DOCUMENTATION IN MUSEUMS OF IBERO-AMERICA: 2021-2022 SURVEY

In 2021, the DOMINO Working Group of ICOM DOCUMENTATION (ICOM CIDOC) proposed different actions to learn about the reality of documentation practice within the region’s museums. A survey was carried out between August 2022 and March 2022, which received 138 responses. The result was the study: Documentation in the Museums of Ibero-America. The study allowed each respondent to describe :

  • Information about themselves and their interest in connecting with DOCUMENTATION.
  • Information about their museum, emphasizing the number of staff in charge of documentation, as well as the time they spend on this work.
  • Information about their museum’s audience, including numbers related to their museum’s reach.
  • Information about their collections, including information on their inventories and catalogs and their formats.
  • Information about the level of documentation of their collections, standards or guides they may use, and how much of their collections are online.
  • Information about whether they are affiliated with professional museum associations, heritage organizations, and about their management of intellectual property.
  • Information about their own appreciation of documentation, as well as their museum’s appreciation of documentation.

Some conclusions obtained were:

  • Most museums are making progress in the basic documentation of their collections through inventories. However, detailed cataloging remains a key area in need of attention. Both aspects require support from DOCUMENTATION to strengthen best practices, but they also represent an opportunity to disseminate advances in museum documentation.
  • The assessment of documentation collides with the availability of the respondent’s time (or their staff’s time) to carry out these activities. This may be because they are assigned multiple tasks. Consequently, museums should be encouraged to implement tools (such as Object ID) that require less time, but that contribute to the security of their collections.
  • Museums are trying to improve the safeguarding of information about their collections through physical and digital means, but without a clear pathway towards the Web and online collections. For ICOM DOCUMENTATION, it is key to play a role in the professionalization of the management, safeguarding, interoperability and access of digital information in museums in the region (LIDO, EODEM, CIDOC CRM, etc.), promoting cooperation and exchange of information between institutions.

In general terms, documentation in the region must be addressed in a profound way, beyond general knowledge about the collections. The actions of museums who aim to manage online collections must respond to the idea of building documentation systems that are grounded in standards and that make it possible for the region’s heritage to be available online with quality and depth of information required.

The original version of the report was made in Spanish. For dissemination to a wider Ibero-American audience, a translation into Portuguese was made. Similarly, since ICOM is an organization with three official languages (English, French and Spanish), a summary version was produced in English and French. For the translation into Portuguese and French, we had the support of Mika Nyman, a member of the ICOM DOCUMENTATION community, who used this work for a process of building a protocol for the translation of cultural heritage information with Artificial Intelligence.

About the translation process: The Bumpy Road to AI Accessibility

Mika Nyman

Over two billion people worldwide have some form of disability, requiring awareness and specialized methods to make digital resources accessible. Surprisingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) also faces significant accessibility challenges. The same techniques used to improve digital accessibility for humans are needed to make resources AI-accessible.

These challenges became evident while translating the groundbreaking DOMINO study, Documentación en los museos de Iberoamérica: Encuesta 2021-2022. Originally published in Spanish, the study was translated into Portuguese using DeepL. The machine translations were then reviewed and corrected by the DOMINO team; the French translation was reviewed by staff from the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). However, DeepL could not extract text from images, requiring a separate process to extract and translate the text before recreating the images.

A crucial next step in AI accessibility is developing translation memories to standardize key terminology across languages. One such initiative is already underway for English and Persian in the field of Cultural Heritage. Additionally, work is ongoing to ensure statistical data is AI-accessible.

This effort aligns with ICOM’s Museum Definition. Embedded in the Museum Definition is a continuum: Museums are institutions engaged in collecting, preserving, interpreting, researching, and sharing knowledge. This continuum was already fully in place before the digitisation of cultural heritage institutions, but digitalisation has added a complementary dimension at each stage. AI now enhances museums’ mission—but to harness its full potential, digital representations of museum collections and areas of interest must be made AI-accessible.