Socio-technical experiments for organizing and disseminating university digital collections: the case of the Tainacan project

Abstract

Our article seeks to show how digital technologies facilitates the organization and access to university collections and museums. By analyzing the cases of universities that use the Tainacan software as a digital repository of collections, the practices of appropriation of digital tools by these institutions were shown and the gains resulting from this use in the face of the challenges of control and socialization of information the area discussed. For such purpose, a quantitative research that sought to survey the number of items cataloged in the repositories was conducted, and the data analyzed considering their frequency distribution in the proposed analytical categories. It shows different socio-echnical uses and specific forms of appropriation, emphasizing management and information treatment practices to be studied. In total, 17 university institutions from Brazil and abroad with experiences in the  organization of 63 digital collections, accounting for 11,896 items cataloged, were identified. The results allowed us to raise hypotheses that museums and university collections adopted Tainacan due to its flexibility and ease of use, which manages to meet the enormous typological diversity, institutional affiliation of these collections and greater simplicity in the implementation and customization. Moreover, it is clear that Tainacan allows the exercise of digital convergence of university collections, bringing them closer to greater mobility and the possibility of communicating with society, constituting itself as an important solution for the socialization of these collections.