GENREG - A Simple and Flexible System for Object Registration at the National Museum of Denmark.
Lene Rold · 1995
with textual data on more than 1,000,000 objects, and electronically stored images of around 200,000 of these. The GENREG database was established by "retrospective " registration of selected object data from the museum's manual inventories and other archives. The oldest inventories go back almost 200 years, and some objects even stem from the National Museum's predecessor, the Royal Art Chamber, which was founded in the 16th century. The image base, however, was established through recent photographs of the objects. The majority of the National Museum's collections naturally concern Danish objects. It has about 200,000 inventory numbers from Danish Prehistory and Middle Ages, any one of which can contain as many as several hundred objects; 400,000 inventory numbers from the Renaissance to Modern Times; 120,000 from the Ethnographic collections; and around 100,000 from several smaller collections. The decision to register selected information on the collections in a database was taken in the mid 1980s when the National Museum, thanks to large private and national donations, was able to begin a major rebuilding and renewal phase. Part of the plans for the Museum's future, was to apply information technology (IT) in all areas in administration, documentation, research, exhibition and other means of