The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN; , RCIP) is a special operating agency within the federal Department of Canadian Heritage that provides a networked interface to Canada's

heritage Heritage may refer to: History and society * A heritage asset A heritage asset is an item which has value because of its contribution to a nation's society, knowledge and/or culture. Such items are usually physical assets, but some countries also ...

institutions. It is based in

Gatineau Gatineau ( ; ) is a city in southwestern Quebec, Canada. It is located on the northern bank of the Ottawa River, directly across from Ottawa, Ontario. Gatineau is the largest city in the Outaouais administrative region of Quebec and is also p ...

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

, and is administratively merged with the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), another special operating agency of Canadian Heritage. Along with providing online public access to millions of collections records, CHIN offers collections management resources to Canada's museum community; more specifically, it assists museums in documenting, managing, and

sharing Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space. It is also the process of dividing and distributing. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of inherently finite goods, such as a common pasture or a shared residence. Still ...

information about their collections, thereby ensuring the accessibility of such information. CHIN provides bilingual information for all its resources. CHIN has three core areas of activity: # create and maintain an online point of entry to Canadian collections; # carry out research and development on collections documentation tools and standards; and # provide guidance and training to cultural institutions on managing collections information. CHIN was the first national organization to participate in the

Virtual Library museums pages The Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) formed an early leading directory of online museums around the world. History The VLmp online directory resource was founded by Jonathan Bowen in 1994, originally at the Oxford University Computing La ...

(VLmp) online museums directory, later supported by ICOM. Moreover, the agency oversees Artefacts Canada, a national inventory of museum collections that provides access to several million records and images from Canadian museums. It used by national and international heritage professionals—as well as by the public—to research Canadian cultural collections. CHIN also manages the online database for

Rowman & Littlefield Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group is an American independent academic publishing company founded in 1949. Under several imprints, the company offers scholarly books for the academic market, as well as trade books. The company also owns ...

's ''Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging'', a structured and controlled list of object terms organized in a classification system in order to "provide a basis for indexing and cataloging collections of human-made objects." First published in 1978 (launching online in 2018), it is North America's most extensively used "museum classification and

controlled vocabulary A controlled vocabulary provides a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. Controlled vocabularies are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems. Controlled v ...

for historical and ethnological collections."

History

The Canadian Heritage Information Network was established in 1972 as Canada's National Inventory Programme, originally to create a data bank, accessed through a computerized national network, and to help museums construct computerized inventories of their collections.Video - About the Canadian Heritage Information Network
/ref>Sledge, Jane, and Betsy Comstock. 1986. "The Canadian Heritage Information Network." Pp. 7-16 in ''Museum Documentation Systems: Developments and Applications'', edited by R. Light, D. Roberts, and J. Stewart. Butterworth & Co. In the 1990s, CHIN began maintaining a website where the museum community of Canada could find resources to improve the online visibility of their collections. In the 2010s,

agreed to allow CHIN to create an online version to supplement the published version of ''Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging'' 4.0. The site was launched in 2018.

References

External links

Canadian Heritage Information Network

Réseau canadien d'information sur le patrimoine

Artefacts Canada English

Artefacts Canada French
{{Authority control Organizations with year of establishment missing Federal departments and agencies of Canada Heritage organizations Canadian Heritage Information Network Museum organizations Department of Canadian Heritage Organizations based in Ottawa Culture of Canada

History

See also

References

External links