Registry of the Fine-Art Collections

The Registry of Fine Art Collections is a joint project of the Czech Association of Galleries (RG) and our methodological centre. Its main purpose is to make fine art collections more open to experts in order to enable them to search for works of art for their presentations and research purposes. It is also accessible to the general public, so that anybody can look up works of art created by popular masters.

Furthermore, CITeM sees yet another, long-term goal in the Registry – the opportunity of showing the interconnection between Museum Authorities and Fine Art collections.

The Czech Association of Galleries had been considering establishing the Registry for a long time. Owing to the fact that most galleries use Demus01 – Fine-Art application – for the documentation of their works of art,  they approached CITeM, asking whether ProMuS could be used as a useful tool for the intended Registry. Jointly, we prepared an analysis leading to certain changes in the existing ProMuS; they were were so comprehensive and useful that we decided to implement them and create a new version called ProMuS1.0. Within the framework of the project we also elaborated methodology for recording data into Demus01 – Fine Arts, including recommendations for image formats, and we prepared a special data transformer for transfer from Demus01 into the Registry. Each of the participating galleries is responsible for data content and the quality and authorship of the supplied pictures.

We are convinced that the Registry will contribute to the quality of data content of the individual datasets because it detects not only small typing errors but mainly disunity in the notation of important fields.