Gestion Informatique Documentaire

Gestion Informatique Documentaire

Home | References | ENSBA

references : ENSBA

ECOLE NATIONALE SUPERIEURE DES BEAUX-ARTS (ENSBA)
National School of Fine Arts

Online project at ENSBA.

Can you introduce yourself ?
Anne-Solange Siret, administrator of Micromusée database at ENSBA.

Can you make a brief description of your museum ?
ENSBA is one of the last institutions in the world to house in the same place modern art education and collections inherited from its history. After being a model copied over several centuries, it has now become a singular institution. If this originality deserves to be protected, it has also resulted in a relative ignorance of the very rich collections accumulated during its three hundred fifty years of existence, the latter being not much or not at all on display. Estimated at around 500.000 art works, this collection is an exceptional iconographical resource.

Do you have specific projects at the moment and how the online project is part of it ?
The availability to the public through an online database with images will partly get around the confidentiality of these collections. With the help and efforts of the Collections service, this database exists and now has more than 69.000 references, of which 42.000 with an image.

How did you handle the online project ?
The installation of the OPACWeb, called “Cat’zArts”, took place under two constraints:
-  As a first step, a major upgrade of the data has been done by the whole staff, in particular on all authority files, with the requirement to produce information for both specialised  and general public.
- On the other hand, technical difficulties with a team kept to a minimum, with one computer engineer. At our level, the technical aspects have therefore relied on two people.



What do you think about Mobydoc partnership?
The online assistance, with people available when needed has been really invaluable, especially with the remote access: this allows a very flexible organization to build the database and work regarding the needs and the reality of the client.

A word to finish ?
Cat’zArts will help ENSBA to improve the knowledge of its collection to the public, and provide an exploration tool more user-friendly and available.
Beyond these issues, this project led us to reconsider the structure of the information in order to build a global tool describing very rich heterogeneous objects through a standardized interface.

http://www.ensba.fr/ow2/catzarts/index.xsp