The IsraelMuseum - managing digital assets Doron Eisenhamer - Manager of Computer and Information Systems Department Susan Hazan – Curator of New Media http://www.imj.org.il The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, perhaps best known for the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, includes permanent collections ranging from prehistoric archaeology through contemporary art. It is the leading cultural institution in Israel and is one of the ten largest encyclopaedic museums in the world, annually presenting a full roster of temporary exhibitions, publications and educational activities. The Museum is committed to the preservation, study and display of its collections, fosters education for its public from within Israel and abroad. Perhaps the greatest challenge that any museum faces is digitizing its collections, whether they are for curatoral or scholastic research, as a provision of contextual information for the museum visitors, or in an interpretation of the collections for remote visitors online.
The Computer and Information Systems Department is committed to the digitisation of the extensive holdings of the pre-eminent collection of the archaeology of the Holy Land, the world's most comprehensive collections of Judaica and the ethnology of the Jewish people around the world and its fine art holdings from Old Masters in European Art through international contemporary art. For a museum such as the Israel Museum, this is a formidable challenge, not only for the sheer quantity of its holdings but also in the complex representation of the interdisciplinary institution and the diverse 22 curatorial departments. This responsibility extends to the-user community of the museum itself with a help desk serving over 300 staff, the thousands of visitors who come through the galleries as well as the hundreds of thousands who regularly visit the website. Allison Kupietzky, Collections Database Manager, has risen to this challenge with a passion. According to Kupietzky, the lexicon was constructed from legacy terms that have been used in the museum for the last 30 years. Functioning as a bilingual lexicon the terms are found in English and Hebrew in parallel tables that may be easily accessed while working on the database. While this is a project that she and her team will be dedicated to for many years to come, some 7,000 objects have already been entered into the database. Once this project has been fully realized, the database will continue to provide the resources for new digital activities across the museum that rely first and foremost on their digital surrogate. Amongst the complex of galleries and material collections, information kiosks in the galleries and computerized study rooms add a further dimension to the museum experience, providing the contextual information that serves to compliment and enhance the gallery experience. Extending the gallery experience beyond the walls, the institutional Internet site, launched in 1995 and was one of the first comprehensive websites to be launched in Hebrew and in English. As new temporary exhibitions regularly make their debut in the museum, both information kiosks and special sections of the museums website are designed, to augment the collections and to provide further depth to the museum experience. This year, the web team developed over ten online special exhibits in Hebrew, English and Russian for both local and remote visitors as well as kiosk –based activities in the Youth Wing and the Judaica galleries. Two major projects were also launched this year – Living Together, with its tri-lingual website, (in Hebrew, English and Arabic) which presented over 500 photographs the fruit of over 120 young adults from all over the country, that celebrated its opening at the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) as well as the point to point, 3-part video conference series – ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls Live’. The Computer and Information Systems Department continues to meet new challenges as each new season comes round and to represent the permanent collections, the on-going exhibitions, and the full range of educational and experiential activities of the dynamic encyclopaedic museum.
