Objects, Constituents & Roles
We often think of museum collections as Artworks created by Artists.
But museum collections go beyond "artworks" and include a diverse range of historical documents, photographs, textiles, tools, cultural items and more.
This broader category is collectively referred to as Objects.
When talking about Objects rather than just Artworks, we also need an expanded concept beyond Artists.
Constituent refers to any entity with a relationship to an Object, such as an artist, organization, or company.
Constituents are related to Objects by Roles. Objects may have many constituents with various roles...
…and a single constituent may play many roles.
Similarly, Objects are related to Geographical Locations by a relationship type.
These relationships form a graph similar to social graphs used in social networking sites.
In these paintings associated with Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, only one painting was actually painted by Rembrandt.
Artwork images from Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Roles are essential to clarifying the relationship between Objects and Constituents.
Objects don’t always have a related constituent. Often, the maker is unknown.
In these cases, an Object’s Culture may provide useful context.
Culture and Constituents can be modelled as separate metadata attributes of Objects.
Or, cultures could be thought of as constituents with the role of “Culture”. (Brooklyn Museum currently uses this approach.)
Regardless of the content model and terminology we use internally, we must consider what makes sense for the majority of our visitors.
Most museum websites simply refer to “Artists” and “Artworks”, regardless of the role of the constituent.
However, care should be taken to clarify roles whenever possible.
2025 Update
Philadelphia Museum of Art is now Philadelphia Art Museum with new branding, website, and domain (https://www.visitpham.org).
Search has been moved to Algolia, and a number of the search features I implemented have been dropped, like search-as-you-type with drop-down suggestions and “Related Artworks” weighted fields search on each object page.
The collection search no longer seems to have a “weighted fields” (boosted fields) approach, or perhaps it does and title takes precedence. The first result for “rembrandt” is by Charles Willson Peale, while in the my old search the primary constituent was slightly boosted and would have resulted in paintings by Rembrandt Peale and Rembrandt to take precedence.
Perhaps most unfortunately, constituent roles and prefixes are completely missing, highlighting the importance of this blog post. Related to this, many object pages are completely missing a constituent, I presume because the record lacks an "Artist/Maker" role.
Screenshot of search results and object page. Prefix labels like “Copy after” are mine.
