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, …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