The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is now conducting its first public evaluation of the ACD by the conservation and cultural heritage community.
Structural flexibility has been the guiding principle behind the ACD schema design in order to accommodate the diversity of cultural heritage objects, and the nearly equally diverse conceptual approaches and working methods used to record the materials, facture, condition, treatment, and requirements information about those objects.
Admittedly, in this evaluation version, the ACD is not nearly as intuitive or easy to use as we plan for it to be. Instead, we have continued to focus on refining the core system functionality and usability based on internal feedback from MFAH conservators, and feedback from webinars, conferences and presentations.
In this iteration, the MFAH offers a proof-of-concept that the ACD is capable of collecting and combining structured and unstructured information about a wide variety of objects using an equally wide variety of conceptual approaches and working methods in a single standards-driven system.
For instance, one may:
- Survey the condition of a group of objects using built-in or custom survey forms, designed and organized to accommodate virtually all types of objects using built-in or user-defined report groupings, fields and terms similar to forms that might be created using MS Excel, MS Access, FileMaker Pro, or other similar products.
- Create detailed narrative examination, recommendation, and treatment reports incorporating images, tables, and formatting similar to reports that might be written in MS Word or other word processing applications.
- Combine these two relatively distinct reporting approaches into a single report that benefits from the advantages of both.
Please contact Dave Thompson to request additional information about the evaluation and access to the ACD. We appreciate your interest in the ACD project and any feedback or comments you may offer.
