Chinese Antiquities in US Museums: Online Collections Databases and Open Data Quality

Abstract

Bringing museum information resources online benefits the public and researchers. Despite decades of digitization, open access, and collaborative data sharing initiatives, few empirical studies have evaluated information retrieval effectiveness and open data quality. This poster uses web-based content analysis and a case study to review over 180,000 Chinese antiquities in 61 U.S. museums. Findings reveal intertwined curatorial and cataloging practices, challenges around the structural-flexibility tradeoff, and limited inter-institutional data interoperability. This poster contributes to the digital curation of non-Western cultural objects, digital scholarships, and provenance research.