EMII European Standards Survey - Future Vision 4.1

European Standards Survey

Future Vision 4.1 - Results - Iceland

4.1 Future Vision
i. Your comments in response to our question: 'Please use this space to describe ways in which you consider EMII should develop to provide a value added resource to museums in your country. Feel free to address any aspect of our current remit or to propose new roles. You may be as detailed as you like and include references to publications, Web sites, iniatives etc. Whilst we are developing our vision for EMII's future activities we also want to ensure that we capture your needs and concerns.'

EMII as a good opportunity to learn how museums and institutions in Europe work with the cultural heritage in terms of collecting, registering, classifying and so on. We will be able to take the advantages of what our colleagues have been doing in other countries through so many years. The museum structure in Iceland is young and there are not very many years since there were only very few museums in Iceland and further it is very recent that there are available educated people working in the museums. That means that the museums in Iceland are those years growing very rapidly if we compare to the 70s and 80s.

Because of the circumstances; Iceland being so small we have the privilege to being able to overview the situation quite well. But even if we are small we have almost the same phenomenon to deal with as in other countries. That means that it is very important for museums in Iceland to get to know how problems are solved in other countries. In EMII there is a opportunity to get answers to questions we are dealing with every day in our work. Is it question of software, different programs and systems and so on. We will be able to get information about classification, terms list, standards and so on. Our work on SARPUR [National Museum of Iceland Collections Management System] is an example of how our small circumstances helped us to make a holistic system dealing with the cultural heritage. I do hope that in some way the work with EMII can advice us in our very important work to get all the information into our product SARPUR. We are now planning how we can solve our task to finish the unregistered part of our collection. It would be a real benefit to be able to do that.

Our work with SARPUR could be a sort of demo how a very small situation or scale can be an advantage in work like this.

Submission Details

i. Submitted by:	Lilja Arnadottir
ii. Job title:	Curator
iii. Organisation:	National Museum of Iceland
iv. E-mail:	liljaa@natmus.is
v. Date Submitted:	05/04/2000

Funded by the European Commission - DGX - Raphaël Programme