digitalnz is a portal to many museum collections that are online in New Zealand. I never expected to be not only informed but shocked when I consulted it recently and found a bit of information that is not only incorrect, it is also inaccurate. So, now I have to get the on-line information altered. That may not be easy so I will give a report back.
Here is what I looked at. I give both the Auckland Museum collection portal:
http://muse.aucklandmuseum.com/databases/Cenotaph/36710.detail
and the digitalnz portal:
http://search.digitalnz.org/nzetcsearchdigitalnz/search?search_text=brownson
This is the entry:
FULL NAME
Ronald Charles Brownson
FORENAME
Ronald Charles
SURNAME
Brownson
WAR
World War II, 1939-1945
SERIAL NO.
443580
FIRST KNOWN RANK
Private
OCCUPATION BEFORE ENLISTMENT
Butcher
NEXT OF KIN
Mrs E. Brownson (mother), 13 Mamie Street, Remuera, Auckland, New Zealand
MARITAL STATUS
Single
MILITARY DISTRICT
Auckland
EMBARKATION UNIT
Infantry Reinforcements
CAMPAIGNS
Italy
DESCRIPTION OF IMAGE
Cartoon/painting of Joe Glenn in Rome in September 1945. Shown lying under a wine cask drinking from the tap.
Cartoon/painting of Jo Glenn and Ronald Brownson. Both men shows holding onto posts, carrying wine and gin bottles, with red noses, saying to one another "Are you Joe", "Are you Ron'. These drawings may be with work of Ronald Brownson - to be confirmed.
What is wrong is this: Dad was not a butcher and he never drank gin!
4 comments:
Hey Ron
Great to see you using Digital New Zealand!
I was a member of the DigitalNZ while I worked at the National Library, and continue to work with them now.
The DigitalNZ search portal provides aggregated access to digital collections from over 100 content partners (including the Auckland Art Gallery). DigitalNZ harvests metadata from these partners, and reproduces this on the search portal, which is powered by an API that's available for other people to build their own search tools (and more) upon.
DigitalNZ doesn't make any changes to the content that they harvest - they simply reproduce what the existing sites make available.
Cataloguing is an art, not a science, as I'm sure you'll agree. The web team at Auckland Museum is made up of great people, and I'm sure that if you drop them a line providing them the correct information, they'll appreciate that and amend the files.
best, Courtney
Hi Ron,
I'm so pleased you've been checking out search.digitalnz.org.
Courtney has covered most of what I wanted to say about how DigitalNZ works. I also wanted to point you to the "Report a problem with this record" link at the bottom of the record page (see http://search.digitalnz.org/records/show/163177.html?locale=en ) We always forward any issues that people alert us to back to the content provider. So if someone contacts us about an Auckland Art Gallery record then we'll be sure to contact you guys! I have alerted our colleagues at Auckland Museum to your post.
All the best,
Fiona
Hi Ron,
Thanks for your discussion of this Cenotaph Record for your father - it's great you were able to find it, but we're sorry for the shock.
We use a wide range of sources to compile the records on the Cenotaph Database, which Digital New Zealand then help us distribute to wider audiences; and we do our best to check for accuracy.
In this case, the offending piece of information regarding your father's occupation came from the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force Nominal Roll No. 14 (Embarkations from 1st April, 1944 to 31st December, 1944) which listed Ronald Brownson's occupation as butcher.
If you have more accurate source information, we would be very happy to amend the existing record. Can you please email us at armoury@aucklandmuseum.com?
Meanwhile, Digital New Zealand has also removed the image and associated information from their system.
Best regards,
Virginia (New Media Manager, Auckland Museum)
Thanks Courtney, I use Digital New Zealand frequently and it is one of the most useful research tools for local material that one might overlook. What I really like about this portal is how it associated material that we do not immediately think is related. That is why it is such a key research aid.
Ron
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