The Victor Meirelles Museum digital collection: metadata as contribution to the representation of objects

Abstract

Describing the objects in museums is follows intrinsic and extrinsic information and requires the process of organizing information to adopt metadata, which group characteristics and represents the elements, their particularities, and their contextualization. Under this perspective, this study aimed to analyze the intrinsic and extrinsic information of the artistic-pictorial works in the Victor Meirelles Museum digital collection (the Tainacan Platform), searching connections between the metadata in some works with the Normative Resolution six of the Brazilian Institute of Museums (2021) to thus point out the similarities in its elements of description. This exploratory research with a qualitative approach used bibliographic and documentary research as its technical procedures. As a result, some metadata related to the museum assets in the institution have been identified and filled, whereas others seem to have been adapted to the experienced reality to standardize objects and their due information by the declaration of the National Inventory of Musealized Cultural Goods. In conclusion, this study stresses that the completeness of the fields on the Tainacan Platform will depend on the informational sources, especially those that show a character of greater or lesser representation about the biography of the object. Moreover, collections will render its historicity unattainable, thus making it impossible the apprehension of this knowledge by the museums.