What’s the meaning of Computer aided graphic documentation for conservation looking it through a critical point of view and having attention to the concrete meaning of the term more than the philosophic aspect?
What are the methodological and technical challenges offers in these fields and the qualitative research methods in recording and documentation activities?
Defining the needs is the first step toward establishing a project timeline, setting the project goals.
The steps will help us to define the work that needs to be done and, mainly, the scope of the project.
As symbolic key points of the proposed project, I’ve selected three reference’s years:
- 1997 when GCI has monitored and recorded the condition of the Siqueiros’ mural América Tropical.
- 2007 Is the date of the publication, cured from GCI, of two volumes at the end of the project RecorDIM – Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles, Robin Letellier, with contributions from Werner Schmid and François LeBlanc and Illustrated Examples, Edited by Rand Eppich and Amel Chabbi
- 2019/2020 It’s the time to re-collect ideas and proposal for Computer aided graphic documentation for conservation (CAGraDoCo), a tool for conservator, a well defined idea ‘bout methodology and practical documentation.
Codes of ethics, guidelines and standards: the final goal is to make the computer-based documentation as an activity devolved to conservator. In other words codes of ethics, guidelines and standards are the reference points for the definition of an authentic history of conservative documentation, a story that seems at present to be completely absent.
The analysis of approaches, points of view and experiences in the documentation standard and de facto documentation activities from institution in Europe and USA and the analysis of the activities of the GCI documentation staff will be classified and archived using a Web based database. In line with this approach, the database structure will be discuss looking the request and the necessities of the GCI documentation staff and focused to a possible open distribution.
The Getty library, the material of the RecorDIM project, the activities of the documentation staff are the central focus of this research because the bibliography on graphic manual or digital documentation should be dramatically improved using mainly the GCI library.
In the second part of the research is concrete and practical because centered on the analysis of the documentation softwares used in the documentation practice of the conservator. The objective is to make AutoCAD – the standard de facto software used in the conservation documentation – useful and to verify how modify the software structure and interface exactly as made in the 1997’s research result. However, according the content of point 3, step two,mainly it is necessary to verify the possibility of customization of the documentation process using CAD and/or GIS open source software. The focus will be also on the definition of a lexicon and documentation standards. The hypothesis is the definition of standard in the conservative graphical documentation both as rules and as customization of CAD and/or GIS software.
