Recently, the office of the Art and Culture Development Foundation under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Uzbekistan has hosted a three-day training from Lena Papailiou, a specialist at Zetcom, where participants study the work of the MuseumPlus platform, one of the world's best cataloguing system in museums.
As we reported earlier, the Foundation is working on the introduction of online cataloguing in the museums of Uzbekistan. The test period for the operation of the online platform will be held in four museums: the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, the State Museum of Applied Arts of Uzbekistan, Aybek House Museum and the State Museum of Art named after I.V. Savitsky.
Starting in the beginning of the week, representatives of museums, as well as employees of the Foundation, have been participating in the training, which is conducted by Lena Papailiou, a specialist from Zetcom who was invited from Switzerland. At the training, she has introduced the MuseumPlus platform, revealing all the specifications of the program’s functioning, and then held a discussion on the points of activating the program in our museums between the training's participants.
So far, employees of the above museums in Uzbekistan have done some work to create a database of museums, namely: special tables have been developed that describe each museum exhibit in detail, an inventory has been made, and staff have been preliminarily prepared for the transition to a new cataloguing system. This will be followed by the final step of loading these tables into the MuseumPlus software.
Among the famous museums of the world that use the MuseumPlus platform are: the Louvre Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Northwest Museum of Culture and Art and many others. The comprehensive and flexible application of this platform provides real-time management of internal museum reports and fully documents the various types of collections and related work processes. This platform has a clear interface, works on the basis of the browser and allows you to receive information by connecting to the Internet from any location. The program automatically maintains lists and counts and issues daily reports on the work of the museum.
Lena Papailiou, Project Manager of Zetcom:
- From the first day of my stay in Tashkent, I began to analyze the database, which was collected by employees of museums in Uzbekistan. My main task was to help to solve all issues regarding the installation of our software and its use, because the main users of MuseumPlus will be museum workers. In addition, it is important for me to understand the needs of each museum individually, as the collections and volume of reports are different for everyone. An individual approach is very important in this process, and I am glad that the Foundation organized a training, which allows us to work productively with representatives of four museums, and to understand the tasks that the MuseumPlus program can help solve. There is still a lot of work to be done, but I am sincerely glad that Uzbekistan is entering the international level in the development of museum activities and, I hope, our cooperation will help in the near future to optimize many of the daily processes of museums in Uzbekistan.