1. Anna Valls
FIRT, Re-Routing Performance
Barcelona, 2013
The ICT and the Dissemination of Heritage
The Experience of MAE

2. Vision and Mission
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts
Vision
To be the reference centre for the research and information of
performing arts of Catalonia
Main goals
To preserve the memory of the performing arts in Catalonia
To support teaching and research at the various schools of our centre
To disseminate our museum, archive and bibliographical collections

3. 4 Units
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts
Research and historical library
1968
Museum
1923
School library
1923
Archive
1978

4. Many kinds of documentation
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts

5. Bibliographical and Media Collection
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts
Books,manuscripts, magazines, DVDs… : > 120,000

6. Set design collection
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts
Set design collection: set sketches, set models, costume renderings,
backdrops… more than 16,000 items.

7. Archive Collection
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts
Photos: > 200,000
Posters: 6,700
Programs: > 100.000

8. Costumes
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts
1000 pieces of actors , tenors, dancers…
Dresses and accessories like shoes, umbrellas, necklaces …

9. Puppetry Collection
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts
The puppetry collection contains 400 pieces

10.  We had 35,177 documents in 885 Windows folders
 We had more than 50 MSAccess databases for the archive and
museum collections
 Our bibliographical catalogue was run by VTLS
 Our digital newspaper database was run by Knossys
 Our staff didn’t include any IT engineer
 We used to have old tecnology and no open source
 We used to pay for all the IT services
Before 2008: Working without Information Technologies
MAE. Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts

11. Strategic Plan 2008-2013
Professionalization: two new IT engineers
Goals
Expenses reduction: open source software and our own
data centre
Improve management, processes and internal
communication  increase efficiency
Taking advantage of IT
to promote our museum collections
Human
Resources
Organization
Finance

12. 2008-2009 Project
From Puting out the fire stage to Reactive stage
2008 2009
The first computer
engineer
Strategic IT
planning1.0
2010
Content DM
To promote museum
collections
Newspaper
Data base
Dspace
Hardware
acquisition
Academic
Internet
network
MAE web
Joomla
futurs students
Web (joomla)
Data
Centre

13. 2010-2011 Project
From Reactive stage to Proactive stage
2011
2nd IT
Engineer
2012
‘Escena
Digital’
Supporting
Virtual
Campus
Anniversary
website
New backup
system
Performances
Database
ECLAP
European
Project
2010
Online
exhibition
‘Viatge per
l’escena’
Intranet
Virtualization
project
Scanner II
website
Strategic IT
Planning 2.0
New
catalogue

14. 2012 Project
We needed an application to manage and to disseminate the
archive and museum collections
We decided to develop our own application
From Proactive Stage to Innovative Stage

15. Proactive Stage to Innovative Stage
Partners: DuraSpace, Stanford, Virginia, Notre Dâme, Hull, etc.
Main elements: Fedora, Solr, Ruby on Rails
2012 Project

16. Proactive Stage to Innovative Stage
2012 Project
A new single data model for all the collections with Dublin Core
metadates (except bibliographical and audiovisual collections)
One single application to:
Describe documents or objects
Preserve images
Disseminate the holdings

17. 2013
Conclusions
Weaknesses
The project took much longer than we expected
Some staff had difficulties to adapt the news formats and
technologies of the XXI century

18. 2013
Conclusions
Strengths
21rd Century Technology
We use one single application for all the archives and museum collections
Our information system covers: ingestion, transformation, preservation
and dissemination
Our digital holdings are growing every day
We are much more efficient

19. 2013
Conclusions
• We believe that the effort of these last six years has been
worth it
• We are open to the world
• Hydraproject has asked us to become partners which
makes us very

20. Proactive Stage to Innovative Stage
2013

21. Anna Valls
vallspa@institutdelteatre.cat