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Museum and University Data, Program and Information Exchange 
MUSEUM COMPUTER NETWORK 
A workshop on data collection and data dissemination in museums was 
held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 5, 1970. It was sponsored by 
New York University in cooperation with the Museum Computer Network, under a 
grant from I.B.M. The morning schedule included a summary by David Vance, 
Museum of Modern Art, of the current activities of the Museum Computer 
Network; a talk by R. G. Chenhal1, Arkansas Archeological Survey, on methods 
used in the Arkansas Archeological Survey (they are using the MCN system); 
and a talk by John Cutbill, Cambridge University, England, concerning IRGMA 
(Information Retrieval Group of the Museum's Association) in England, which 
is an interdisciplinary organization attempting to design a mutually compat¬ 
ible and logically pure communications format. The afternoon was devoted to 
seminar groups focused on various aspects of data collection and dissemination, 
followed by a general discussion of the seminars. 
The Museum Computer Network is composed of about 23 institutions, most of 
which are in the New York City area. The basic aim behind the organization of 
the Network was to provide a mutual data bank of art, archeological, and other 
museum catalogue records that would be available to all. At the present time 
only two museums are actively engaged in data storage. The Metropolitan and 
the Museum of Modern Art both have remote terminals used for data input to the 
disc at a time-share contracter (Bowne Time Sharing). After the data are listed, 
checked, edited, and approved, the disc is read onto magnetic tapes and the tapes 
are sent to the Computer Center at SUNY, Stony Brook, where they are merged with 
previous disc files and stored pending retrieval calls. 
At the present time, although extensive records are prepared, the software 
is not yet written to permit manipu1at ion of the data in all desired ways. I 
had the impression that at present they cbuld arrange the data by any of the 
following five categories: artist, title of object, medium, museum where 
located, and museum accession number. Any listing at the present time prints 
the entire file arranged by one of these categories, and it is not possible at 
the present time to restrict a read-out to "all water colors by Picasso," for 
instance. Vance indicated that they were hoping to get additional software 
written in the near future to permit selective retrieval and better manipulation 
of existing data. 
There were two computations of costs of data input. Jack Heller, of the 
SUNY Stony Brook Computer Center, indicated that the cost per record, which 
would be equivalent to the catalogue entry for a single specimen for natural 
history material, averages out to about one dollar. At this rate, to store 
all catalogue data on the reptile and amphibian collections in the USNM would 
cost slightly more than $200,000, and for all reptile and amphibian collections 
in the United States, a little more than a million dollars. A second estimate, 
