Computers II: The Role of Older Descriptions and Identifications of Objects in a Museum Database.

The article reports on the automation of data related to the collections of the National Museums of Scotland. It states the that planning of this automation lies in the relationship between the existing paper records and the database that will be created from them. The author notes on the constraints on automation which includes the history of the institution and the representation of that history by its surviving archives. He adds that the archeology collections of the National Museum of Scotland date back from 1780 and they have used various methods for record-keeping which resulted in some overlaps in the sets of paper records.