Museum Information System of Serbia

One of the important strategic goals of the National Museum in Belgrade, as Serbian central institution for safeguarding movable heritage, is the creation of a unified Museum Information System of Serbia – MISS, based on the contemporary international museological and technological standards.

The planned development of MISS has started in 1995 with the creation of the Strategic Development Study that defined its structure through connecting business processes and classes of data within the museum as a business system. A year later, the first of total 11 subsystems was implemented – Central Register of Serbian Mobile Cultural Heritage. The Central Register has made it possible to form basic electronic records of museum artifacts in Serbia based on the minimum of data required to describe museum artifacts according to present international museum standards.  At this time data processing was done by the individual museums which were not interconnected, and the compiling and administration of the submitted data was done by the National Museum in Belgrade.

In the following development stages, the National Museum continued to develop the MISS in accordance with the set strategy. Contemporary, expanded MISS database was created and it encompassed the data from three central subsystems of MISS: Addition to the Museum Collection – Acquisition, Scientific and Expert Processing, and partially Accommodation of Museum Collection. More than 220.000 previously entered data in the Central Museum Registry of Serbia was imported into the new, unique MISS database, which ensured continuity of data processing. Program support was also created and enabled the data from various museum databases to be imported in the central MISS database. The database is loaded to a server of an internet service provider, and the data administration is done by the National Museum using a custom made administrative program module.

Today, museums of Serbia access the MISS database using a web program package ETERNITAS, developed as a contemporary specialized application intended for use by museum experts. The system records all museums and museum collections in Serbia. Through numerous workshops approximately 300 museum experts in Serbia has been trained and assigned appropriate accounts for accessing the system.

Further development of MISS, design and introduction of other subsystems while using contemporary IT methods and techniques, enables more efficient use of data related to museum collections in Serbia, both within the museums and for the general public.

Internet presentation of Museum Information System of Serbia: www.eternitas.rs

Read more at Review of the National Center for Digitization:

The Eternitas Web Application – Implementation Step of the Museum Information System of Serbia

Museum Information System of Serbia Recent Approach to Database Modeling