Material Culture in the Computer Age - An Assessment of the Parks Canada Terminology Record as a Means of Storing Conceptual Data

Since the summer of 1992, the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa has been involved in a project to complete the English version of the Illustrated and Descriptive Dictionary for Historical Collections of Parks Canada, a unit of Heritage Canada. The work is being done as part of the graduate courses Terminology and Museology and Standardization in Terminology and Museum Documentation, and also as a practicum in terminology for undergraduate English-speaking students of the University of Ottawa, mostly of the School of Translation and Interpretation, because of their training in terminology. This dictionary, the first volume of which will be published shortly, is designed primarily for helping archivists and curators at Canadian Parks Historic Sites improve the identification, classification and cataloguing of artifacts in their collections. It is the logical supplement to the nomenclature established on this subject by the managers of Parks Canada collections (Canadian Parks Service, 1992).