The National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) holds the national collection of European and Irish fine art. In addition to promoting the gallery and it’s collections through exhibitions, other major functions comprise conservation, preservation, provenance research, education and assistance with investigation of the collections. This study is being carried out in cooperation with art specialists at NGI, facilitating access to their essential expertise and knowledge of cultural heritage. In order to gain an understanding of domain expert practices with respect to curation of the collections several meetings were held with art specialists at the gallery. These art experts included a curator of the northern European collection, a curator of the archives and a librarian. Since the meetings served as a learning experience for this researcher and were exploratory in nature, no strict agenda was set. The domain experts responded to questions and offered advice and provided further information describing their methods and tasks. Findings from these meetings (Appendix A) provide essential knowledge informing this research. Curator of the collection: It is apparent that important tasks for the curator involve long term planning and research into works of art, with a) exhibition and b) research and publication of research in the arts, forming the major activities carried out. The curator informs that organising an exhibition can take a couple of years from inception through to actualization. An exhibition may be presented to celebrate a particular event, it may be organised around a particular theme, it may celebrate a group of artists or may be organized on some other basis that is of interest to the public. Galleries work in cooperation with each other. For example, the curator has identified an artwork that he wishes to include in the exhibition that he is currently planning but the artwork is not contained in the NGI collection. Acquiring this particular (unnamed) artwork involves liaison with another gallery in Germany, to organize a loan of the artwork for the duration of the exhibition. The curators preferred method of communication in this instance is direct communication rather than phone or email and he will travel to the gallery in Germany to discuss the possibility of the Loan and logistics of same. Discussing the curators recently published book “Gabriel Metsu: Life and Work. A Catalogue Raisonné” provided insight into how the art specialist approaches an artwork. It is clear that the curator considers that many aspects as well as and beyond the “image” are important for research in art, such as, the artist life; the artists oeuvre; the artwork in relation to the artist’s oeuvre; the social and cultural context in which an artwork is created; artwork attribution and provenance; artwork subject or theme, grouping …show more content…
Complementing the collection of oil paintings is the Yeats Archive. The Yeats archive was donated to NGI in 1996 by Ann Yeats (the daughter of the poet William Butler Yeats who was the brother of the artist Jack B Yeats). Several additional collections have been acquired since then. Materials within the archive comprise watercolours; sketchbooks; illustrations; books and plays by the artist; the artist’s personal library and memorabilia associated with the Yeats family. The Yeats collection serves as an exemplar of the rich and complex nature of the domain; thus it forms the underlying dataset for this …show more content…
Similar to many other museums, NGI’s website provides information to the public such as details of exhibitions, visiting times, learning, research and the museum shop. It also provides public access to the museum collections. The front-end application to the archives is “Doras” which may be accessed from the website, while the backend archive system is iBase, a digital asset management system. The Yeats archive is not yet available online due to copy-write restrictions, but is available in Word document format. The front-end application to the library is “Portico” which may be accessed from the website. eMuseum is the front-end application to the museum collection, which may also be selected from the website. eMuseum is provided by Gallery System and publishes / retrieves works from the collection. The back end inventory control system is TMS (the Museum System): this software is also supplied by Gallery Systems. Other systems used by gallery personnel include auction house websites; subscriptions to these sites provide details of works for auction and