DATA MANAGEMENT

Data management policies and practices should be consistently reviewed and updated in alignment with your organization’s data use intentions. This includes the structures and processes that are designed to ensure accountability, transparency, responsiveness, legality, stability, equity and inclusiveness, empowerment, and broad-based participation. The following are some prompts and activities to consider in relation to data governance.

Provenance and Preservation

All returned questionnaires should be preserved—scanned (if hard copy) and saved (in a format as close as possible to what the artist returned) with a clear link to the data’s location.

• Establish a protocol to securely and consistently transfer information from the form to the database.

• Track when forms were sent out (and the precipitating event, e.g., an acquisition or information-gathering project), which version of the questionnaire was sent, and whether completed questionnaires were returned or not.

○ Have a mechanism to receive, review and/or update, and remove data over time.

○ Prepare to handle variations of the questionnaire, either translations to different languages or updates to the questionnaire itself over time.

• Document what is not recorded (constituents who have not responded to the questionnaire or respond only partially) and how this is reflected in your data, e.g., capturing all types of responses: an answer, a decline to answer, no answer.

• Centralize data in anticipation of a future in which this kind of data is aggregated and managed at a sector level, rather than at the institutional level. The benefits would include not taxing artists with multiple forms (by finding one template that fits the multitudes of needs of organizations globally) and easing maintenance for individual organizations.

Structure

• Refer to the information gathered in the assessment and conceptualization phases (see Assessment and Conceptualization) about the types of reporting requests anticipated for this kind of data and be sure values are recorded and parsed in a way that would satisfy those reporting requests.

• For fielded, structured data, enter each term and data element individually, not as a string, unless the data can be easily parsed.

• Deploy linked open-data principles whenever possible, i.e., include a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for names or terms that are sourced from a linked data service or authority file such as Getty Vocabularies, id.loc.gov, Virtual

International Authority File (VIAF), or Wikidata. Note that some of these may require updates to be made current (see Further Research).

• Data captured in systems should ideally be both controlled (i.e., fielded, with controlled term lists and options to provide remarks) and include primary data such as:

○ The language as shared by the artists (i.e., their actual words).

○ The source of the information (i.e., who filled out the form— vital for any museum with works by both living and nonliving artists in which data on nonliving artists may not be self-identified).

○ The date that the data was received or collected.

• To assist in future data management and discoverability, include an indication of the type of data recorded, including that this data is “demographic” or even specific types of demographic data (e.g., “gender identity”).

• To support the stated intentions for data use, indicate clearly within your database whether data points are for internal use only or external use, whether that is at the questionnaire level or at the question level, including the decisions made by the artist, if that was given on the questionnaire.

Making Meaning

It is incumbent upon us to correctly document what is shared with us, so that we are able to translate answers on the form to something meaningful. Through the use of data standards, the meaning of individuals’ answers can be recorded and preserved.

• Employing a controlled vocabulary will support the use of demographic data. You can build your own, but a variety of vocabulary tools exist (though to date none is considered a sector standard). See the list in Data Structure.

• Artists may provide their own demographic terms that fall outside of your controlled vocabulary (See Questionnaire Structure), requiring the recording of their natural language responses and/ or translation into a controlled vocabulary term.

• Questionnaire data represents a moment in time for the artist and should not be assumed to be tied to a particular work or body of work. An individual artist’s demographic data should be recorded and considered separately from object data.