A Session of the Custodians Council of the State Hermitage Museum

On March 13, 2013, a session of the Custodians Council of the State Hermitage Museum was held, dedicated to the realization of a plan for the creation of the universal Hermitage Museum record-keeping and custodial database. The session was opened by the General Director of the Hermitage M.B. Piotrovsky who noted the exceptional importance and necessity of this work.

The creation of a universal Hermitage Museum database began in December 1999. Since 2009, it was transferred to the modern KAMIS museum information system, which makes it possible to complete a wide range of museum tasks: fulfilling record-keeping and custodial function, document processing and creating multimedia application. The leading specialist of the Department of Scientific Documentation K.S. Romanov noted in his presentation that due to the preparations for the museum’s jubilee, it has become possible to complete to formation of the database by the end of 2014.

The effective organization of the work to expand the universal Hermitage Museum database by bringing in addition resources to scan the documentation and photographic records of museum items made it possible to significantly increase the volume of information contained in it over the course of 2012; all of the record-keeping documentation has been scanned: 871,576 pages, and 355,000 museum items have been digitized. The volume of the database at the beginning of 2013 amounts to 1,065,314 records, by December 2014, it will contain descriptions of all of the museum items stored in the Hermitage (1,000,000 images); it will become a unified source of information about them.

In 2010-2012, the development and implementation of specialized modules for automating the museum system, integrated with the Hermitage’s primary database, enable the employees of the Electronic Publications Sector to independently create multimedia application for visitors to the museum and the internet audience. In 2012 ten educational programs dedicated to the museum collections were published in the State Hermitage Museum’s site, a program for information kiosks for the exposition of the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory was created. Plans are in place to launch ten more educational multimedia applications on a variety of museum subjects and twelve programs dedicated to Hermitage masterpieces by 2014. An informational/navigation system, which will become part of the information infrastructure of the Main Museum Complex and the General Staff Building, will be created based on the Hermitage’s universal database.

The safety and reliability of the universal record-keeping and custodial database were addressed in a presentation by Yu.M. Loshak, the General Director of the developer company behind KAMIS, the integrated automated museum information system.