MAO

Cataloguing nearly 2,000 archaeological artifacts for the Museum of Oriental Art

Turin’s Museum of Oriental Art (MAO) holds a collection of archaeological artifacts that, despite the museum’s existing cataloguing system, couldn’t structurally record some relevant information: materials, findspot, restoration work carried out. I built a dedicated Access database specifically to close that gap.

The technology chosen certainly isn’t the most sophisticated on the market, but it was the right fit to work around specific project constraints — and it still made it possible to catalog nearly 2,000 artifacts, whose data later flowed into the museum’s official database.

The work also led to a public conference held alongside the exhibition “Sulle sponde del Tigri. Le Collezioni del MAO da Seleucia e Coche” (On the Banks of the Tigris: MAO’s Collections from Seleucia and Coche), where I talked about how structured databases can help organize archaeological artifact data, with the goal of making culture more accessible to everyone.