About This Collection
Roundel with a Personification of the Moon, Unknown French from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Content
Retrieving the Moon is a collection that explores the information management architecture and the discoverability and retrieval of museum objects within it. I was interested in restricting my selection of ten artworks based solely on one search term and utilizing the faceted classification system employed in museum discovery layers to filter results further. I settled on the search term ‘Moon,’ given its broad symbolic potential across cultures and history. The search process began with selecting an art museum, navigating to the online collections landing page, and searching for the term ‘Moon.’ I then utilized filters to search for objects by geographical region and time periods. I intentionally selected a diverse group of objects ranging across history, cultures, materials, and forms to demonstrate the broad coverage of searching for just a single term.
Through this exercise, I gain insight into how museums index certain fields and employ access terms to aid in the navigation and discoverability of their collections. I was surprised to discover across all ten objects I selected, none had the word ‘Moon’ tagged in the subject field. Seven of the objects were retrieved because ‘Moon’ is in the object title and the remaining three were retrieved because ‘Moon’ was mentioned in the object description. An interesting example of indexed fields is demonstrated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met’s collection search box returned objects that had no topical or form associated with the Moon but were indexed under the term because the work was cited in a publication with ‘Moon’ in the title. For my purposes, these search results did not align with my user intentions and added over 100 extra objects to my search result.
The process of compiling this collection revealed a surprising discovery that the eight museums I searched across did not utilize subject term fields for topical or content access. But instead relied on the object title and the description fields to index topical or content terms.
Rabbit in the Moon, Unknown Chinese from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Scope
This experiment resulted in a collection containing ten artworks housed across eight museums including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ranging from a deity associated to the moon from Egypt from 664 B.C to Katie Paterson’s contemporary art installation in 2008.
Context
This Omeka S website and the collection was formulated for INFO 684 Museum Information Management Spring 2021 at Pratt Institute School of Information.