Is your catalogue data ready for reuse? Ten lessons from NEMO
A catalogue can be available online while its records remain difficult to search, exchange, update, or preserve. A practical guide from the Network of European Museum Organisations asks institutions to consider these later uses when information is first recorded. This field note summarizes the guide’s ten-part framework, considers its relevance to catalogue raisonné projects, and provides questions for reviewing your own documentation practices.
Image credit: Paul Gauguin, La Hutte sous les palmiers, 1899, Oil on canvas, 30.8 x 46.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
Source: Digital Basic Cataloguing: 10 Principles
Published: First version, 2022
Publishers: Network of European Museum Organisations and German Museums Association
Author: Winfried Bergmeyer, with Paul Klimpel contributing the legal guidance
Reviewed: September 2026
What is Digital Basic Cataloguing: 10 Principles?
The guide addresses how museums should prepare collection information for digital use. It does not prescribe which information every museum must collect, and it is not a formal standard or certification.
Its intended audience is museums, but many of its questions apply equally to catalogue raisonné teams. Both work with information about objects, people, places, events, images, provenance, sources, and rights. Both also need records that can be reviewed, revised, searched, published, exchanged, and preserved.
The report organizes this work into ten areas.
1. Connect documentation decisions to institutional purpose
The guide begins with institutional requirements. Documentation practices should reflect the organization’s mission, collection policy, resources, and intended uses for the information.
A written documentation policy should identify required fields, entry rules, review responsibilities, and procedures for resolving questions. Staff also need continuing training as technologies and institutional priorities change.
Question for your project: Do you have written guidance explaining what must be recorded, how it should be entered, and who may review or approve it?
2. Structure information for people and computers
Information that makes sense to a reader may not be easy for a computer to process. The report recommends dividing complex statements into smaller, connected units and assigning identifiers to records.
It also gives particular attention to uncertainty. A question mark or explanatory note may communicate doubt to a reader, but it may not support filtering or data exchange. Uncertainty should therefore be recorded explicitly and consistently.
Question for your project: Can your records distinguish confirmed, uncertain, estimated, disputed, and unknown information without relying only on free-text notes?
3. Use appropriate controlled vocabularies
Controlled vocabularies can help teams use consistent terms and connect their records to information maintained elsewhere. They are especially useful for people, places, materials, techniques, object types, and subjects.
External vocabulary identifiers can support linking and multilingual labels, but they do not determine whether a scholarly conclusion is correct. Teams must still select, review, and contextualize terms.
Question for your project: Which fields use controlled terms, and do you preserve the identifiers and sources associated with those terms?
4. Plan external data enrichment carefully
Identifiers and interfaces can connect a record to external information. This may allow a team to retrieve names, translations, geographic information, or other contextual data without maintaining every element independently.
The report recommends deciding which sources may be used, which information may be added, and whether external data will be displayed on demand or stored locally. The source of imported information should remain identifiable.
Question for your project: If information comes from an external source, can users tell where it originated and when it was retrieved?
5. Manage digital media as documented objects
The guide distinguishes between digital representations of physical objects, such as photographs and scans, and works or documents that were created digitally.
Images, audio, video, documents, and three-dimensional files need their own identifiers, technical information, rights information, and relationships to collection records. A Digital Asset Management System can assist with storage, versioning, transformation, and delivery, but it does not by itself guarantee preservation.
Question for your project: Can each digital file be identified, connected to the correct record, traced to its source, and interpreted together with its rights and technical information?
6. Decide how multilingual information will work
Multilingual cataloguing involves more than translating a public website. Teams must decide which information will be recorded in multiple languages, which language is authoritative, and how later revisions will be coordinated.
Controlled vocabularies may supply labels in several languages, but titles, descriptions, research notes, and interpretive texts still require translation and review.
Question for your project: Have you documented which fields are multilingual and how changes will be reviewed across languages?
7. Design for export and exchange
The report treats data export as a foundational requirement rather than a feature to consider later.
Files and application programming interfaces, or APIs, can both support exchange. Neither eliminates the need to agree on field meanings, formats, relationships, identifiers, and access conditions. A CSV file may carry simple tabular information but struggle to preserve complex relationships. An API can provide defined access to data, but it still requires documentation, mapping, and permissions.
For current guidance on structured cultural heritage exchange, the 2025 LIDO Primer explains how the LIDO metadata schema represents and transfers information about cultural objects.
Question for your project: Can you export complete records, relationships, vocabulary references, and media information in documented formats?
8. Record provenance as structured and qualified information
Provenance is more than a sequence of names. Useful records may need to identify ownership periods, actors and their roles, transaction types, places, sources, gaps, and degrees of certainty.
Structuring these components supports research and comparison, but the structure must preserve ambiguity where the evidence remains incomplete or disputed.
Question for your project: Can your provenance records distinguish evidence, interpretation, uncertainty, and gaps without forcing them into a single narrative?
9. Document rights, restrictions, and permitted uses
Owning an object does not necessarily mean owning the copyright in it. Rights may also differ between an original work, a photograph of that work, catalogue text, and other associated files.
The report discusses copyright, neighboring rights, data protection, licenses, orphan works, and reproductions of public-domain material. Its legal discussion reflects a European context in 2022 and should be checked against current law and the relevant jurisdiction.
Question for your project: Does each publishable resource have documented rights information, a source for that determination, and clear conditions for access or reuse?
10. Plan for continued access
Digital sustainability requires more than keeping a website online. The report recommends complete backups and exports, documentation of local configurations, usable metadata standards, durable links, versioning, appropriate licensing, and long-term archiving.
Responsibility matters as much as technology. Persistent identifiers, backups, and open formats remain useful only when an organization maintains them.
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Levels of Digital Preservation provides a current framework for assessing preservation practice. Version 2.1, released in March 2026, also incorporates environmental sustainability into preservation planning.
Question for your project: If the current system or responsible staff member were no longer available, could another team understand, recover, and continue the publication?
What we take from the report
Three ideas are particularly important for catalogue raisonné projects.
Reuse begins during cataloguing
Making records reusable is not a final export task. Identifiers, relationships, sources, rights, uncertainty, and language must be considered while information is being entered.
Uncertainty is part of the data
Catalogue raisonné scholarship frequently depends on incomplete, conflicting, or developing evidence. Recording uncertainty in structured form allows a publication to remain transparent without making the information impossible to search or exchange.
Sustainability is an organizational commitment
No file format, identifier, or technical platform can preserve a publication without assigned responsibility, documentation, and continuing resources. Long-term access must be planned as part of the research project.
What has changed since 2022?
The report itself acknowledges that its technical guidance requires continuing review. One recent example makes that need clear.
In 2026, Getty discontinued its regularly refreshed XML releases and XML web services for several Getty Vocabularies. Getty continues to provide web search, stable vocabulary URIs, Linked Open Data, SPARQL access, and OpenRefine reconciliation, but institutions using the retired services must adapt their workflows. Getty’s current technical guidance explains the available access methods.
The underlying principle remains sound: connect records to maintained external identifiers where appropriate. The particular method used to retrieve information may change.
How to use these ten questions
Treat the questions in this field note as a preliminary review, not a pass-or-fail assessment. Record each answer as:
Yes
Partly
No
Unknown
Not applicable
A “partly,” “no,” or “unknown” answer identifies a decision that should be documented before a major migration, publication, or data exchange.
The complete Digital Basic Cataloguing: 10 Principles provides detailed explanations, examples, and further reading for each area.
