Case Study 1: Bert's Bonsai (BB)

Bert's Bonsai is a small company, started by a retired plant scientist, which sells Bonsai plants, materials, and tools to cultivate them, and literature in book and magazine form. They were an early adopter of electronic records, and are still happily using an Amiga-based picture-and-text database for their plants from which they produce a catalogue they send round to the local gardening and florist shops as well as mailing to the special interest groups. Their mailing list is also maintained on the Amiga.

Bert's Bonsai has now been bought up by the proprietors of a garden-supplies franchise. The franchise have been advised by their (overworked and unenthusiastic) IT staff that the material currently in electronic form is next to useless, and it Could be best to start again; this has led to some legal dispute between the former owners of BB and the purchasers. The director of the franchise who organised the deal would like to know why BB can produce better catalogues and mailing list on a 25 year old Amiga than his staff can with a 2 million dollar IT budget.

The immediate challenge is to incorporate the plants and tools components of the stock into the greater franchise stock-lines with minimal fuss, and convert the mailing list and distribution list into the franchise's own versions. This also adds getting a web-presence for the new (combined) catalogue as well. The director in question wants to improve the current cataloguing and mailing practices to be at least as good as BB's. The IT staffs are resentful and look to be uncooperative.

Case Study 2: Aquatic Sport Museum

The Aquatic Sport Museum was formed when a local government acquired several bankrupt museums featuring historical materials pertaining to swimming, lifesaving, sailing, waterskiing and canoeing that had been created at the height of the America's Cup celebrations in Fremantle, Western Australia. There are 5 separate collections involved, which were merged with materials donated by local sporting clubs and the collected records of sporting organisations that have since ceased functioning. All of these materials are now going to be housed in a converted passenger shed on a wharf.

Each of those original museums had to keep to a standard to get permission to operate as an approved tourism venue, but standards for museum management have changed since then, and the DOS or Amiga machines that the digital records are kept on are not certain to work for much longer (if they work at all). There are also lots of minutes of meetings to do with the different organisations, and thousands of photographs and motion film, none of which has been digitised. There is a small library of reference material to do with local history, and to do with the history of the aquatic sports in general. There is also a large collection of clippings from newspapers and magazines. As well as the realia (physical items), there are a lot of digital artefacts with full metadata provenance as they have come from the local council where such things are done to an ISO standard.

There are rival plans to deal with the gathered historical artefacts: one is to house all of the material in one collection and get rid of duplicate and inferior material, and to pursue a line of investigation that gets more detail from the individuals who are still alive about the material.  The other plan is to try to have sections reflecting the original collections and the purposes they served, and try to build up material about the institutional presences behind them.

As this is primarily a real-world physical exhibition, they need to get a standard catalogue in place, but are keen to get a web presence going, with digital artefacts complete with metadata presented in such a way as to get visibility with search engines. This means compliance with best practice Dublin Core, as well as collection-level metadata for the material with a particular provenance. Finally they need to organise all of the additional information (the oral history, the clippings etc) in a way that lets local historians do research.

Prepare a knowledge management system to serve their purposes.