Behind the Scenes with the Collections Data Migration Team
By Bowdoin College Museum of Art
It’s been more than 250 years since the prototype of a jigsaw puzzle was created by a London cartographer and engraver, who fastened maps onto wooden boards and cut them apart at country lines for reassembly. Both elegant and instructional, John Spilsbury’s early “dissections” have evolved into a perennially popular game. The 1850s invention of the up-and-down scroll-saw, or jigsaw, led to limitless variations on the idea of an image cut into hundreds or thousands of interlocking pieces, ready to reassemble into a whole image.* For jigsaw puzzle aficionados, the more complex and colorful the image, the better!
At the Museum of Art, staff members are continually engaged in creating and assembling a different but equally intricate puzzle—one that uses computer technology to track and describe information about the museum collections. A Collections Management System, or CMS, was first developed at BCMA in the 1990s, and staff have devoted substantial knowledge and effort to the input, updating, and refinement of collections data.
In the late 1990s the Museum adopted a collections management software called EmbARK, created by Gallery Systems—a company specializing in the data needs of museum registrars, collections managers, curators, and administrators. As of 2022, almost 40,000 EmbARK records document every catalogued and exhibited work of art in the Museum. Each is linked to images and information such as artist, source, location, condition, and more. The EmbARK records also support a web interface, Kiosk, through which anyone can search the museum’s holdings through the BCMA website. And, like a jigsaw puzzle, the collections database assembles into a vibrant picture of the whole.
These essential tools are about to become even more powerful with a major upgrade to next-generation software called TMS Collections and its public interface, eMuseum—both developed by Gallery Systems. In January, the Collections Management Integration Project team began work to shepherd the migration of data to the new system.
Both project manager Elizabeth (Betsy) Carpenter and data coordinator Anne Witty are returning members of the Museum team. BCMA staff will collaborate closely with faculty and students during the upgrade to ensure that access to the collection for teaching and research meets their needs. Bowdoin’s IT department and Gallery Systems staff will handle technical parts of the project, anticipated to run through June 2023.
To ensure the smooth migration of information to the new system, the BCMA team will first review records for consistency and ensure that the terms and fields we use conform to best practices for museums. In essence, the team is checking each piece of the data jigsaw puzzle to make sure it fits smoothly and contributes a complete portion of the overall image.
According to Tina Lerno, a jigsaw enthusiast and digital librarian at Los Angeles Public Library, the largest commercially available jigsaw puzzles now boast more than 40,000 or 50,000 pieces.* So the BCMA, with its 40,000 piece data puzzle, is in good company as we begin preparing the data for the next generation of collections management systems. Stay tuned!
Betsy Carpenter, Collection Management Integration Project ManagerAnne Witty, Collections Management Integration Data Coordinator
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
*Source: Tina Lerno, A Puzzling History of Jigsaw Puzzles (at https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/puzzling-history-puzzles); accessed 2-7-2022