XLIII Scientific Instrument Symposium - SIC 2024

Session Chair: Alexandra Rose (Science Museum, UK)

Musings of a Curator - Precision and Accuracy in Online Museum Catalogues of Scientific Instruments
Author: Peggy Aldrich Kidwell
As museums seek to make holdings more widely available online many of us are reexamining instruments and records. Once cataloging was for internal use, focusing on museum numbers, object and source names, storage locations, and dimensions. Public access came through print publications, often focused on a single sort of object (e.g., a collection of astrolabes). The audience was distinguished, but small. Labels for the few objects placed on exhibit reached more people but were brief.

Many printed catalogs have been digitized and circulate online. Both initial and revised cataloging is now done on computer databases rather than typed cards, and much of the content is online for computer users across the world.
At NMAH, there has been greater emphasis on uploading records from databases than on assuring that they are useful, accurate or complete. However, some of us have reexamined records to provide accurate information and historical context. Website visitors can learn about such instruments of precision as Ramsden’s dividing engine and such feats of precise calculation as a 1961 printout of the first 100,000 digits of pi, as computed on an IBM 7090 computer. At the same time, there are efforts to use digitized museum records to make more precise counts of the number of objects in the museum – or at least the number of numbers that have been assigned (e.g., does one set of seven drawing instruments in a case count as one, seven, or eight objects?) Dates assigned and dimensions given also raise questions of precision.

Public Instruments of Precision
Author: Tacye Phillipson
Over the decades, our museum in Edinburgh has displayed a small number of working scientific instruments to the visiting public, giving access to precise readings of phenomena including the time, weather and ground tremors. They coexisted on the galleries with objects which worked as demonstrations and interactives, and which have a similarity to interactives and moving demonstration objects that are presently in the galleries. They provided access to the real objects of science in ways in which retired relics or replication cannot.

These working instruments of public precision have previously been considered separately, each as part of the subject that they related to, such as featuring as part of the story of the Edinburgh time service, or in listing of seismographs. In this presentation I will explore them together as a type of exhibit, with a focus on the public accessibility of the working instruments and how this was portrayed by the museum and, where evidence exists, how this access was received by the visitors.

21st Century Online Accessibility to Scientific Instrument Collections and the Need for a Science and Technology Thesaurus: A Pilot
Author: Trienke van der Spek
Co-Author: Christel Schollaardt
In January 2024 five Dutch science museums and the Dutch governmental Cultural Heritage Agency launched collections-based online platform Vind het Uit (Invent it). It gives pupils and students access to scientific and technological objects from five museum collections with a uniform and new disclosure that allows free association and creative use of this heritage.

The platform is the first result of a longer-term collaboration that aims at improving the online visibility, accessibility and usability of Dutch science collections – and scientific instruments in special – by generating a central, standardized and durable online access to these sources in an (inter)national context.
During this first pilot project uniform disclosure of the collections proved to be more challenging than expected, despite the comparability of the collections, the use of the same collection database software by all and the shared ambition to work towards a disclosure of collections by Linked Open Data. One of the most important issues was the lack of a professional online thesaurus for scientific heritage with the a sufficient level of precision and versatility. As a result this project gave birth to an unexpected, but very much needed result: a first version of a Science and Technology Thesaurus (STT).

This paper presents the insights from this project and discusses next steps. It also includes an ambitious call to the SIC community to explore the development of an international STT as a tool to improve online accessibility to scientific instrument collections worldwide.