Information Technologies in the Research Activities of Museums: from Digital Catalogs to Artificial Intelligence Methods

Abstract

The article is of a historiographic nature and is intended to record the main stages in the development of hardware-software complexes and systems for creating digital images (DI) of museum storage items and their (DI) application in intra-museum activities: from solving practical problems of documenting the discovery (acquisition) of museum funds with historical artifacts, their existence in museums, conservation and restoration, creation and development of catalogues, to the implementation of historical and art history research, implemented using the methods of mathematical statistics and a wide range of modern approaches, technologies and scientific disciplines of Data Science. For the first time in Russian historiography, the expansion of the range of research tasks is considered, which has been going on from the mid-1970s to the present and has become possible, on the one hand, in connection with the growing understanding of the information potential of DI of museum objects, and on the other hand, with the digital transformation of traditional technical and technological methods of analysis of museum items, highlights the history of design and development of specialized hardware and software systems; an original periodization of the identified processes is proposed, a brief description of each of the 4 identified stages is given (including a methodological breakthrough that occurred at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries) and the results of the most significant scientific projects are described.