One Common Database System for 150 Small Social History Museums

The slogan of the efforts towards automating the collection information in Norwegian museums in the seventies, was Get a bucket under the data stream formulated by Jostein Hauge, then the director of Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities ( Hereafter NCCH). In Cooperation with the national organization of the art and social history museum, NCCH developed a standard registration form (on paper) for museum artifacts. Having no personal computers at that time, the form was intended to be filled in by typewriting OCR-letters at the museums and to have them read at the central computer at the University of Bergen. Several museums tried this service, but found the procedures slow and heavy in use.