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Teylers Universe

The project Teylers Universe is an initiative of the Teylers Museum and is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

The goal of the project is to enable end users to search through the six major collections of the Teylers Museum in a coherent and integrated way. With the findability layer which is created in this process, it should be possible to expose possible relations which have to do with the context of the origins of the collections: the Enlightment. This concerns the following collections:

art
rare books
scientific instruments
coins and medallions
paleontological objects
mineralogical objects

In addition to these collections there is a large, digitized archive of the administration of the museum which dates back to its origin at the end of the eightteenth century. Also there is a treasure of articles that shed light on the history of the museum - the Teylers Museum is the oldest public museum of the Netherlands - and on the roles collectors and the collections played in it.

To achieve the goal of the project, a digital infrastructure is being set up in which the information from all knowledge domains of the Teylers Museum can be combined. The existing databases behind each of the six collections are being converted to an RNA environment. During and after these conversions, when the data is in the environment, there are several options to discover the relations that are present in the data and record them as machine readable links.

Maintaining and extending the collection data will partly be done in the original collection systems. These function satisfactorily so there is no need to change this. The data of two collections, however, will be further maintained and extended in the RNA environment with the RNA Toolset.