About IMAGINE

The Israel Museum's searchable database currently accesses a part of the Israel Museum's collections across the three curatorial wings of the Museum as well as the Israeli Art Center.

The Museum's holdings of Art, Archaeology, Judaica and Jewish Ethnography comprise well over 250,000 objects and sets. The Museum is currently moving toward a comprehensive system of digital collection management, which will eventually encompass all of the encyclopedic holdings across the museum. As the program develops, the in-house database will be made unavailable online when both local and remote visitors will be able to access collections across the three curatorial wings in via simple and complex searches.

IMAGINE, the in-house image search engine of the Israel Museum allows curators, conservators, registrars, and service personnel to enter and update data, and provides the different departments simultaneous access to centralized data. Once digitized, the data can be searched in many different ways, by artist name, by country of origin or complex searches that a researcher might wish to explore.

The Database
Since 1999 the Israel Museum Collections Database development has been headed by the Computer and Information Systems Department and guided by the Steering Committee and currently provides a full solution to the multiple needs and functions of the twenty-seven departments of the Museum.

Many different database formats existed is the museum prior to IMAGINE and in order to enable a researcher to access information from the entire encyclopedic holdings of the museum all formats needed to be converted to one data format. There are currently some 56,000 objects the database. In addition there are 11,000 scans, which add a further dimension to the catalogued objects. A customized, multilingual lexicon was constructed built of 18,000 museum legacy terms by the IMAGINE team, in conjunction with the chief Registrars Office. The multilingual lexicon enables users and researcher to query the data in either English or Hebrew. The addition of Russian and Arabic are planned for the next stage.

Acknowledgments

The IMAGINE team would like to thank the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, its administration and staff, and all the people who sat on the various steering committees and played a role in making decisions relating to this project for their support in the computerization process of this national treasure. The IMAGINE team would especially like to thank the Director of the Museum, James Snyder, who has propelled this project forward from the start.

Curatorial Steering Committee

Allison Kupietzky – Collections Database Manager
Doron Eisenhamer, Manager of Computer & Information Systems Department
Miriam Apfeldorf, Chief Registrar
Yaki Har-Tal, Former Deputy Director, (1999 - 2003 )
Dor Lin, Deputy Director for Planning & Development, (2002 - present )
Suzanne Landau, Chief Curator of the Arts & Curator of Contemporary Art Wing
Daisy Raccah-Djivre, Chief Curator of the Judaica & Jewish Ethnography Wing
Silvia Rozenberg, Chief Curator of Archaeology Wing
Carmela Teichman, Coordinator of Curatorial Services, (2003 - present )
Iris Fishof, Director of Curatorial Services, Israel Museum , Jerusalem & Chairperson of Committee, (1999 - 2003 )
Yigal Zalmona, Chief Curator-at-Large & Chairperson of Committee, (2003 - present )
Executive Steering Committee
James Snyder, Director of Israel Museum , Jerusalem
Dor Lin, Deputy Director for Planning & Development, (2002 - present )
Yaki Har-Tal, Deputy Director, (1999 - 2003 )
Allison Kupietzky – Collections Database Manager
Doron Eisenhamer, Manager of Computer & Information Systems Department
Miriam Apfeldorf, Chief Registrar
| Daniel Ben-Natan, Vice President for Development & International Relations
Iris Fishof, Director of Curatorial Services, Israel Museum , Jerusalem & Chairperson of Committee, (1999 - 2003 )
Iuju Orenstein, Head of Finance
Yigal Zalmona, Chief Curator-at-Large
The Israel Museum thanks its Friends for their generous donation, which made Imagine possible.