arts and other subjects.
In
Australia, the New Technologies Working Party of the Cultural Ministers
Council has initiated workshops, projects and publications on new technologies
and cultural activities. Information on digitisation, interoperability and
other issues is covered on its CD ROM, The Digital Environment
[September 1999], which includes the paper, Frameworks for multimedia
access to cultural heritage: an overview of standards, legislation initiatives
and policy mechanisms. The Cultural Organisations Metadata and
Database Interoperability Group [COMDIG] was established by Multimedia
Victoria and Arts Victoria to explore interoperability issues for libraries,
archives, museums and other cultural institutions in Victoria
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