Museums are repositories of hundreds of millions of unique objects and specimens, painstakingly recorded in paper documentation systems and supplemented by countless related images, manuscripts, bibliographic materials, oral histories, and correspondence.

These materials represent the world's cultural and natural heritage and have the power to inspire, to motivate, and to help mankind. But they are largely inaccessible even to the people working in museums.

Though museums have been automating their collection records for more than 20 years, almost all of these efforts have been centered on clerical tasks in the registrar's office — logging items in and out, tracking their movements, and making basic lists of objects. Many people, both inside and outside the museum, are interested in this information, but most don't have access to it.

Most of the potential that museums have to impact society is not being realized. We're trying to change that.

We've developed a new model for museum automation systems and have built a system based on it. Multi MIMSY 2000 is an innovative museum resource system that is designed to open up the content of the world's museums to a broader base of users who can access these resources either directly or via the Internet for a wide variety of purposes.

Multi MIMSY contains a sophisticated data structure for recording identification, management, and scholarly research information about objects and specimens. However, our goal with Multi MIMSY is to establish a foundation for navigating knowledge rather than just storing and retrieving data.

Here are some of the key elements in the Multi MIMSY model:

Knowledge Authorities. Most people, including people who work in museums, don't necessarily know what "gouache" is, where and when the War of the Roses was fought, or what a Canis dirus is and whether or not it still exists. Multi MIMSY provides a set of Knowledge Authorities ™ that contain context for interpreting the data that describe objects and specimens.

There are seven Knowledge Authorities in Multi MIMSY — associated people, associated places, associated events, associated subjects, associated publications, associated dates, and associated objects.

Say you have the hat that was worn by Paul Revere during his midnight ride. You record information about the hat in the catalogue portion of Multi MIMSY — such as what it looks like, its measurements, how and from whom you got the hat. Biographical information about Paul Revere may be recorded in the associated people authority — when and where he was born and died, a brief synopsis of his life, where he lived in Boston, and other details.

You can record information about the American Revolution in the associated subjects authority — what it was, when it was, where it was, its outcome, and any other related information. In the associated events authority, you can describe his midnight ride.

All of these records in turn may be dynamically linked to other records in the Knowledge Authorities as well as to object and specimen records. To link records to one another, you just click on a button, select the record you want to link to from a Pop-Up List and type in the nature of the relationship between the records.

Paul Revere's biography, for instance, may be linked to those of John Pullman and Robert Newman (the men who hung the lanterns in the Old North Church tower) or that of John Larkin (the deacon who loaned him the horse for the midnight ride). It may also be linked to the record for Boston in the associated places authority.

If you have a copy of Longfellow's poem about Paul Revere's ride in your collection, you can link it to any or all of the records described above or to a biography of Longfellow which might tell you that he was the grandson of Peleg Wadsworth, Paul Revere's commander on the Penobscot Expedition. And the Penobscot Expedition might have its own record in the associated events authority. And, for good measure, you might want to link in a QuickTime movie excerpt from the silent film that Thomas Edison made of the ride based on Longfellow's poem.

These links can be navigated in any direction from any of the linked records. Just as importantly, they can be turned into hypertext links when the data become part of your website.

Each user can take his or her own path through the information, connecting it in different ways. You might start with a query about Boston, get a list of people associated with Boston, select Paul Revere, and then segue to his biography, the biographies of his friends, the description of his hat, or Longfellow's poem.

You can start with the hat or with Deacon Larkin's biography or the Edison film or anywhere else. Each user can follow the links in the direction of his or her own choosing.

The Knowledge Authorities provide an interconnected, intellectual context in which the object or specimen is framed and through which it may be interpreted. They have been designed to be "Internet ready" in providing links that can be exploited by Internet browsers.

For museum materials to be of interest to and be used effectively by a wider audience, this context is essential. Going onto the Internet and getting a list of all the hats in a collection is nowhere close to as interesting or stimulating as knowing who owned those hats, how they were made, or how they were used.

The Knowledge Authorities are the first step in transforming museum automation systems from object-centric, single department systems to knowledge navigation systems of wide appeal and applicability.

Recyclable Resources. Museums collect knowledge all of the time as part of education projects, exhibitions and the creation of publications. Much of the work done in museums involves creating content to interpret the objects and specimens that these institutions hold in the public trust. This information is used in education programs, printed catalogues, interpretive wall labels in exhibition areas and, more recently, CD-ROM publications. All of these are "one-off" activities. None of this information makes its way back into traditional museum automation systems.

A basic concept of Multi MIMSY is that of "recyclable resources." Multi MIMSY is built so that users can easily select materials for use in special projects and then download them into other applications for further work. At the end of a project, instead of ending up with the images that were made to create an exhibition catalogue on someone's Syquest drive and the text off in someone else's word processor, all of these collateral materials can be funneled back into Multi MIMSY. Once part of Multi MIMSY, they can be combined with other information, provided to users and further enriched with subsequent research.

To maximize the use of these auxiliary materials, Multi MIMSY has been especially designed with a data structure that enables these materials to be accommodated and categorized along with extensive capabilities to catalogue and handle images, sound, video, and long text.

Simultaneous Structure. In most museums, books go to the library, images go to the photography department, manuscripts go to the archives and objects and specimens go to curators. This has led to developing different systems with different search tools, different syntaxes and different vocabularies for different kinds of materials, even though the materials themselves are all interrelated.

A researcher may be interested in Chichen-Itza. The researcher generally doesn't want to go to four different departments and use four different systems to find out if the museum has any materials on this topic.

Multi MIMSY provides a "one stop shopping" approach to finding all the materials related to a single theme. The system utilizes a unique data organization called "Simultaneous Structure." All materials, regardless of their physical nature, are stored in the same set of data fields in the same database — objects, natural science specimens, books, manuscripts, archival materials, photographs, etc. The special needs of individual users and museum disciplines are handled at the user interface level, not at the structural level.

Instead of going from department to department to find out about Chichen-Itza, you do a single query to learn about the excavated objects in the archaeology department, the copy of People of the Serpent by Edward Thompson (the modern discoverer of the site) in the library, the glass negatives of the site in the photography division, and the manuscript correspondence between Thompson and his friend Willard that is housed in the archives.

Simultaneous Structure provides the best of all worlds — you can search through only specific kinds of material (such as natural science specimens or manuscripts) or you can search across all materials at once.

The next year will be really exciting. Multi MIMSY 2000 is currently installed at several sites and is scheduled to be installed at another 70 during the coming months. (In the aggregate, these institutions hold more than 10 million items.) This will result in the largest virtual database of museum records that has ever existed in a single format.

We believe that the availability of these data will launch a new era in museum automation that will foster the exchange of data between museums for exhibition, education, and research purposes and begin the movement toward dissemination of this information over the Internet to vast new audiences.

By designing a different kind of museum automation system — one that supports fast access to every aspect of an item, connects it with supplementary information, and enables everything to be combined, correlated, and collated across physically diverse collections — we will open up the access and use of museum materials. This kind of user-orientation and unprecedented access can change the pathways of humanities research and the patterns of scientific inquiry.