In order to move from siloed collections to a shared collections discovery portal, museums need both blended best practices and a shared vocabulary. Building on our discussion about blending best practices, this post outlines the next critical step in creating a truly unified museum consortium portal: developing a standardized vocabulary.
Some museums may have portals with an underlying collections management system (CMS) sophisticated enough to connect similar data as an aggregate dataset that can be searched against. Even when aggregating is possible, a thoughtful discussion around shared vocabulary among portal partners is recommended to help ensure successful collection discovery.
The Challenge of Varied Terminology
In the traditional museum model, each institution functions as an island of information. However, in a shared discovery environment, these individualistic cataloging habits can become discovery barriers. Imagine a digital user searching for “Madonna.” Without a common linguistic framework, they might miss significant, relevant results from a partner institution that catalogs similar items exclusively under “Virgin Mary.”
Too often, the burden of discovery is unfairly placed on the user, who must play a game of semantic hide-and-seek, guessing every possible synonym, regional variation, or technical term used across multiple museums. Sharing vocabularies bridges this gap between specialized professional descriptive styles and the organic way the public searches for art and history.
What Does It Mean to Share a Vocabulary?
Sharing a vocabulary is a collaborative practice of aligning the language used by different institutions so their data can be searched and understood as a single, cohesive collection. This is not about erasing institutional identity, but about using common translators
Most traditionally, alignment is achieved by adopting external standards such as the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) or the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN). By anchoring internal records to these global standards, a museum ensures its data is findable by any system that speaks the same standard language. It reconciles the different ways an encyclopedic museum and a contemporary gallery might describe a similar object, creating a seamless experience for the end user.
The Power of Field Aggregates
One of the most powerful technical strategies in shared discovery is the creation of data aggregates. In this approach, the portal pairs like fields together, allowing the search engine to query multiple data points simultaneously. These are typically employed as keyword searches to retrieve all relevant information.
For example: The portal can aggregate data from both the Medium and Materials fields. This ensures that a user searching for “marble” receives all relevant results, even if one museum stores that information in its Medium field while another uses a Materials field.
Flexibility and Machine Readability
Aggregates enable machine readability, allowing the system to interconnect records based on shared nodes. This functionality provides immense flexibility to individual museums. Partners can continue using their preferred internal cataloging fields—maintaining their specific workflows—while still benefiting from a high-performance, cross-collection search experience.
This technical infrastructure removes the “correct field” barrier. The digital user no longer needs to know which specific metadata field is used to store information. By shifting the complexity puzzle from the user to the underlying technology, we create a more inclusive, accessible, and powerful tool for global discovery.
The Power of a Shared Vocabulary
A shared vocabulary can be a powerful tool because it unlocks the collective stories of our institutions for a wider audience. By prioritizing shared vocabularies and smart data aggregation, we ensure that the portal’s central search engine doesn’t simply look for matching characters but understands the interconnected concepts at the heart of our collective materials.
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