Use of Controlled Vocabulary in the Documentation of the Singapore National Collection

With a collection of about 300,000 artefacts since the days of the Raffles Library and Museum (now the National Museum of Singapore) in the late 19th century, documentation of artefacts in the Singapore Collections Management System (SCMS) varied vastly in standards. Search and retrieval of information via technology was also not taken into consideration. The resulting challenges included: inefficient retrieval of records during searches; inability to develop facetted search features for online search pages; difficulty in creating a taxonomy; and unorganised data. The Cataloguing Team at the Heritage Conservation Centre (HCC), formed in 2014 was assigned the task to structure and standardise the data. This led to the use of controlled vocabularies in the cataloguing of the artefacts and later, the creation of the NHB Controlled Vocabulary. With these, it aims to enhance the search and retrieval of the National Collection records on Roots and our internal collections database.