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Site: National Museum of Ethnology
10-1 Sentri Expo Park
Suita, Osaka 565, Japan
http://www.minpaku.ac.jp/eng/index.htm
Date Visited: 27 March 1998
WTEC Attendess: T. Ager (report author), B. Croft, L. Goldberg, M. Shamos, R.D. Shelton Host: Prof. Sugita Shigeharu, Deputy Director-General of the Museum
The National Museum of Ethnology was established in 1974 as an inter-university research institute under the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture (Monbusho). It has been designated as a center of excellence in the field of ethnological studies. Its mission is
The museum staff includes 75 professors, 21 staff members in the information and documentation center and 34 members in the administration department.
In addition to research by resident scholars, the museum conducts symposia and joint projects, hosts visiting scholars, publishes four periodicals and three series of occasional papers or reports.
Japan's Graduate University for Advanced Studies, School of Cultural Studies, has its Regional Studies and Comparative Studies departments located at the museum. About 18 PhDs have been graduated since this function began in 1989.
The museum maintains a library of about 460,000 volumes, 13,000 bound volumes of periodicals, 62,000 audio-visual or multimedia items, and 216,000 artifacts. Virtually all the books, reports, periodicals, and artifacts are cataloged online. About 60% of the artifacts have been imaged, and this image data is included in the online asset management system. Currently all new artifact accessions are imaged as part of the acquisition and cataloging process.
The permanent exhibition of 11,000 items is about 4% of the artifact collection, and is open to the public six days a week. A Special Exhibition Hall is used for temporary exhibitions, often including rare materials loaned from other museums. The exhibition halls have many multimedia and computer-based kiosks. Especially interesting is the Videoteque, a 45-seat video-on-demand system, currently supported by a robotic laser-disk library containing about 1,600 disks.
Further information about the museum's programs, operations, and exhibitions can be found on the Web site listed above.
Prof. Sugita hosted the group and gave an overview of the museum functions and operations, as summarized above. The annual budget of the museum is ¥4.774 billion (1997) of which ¥550 million is for computer functions; procurement (¥399 million) and computer leases (¥150 million). The 1998 Japanese government funding for the digital-museum project consisted of ¥450 million (which included money for special hardware (¥200 million) and contents (¥100 million) and computer leases (¥150 million)).
The museum makes extensive use of technology including the online catalog and asset management system for artifacts, books, periodicals, and special collections such as the Human Relations Area Files (about 863,000 test pages). Virtually 100% of the museum's holdings are cataloged online. But the most interesting aspect is that for the artifact collection, a program of using 3D scanning, imaging, and measurement is applied to every new artifact (subject to scanning size limitations) that is acquired.
Three 3D scanning devices are in operation. The smallest is used for objects in which the largest dimension is less than 40 cm. The largest can handle objects of maximum dimension 1 meter. This large device can also image the object from all directions in 1/2 degree increments, providing more than ample data for various VR and 3D representation techniques. Typically, however, an object is imaged from front, back, left, right, and top. Such scanning generates about 12 megabytes of image data per artifact. The image devices are also capable of measuring the object's overall height, width, depth, and can map its contours as well. About 100 objects per day can be cataloged by the three imaging systems. One operator for all three is sufficient. The museum does joint research on 3D imaging with NAIST. The museum's online catalog allows search by subject term (the objects are cataloged using a controlled vocabulary). Query by image content is not supported in the artifact catalog. The catalog and other museum databases are shared among some other research institutes and universities, but are not available to the general public over the Internet. Prof. Sugita expressed the desire to extend more of the museum's online resource to the public, including some online exhibition capability. The museum is working with IBM Japan, the British Museum, and Cornell University on a Global Digital Museum Project (see IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory site visit report).
The museum's video collection is almost 20 years old. It began with cassette tapes, and was converted to laser disk. Another conversion to DVD during the next 2-3 years is being planned. The first conversion from cassettes to laser disk cost ¥600 million. The conversion to DVD is estimated to be about half that. These format conversions and digital material refresh costs are a concern for all institutions that undertake digitization. Although the actual copying from one format to another is routine, one can expect that the transition from an analog format such as laser disk brings requirements for new distribution technologies, and affords new opportunities for cataloging, indexing, search, and cross-linking with other digital materials.
The museum is participating in an IBM customer or user-group initiative called the IBM Asia-Pacific Digital Library Consortium. The WTEC team was invited to a luncheon with the IBM consortium while both were at the museum. In addition to the National Museum of Ethnology, libraries or museums from Taiwan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong, are participating in the IBM consortium. Although the consortium consists of IBM digital library and content management customers, its focus is on larger shared problems, including especially the development of standards and accepted practices for interoperability of digital collections.
The WTEC team that visited the National Museum of Ethnology was impressed by the scope of the digitization process for museum artifacts. The team members also felt that the utilization of multimedia resources in the exhibition areas of the museum was advanced and very comprehensive. Utilization of the museum's digital assets on the Internet is not as far along, but the museum indicated that greater use of Internet is under discussion.
The museum's twenty-year history of utilizing advanced computer technology for museum operations, internal research programs, and public exhibitions has clearly been instrumental in achieving its current advanced utilization of technologies for managing digital information. The team agreed that the National Museum of Ethnology was an excellent example of an advanced, technologically sophisticated museum.