Peter Homulos recounts how he went from being a geology student to a director of the National Inventory Programme, the precursor of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), all before he was 30 years old. The mandate of the Programme was to maintain the records of Canada’s cultural properties, but it evolved into creating a computerized inventory of collections to facilitate the sharing of information. It was also responsible for research and development on information management, collections documentation standards and collections management systems. From a modern perspective, it is difficult to convey how groundbreaking and even controversial this initiative was.
Peter Homulos: Director, CHIN, 1972-1992
Duration: 38:48
[Music: “We Don’t Know How it Ends” by Lee Rosevere from the album “Music for Podcasts 6.” Style: Electronic Minimalism]
Nathalie Nadeau Mijal (NNM): Imagine, for a moment, there is something you don’t understand—a word, for example, that you’re not familiar with. What do you do? You look it up on Google. But what if it’s the late 1960s, early 1970s and the word you don’t understand is the word “computer.”
Peter Homulos (PH): And I said, “What’s that?” And went home, looked it up in the encyclopedia and the word “computer” wasn’t in my encyclopedia.
NNM: I'm Nathalie Nadeau Mijal and this is CCI and CHIN: In Our Words.
Our guest today is Peter Homulos. In today’s interview, he will tell us how he went from geology student to director of the National Inventory Program, all before he even turned 30 years old. For context, the National Inventory Program was the precursor of the Canadian Heritage Information Network or CHIN. One of the original goals of the program was to keep a record of Canada’s cultural property to discourage theft, but the mandate quickly grew to creating a computerized inventory of collections, to facilitate the sharing of information, as well as conducting research and development on information management, standards and technology. From a modern perspective, it’s difficult to convey how ground-breaking and even controversial this initiative was. So, let’s get back to Peter and find out how exactly he got started on his unique career path.
PH: I ended up at CHIN… I guess as the second person that was hired. The first person that was there was a person by the name of Michel de Tedesco and Michel was actually the Chief of Information Systems for the National Museums of Canada at the time and he was the one that hired me. And, then within two years Michel had moved on and unfortunately passed away when he was only 33. So, he wasn't around with us for a long time and as the only other person there I got put into the hot seat, so to speak.
NNM: So when they brought you on, what was your position when you started?
PH: I was brought on as a computer programmer. I'd actually been studying. In first year, I was studying geology and landed a job, among other things, cataloguing the national mineral collection that was the Department of Natural or Energy, Mines and Resources. And then in my second year at Ottawa U [University of Ottawa] they announced their opening at school of computer science and I said, “What's that?” And went home looked it up in the encyclopedia and the word computer wasn't in my encyclopedia so I said well if it's that new… maybe I should take it, so I switched over, but continued during the summers working at Energy, Mines and Resources and doing the cataloguing and then when the National Museums announced that they were going to do a computerized inventory of collections, that just sort of brought together two interests: my interest in cataloguing collections and the computer science part and so I actually dropped out of university to take the job when it was offered to me.
KJ: Wow.
NNM: That’s amazing.
KJ: That's really avant-gardiste to go—to have that kind of… I love how you use, you know, you looked it up in an encyclopedia and obviously…
NNM: And it wasn’t even in there!
PH: That just shows you how old I am!
KJ: So okay, so you were working in… for CHIN? It wasn't even CHIN then at the time?
PH: Well, it was actually—the original program was called the National Inventory Program.
KJ: Okay.
PH: So coming out of the National Museums policy of 1970, there were a number of programs, CCI [Canadian Conservation Institute] being one, the International Exhibit Program, Museum Assistance Program and the National Inventory program. And it wasn't long after we actually started doing the work that we realized that in the context of museums, an inventory goes way beyond what it is in industry and becomes as much an inventory of provenance and knowledge about the collections and the objects in the collections. And that's why between ‘72 and I would guess ’75-’76, we spent a lot of time re-orienting the program and ended up with it becoming the Canadian Heritage Information Network, for—“Canadian” for obvious reasons, “Heritage” because we felt in some ways it went beyond just an inventory of collections. It was more about knowledge. “Information” as opposed to a raw data on “what have you got and where is it?” And we were trying to build a network, a national network to share and exchange that information for a variety of purposes nationally.
KJ: So when you started, you said you were pretty much the only person at the beginning.
PH: I was actually hired as a computer programmer, yeah.
KJ: And so when did it start to grow? When did people start to join and how did that come about?
PH: It started very shortly after that I mean we started I can't remember with exactly it may have been the provincial museums that we initially started talking with and came to the conclusion that work needed to be done, if we were going to share information, work needed to be done on data and information standards. And because technology at the time was incredibly expensive relative to what it is today, the idea of sharing this on a network—and it was also opportune because Canada had just introduced one of the first digital networks in the country, anywhere actually. So, it moved from the old analog telecommunications networks into the digital environment and because of the nature of the country, that network was able to extend from coast to coast. So that was a backbone upon which we could build and we took that opportunity to build on that backbone, because as I said, trying to put technology everywhere in the country was expensive, trying to share it over a network was far less expensive.
NNM: And I think it's really difficult to—well it's difficult for me anyways—to think about this time because this was in the early 1970s, mid 1970s… and so what did a digital network look like at that time? It's not what we imagine today, right?
PH: Well, I mean physically it didn't look much different than it did today. The thing that changed was speed and the speed of the networks. And rather than being based on an analog, sort of voice-based communications network, it started getting into technical things like packet switching and those sorts of things which allowed much more information to flow across the network than it did on the old analog networks. And there was-- and Canada was unique at that point because there was… Using computer technology to try to keep track of collections and information in museums was just beginning in different parts of the world. And so there was a group in the US that we actually joined and became part of called the Museum Databank Coordinating Committee. There was a group in the UK called the MDA (Museum Data Association) or something like that, I forget. It was actually part of the Museum Association in the UK. The French were doing a fair bit of work with the museums in France. And there was a lot of exchange and among countries in terms of what the right strategy might be and I think at that time most of the world thought we were nuts to think about developing a network. Because the idea for the use of technology was sort of very batch-process oriented, where you would produce printouts and use the printouts in place of card catalogs and that kind of thing, card indexes.
KJ: So, you started or you were hired to be the computer programmer and then you moved on to different positions leading to… ultimately at the end, or towards the end, director general…?
PH: Well, I moved right into the job, in my twenties.
KJ: In—as Director General? Really?
PH: Well, it wasn't called Director General at the time. The position title at the time—because this was the in-house computer department of the National Museums. So I think the job was called Chief of Information Systems or something and then it got renamed probably within a year or two to director of the National Inventory Program and then director of CHIN and ultimately… It was the same job, it just kept getting redefined and eventually, Director General of CHIN.
KJ: So you really had your hands in the role of building CHIN to—from its foundation to kind of where it is today.
PH: Yeah, yeah, no, very much so.
KJ: Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
PH: Well, it was it was interesting and challenging because there were as many views about what should be done and how it should be done as there were people around the table. And, so we struck a
National Advisory Committee with probably six or eight members from museums across the country. And the purpose, literally was to provide us with advice and guidance on how we should implement this program, originally, as I said, the National Inventory Program. And, there were views that stretched
everywhere from it should be a simple number, name, place kind of index, through to it had to be something that allowed you to record information about the significance of the objects in a collection because they weren't self-documenting. And, the way in which we recorded that information and tried to standardize some language around that recording, became in many people's view an important component or the central component of how to create a network to share information about the heritage objects, or museum objects and heritage in a broader context, on a national basis.
KJ: And so you had to build a team as well, quite a team, I'm assuming. So, can you tell us a bit about that? How that happened? What were you looking for as far as people's backgrounds in something so new?
PH: Yeah, we started out assuming that this was a computer problem as most technology people do. And realized very quickly when we were sitting in meetings that we were speaking at cross-terms quite often when we would sit down with the curators, collections managers, registrars, and what-have-you, and some computer programmers. So, we started reaching out to Museum Studies programs and brought in a group of people who were coming at it from a museological background and created our Museum Services Group. And, then what we tried to do was to pair up the museum services people with our technology people when we would sit down and have discussions with museums and try to work out the understanding in-house, so that we had a more coherent message when we were talking with museums across the country.
KJ: So, what were some of the challenges that you would have encountered? Because—and even just technology-wise, I mean it's evolved considerably, of course, since the beginning of technology. But,
how did that have an impact or how did that contribute, maybe, to the work that you were doing?
PH: Probably didn't realize that the technology that we had available to us was not good enough. And, our disk drives, for example, were the size of washing machines and they held 25 megabytes per disk drive. So, those are the kinds of limitations. We had to write our own operating system for the first data entry because the first job we undertook was doing data entry. So we hired a few programmers and we hired a larger data entry pool. And, we had records initially from the four national museums at the time being photocopied and shipped over to us and we were doing data entry on them online but in order to create those systems we had to write our own operating system and regularly spool things off on to tape because of the limitation. I think we had to two disc drives, which gave us a grand total of 50 megabytes of online storage.
KJ: [Laughter] The office environment must have been so different as well, right? With the size of computers and what-not it would have been…
PH: I mean, it was raised flooring and it was back in the days of mainframe computers, yeah.
NNM: Was it exciting to develop all of these new operating systems?
PH: Oh, I mean it was absolutely exciting because, number one, the whole field of computers was new. This was a new project. It was something that museums not only in Canada were looking at but around the world were looking at. So, there were sort of endless days and nights of arguing back and forth about what form the use of computers should take in museums, the extent, whether or not we should be looking at online networks versus… I mean there were—there was a school of thought that said well everything you need to know about a museum object you can put on an 80 column punch card and just store them and once a year produce a printout and use that in place of a card catalog, card index, so.
NNM: And how did you feel about those different…?
PH: You had to love every minute of it. It was, it was challenging, it was unknown. It was full of debate. I mean there were a whole school of people that thought that technology had no place in museums. And, there was actually at the time a columnist. His name was Charlie Lynch.
PH: And Charles Lynch wrote an opinion piece that said using technology in museums to keep track of collections is akin to the monks using photocopiers to do illustrated manuscripts.
NNM: [Laughter] These are some very passionate opinions!
PH: Oh, of course, of course. Yeah, any time you're introducing something new. And nobody was convinced that, you know, computer technology really had a future. You know, people were saying, “Well, you know other than keeping track of your recipes, what would you ever use a personal computer for?”
KJ: So how did you convince people that there was a need for technology in the heritage community and how did you get that buy-in from people?
PH: The challenge in Canada and I mean, there was an international community of people and that community people came together here in North America. We did a lot of exchanges with the US and Mexico, just in terms of thought processes and ideas. We weren't on our own. And as I’d mentioned all of us kind of came together around CIDOC, the International Committee for Documentation at ICOM and so there was a group of kindred spirits. And we had discussions there. Locally or nationally here in Canada, there was a real debate between say 1973-74 and ‘75-‘76 about what we should do and how we should do it because that was the period, the transition period between the National Inventory Program and CHIN. Moving in the direction of CHIN implied a considerable increase in effort because we were talking about a lot more information, a much broader base of collections and a larger set of museums. So, that that debate largely played out at the board table at the National Museums.
KJ: So the network was really beyond just the Canadian network. It was international, really with contributions or…
PH: No, the network didn't—the network became international in some time in the ‘80s when CCI, CHIN the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and the conservation department at the Smithsonian, we all got together and started working internationally on conservation information. And that was actually the, sort of, pivotal project that turned CHIN into a Special Operating Agency.
KJ: I see.
NNM: Oh! Interesting!
KJ: Yeah! And you were still involved in all of that?
PH: Yeah, yeah.
KJ: So how did that change for CHIN? How did that… Did the direction of the projects and all change
or…?
PH: No, other directly the direction of the program never changed. In that sort of ‘73 to ‘75 period, we'd recognized that we were dealing with more than just collections information that there was a heritage information component to all of this. And it was the coming together with CCI, the GCI [Getty Conservation Institute] and the Smithsonian to start bringing in the, a lot of the ICOM CC abstracts and what-have-you, that started broadening the base. And then that created a demand for access to our network from outside the country, but bearing in mind that, you know, we were funded by the Canadian taxpayer, how do you justify and warrant that? And so we did it on the basis of a fee for service, service outside the country and but in order to support that service, we needed the revenue in order to augment the technology we had. So Alain Gourd, who was the deputy where—we now transit over to Department of Communications as our home base, along with CCI and the other national programs. Alain, who was the deputy minister of communications at the time, approached Treasury Board on our behalf and said, “We need to make these guys a Special Operating Agency, so that, number one, they can charge for their services and, number two, retain those fees in order to pay for the increased services being offered.” So that made that information basically available to Canadian museums without any additional cost to the taxpayer at that time.
NNM: And that's something that's really interesting about CHIN as an organization is the way that it's continued to evolve and I was sort of under the impression that in the ‘90s there was a big change with the Virtual Museums, but I found this article that you wrote. I think it was published in 1978, actually and in this article from 1978 you're saying, “Although our progress to date has been most encouraging, we have recognized that a redirection of the priorities and philosophy of the program is required.” So, really early on, you recognized that need to continue to evolve.
PH: Yeah, we had done—back in, and I'm guessing here, but I would say the early to mid-80s, we actually created on a CD-ROM, which was brand new at the time, a project for CIDOC [ICOM International Committee For Documentation]. CHIN had created a project for CIDOC that brought together a group of old masters from about 23 museums, I think, in a bunch of countries along with a database on CD. And, so we started that early making, thinking in terms of multimedia. And, that's when we created the—we had a sort of a technology assessment, small Technology Assessment Center. And, the idea of the center was to try to push the bleeding edge of some of these technologies to see if they had an application for museums.
KJ: That's impressive. Again, just thinking about how technology was so different too. So, to be able to develop those kinds of things… It’s just amazing.
PH: But it was a different time it was a very optimistic time when people were… I mean the National Museums Policy basically came out of 1967, the centennial year and it was a very optimistic time for the country and these programs and ideas were optimistic programs and ideas. It gave us an opportunity to develop approaches and strategies using technology that wasn't quite there yet. Because, at the end of the day, I mean in the mid ‘70s, we realized that a big part of the issue was terminology and standards. And we actually did a lot of work with, sort of language analysis and some of it, in hindsight, is a bit of a precursor to a lot of the stuff that's happening on the web right now. Because we were looking at, you know, we were building databases with fields in them and each field had a label and of course the label for a field gave the context for the data that followed. So, if you said this field contains “materials,” you knew what followed were a list of materials. And we started doing some because museum cataloguing and research had been done using natural language and the only attempt that had been made to any kind of categorization was in a very few domains such as materials, use, what-have-you. So, you had things like Murdock and the Outline of Cultural Materials and you had the work that Bob Chenal had done on Nomenclature and what-have-you. And we started looking at the collection of words that we were taking from the data entry that was being done in the context of the fields we'd identified through the work of national committees in different disciplines and realized that if we collected about three million words at random, we'd have almost all of the unique words that would ever exist. And so, the initial approach to building data dictionaries and terminology standards was just that, you know, let it go, collect the words, and start analyzing them and processing them after the fact in order to look at where the commonalities that might be. Because there was no agreement at all as to whether or not collections and nor should there have been—whether or not collections should be organized by any one facet of what they are. So, whether it was you know, function, use, material, whatever there was no agreement around that at the time. So, central to what the program was all about was the development of those data and information standards.
NNM: To someone who isn't familiar with or isn't as familiar as you with the concept of data and collections, what is the importance of cataloguing in this way?
PH: The uses that museum staff, be they curators, researchers, educators, conservators, the use they're going to make of the collections and the information around the collections is basically unknown, because that's why they're doing research. And so, what you're trying to do, is support an activity that could branch off at any given opportunity in a new direction. And so, if you try to constrain it, then the
utility of the information you're recording i.e. if you create just an inventory of “give it a number, give it a shelf, and give it a name,” then that doesn't support the uses to which the collection will be put, in many ways. It does from a material management, you know, a certain industrial material management point of view, but it doesn't in terms of trying to support information and knowledge about heritage.
NNM: You can look at a list of objects but you won't you know anything about them, I guess, yeah.
PH: Yeah well, yeah and so much of the significance of the collections is in what is known about them. Not simply the fact that an object exists and where it is and so the… And so that was a big part of the initial debate, right? As to whether or not what we needed was a list of what a museum has and what shelf it's on. Or should we be looking more expansively in terms of a knowledge base about the collections.
NNM: Something that's interesting to me that I want to ask about is because this National Inventory Program was created by the federal government but the client base were museums… So how did museums react to the existence of this program?
PH: There was a spectrum of reactions. I mean, there were some people that felt that computerizing
the information about museum collections would be a threat to the collections. Because people would find out what was where and I remember—I can't remember who it was—but being at a meeting somewhere and this debate was taking place and somebody said, “Well, you know, if we recorded the existence of all the gold coins in our collection, everybody would know where they were and we're going to be burglarized.” And somebody else at the meaning stood up and said, “If anybody ever showed an interest in your collection, you'd show them exactly where they were.” So, there, you know, there were thoughts kinds of competing points of view.
KJ: That must have been a challenge though—to have to manage that as well? You know, with the community?
PH: It wasn't that there was a resistance to the idea. It was unknown. Because I mean computers were unknown things. A lot of people didn't know what this program was about and they had no reference point. I mean conservation had been done in museums for so long, the people understood its function and role. People didn't understand what using the technology or what using computer technology in museums would yield, at the end of the day. And whether or not it was a positive effect or a waste of money.
NNM: And when you reflect back now on the technology that was shared with museums through CHIN, what kind of an impact do you think that had on museums?
PH: In my mind, it was never about the technology. I mean it was about the technology as a tool, but it was really about information management in museums and I hope that's the lasting legacy. My view on the technology front was always, I mean this is from 1975 forward, was always that as the technology became affordable within a museum, that the data management function should migrate back into the museum; that it's not something that needs to, nor should be done on a national network. So that was the reason that we retained in those earlier years, individual databases for each museum and then extracted from each of those databases, a subset of information that at the time we put into two national databases: one for the natural sciences and one for everything else. And, with the idea that when a museum could afford to, or when the technology hardware and software became available for them to implement in-house systems, those databases could be picked up lock, stock and barrel and just migrated into the museum and then they could still continue to make contributions back to any kind of national sharing. So that was always the design. And, so it wasn't—it was the use of technology for reasons of economy of scale and convenience at the time, not any sort of philosophical belief that heritage information should be centrally managed.
KJ: Is there anything else that you would like to—that we should talk about anything that you thought maybe we would discuss today that we didn't we didn't get into?
PH: There were two people that I think were really important to both– well, not only both, but to the national programs, in that era and they were Jennifer McQueen and Bob Nichols.
KJ: Jennifer, we've heard through Brian Arthur. Please, yes, we would love to hear about that.
PH: I mean both Jennifer and Bob were marvelous people and really staunch, staunch supporters for the work that the national programs were doing within the museum community in Canada. I can remember having lunch with Bob and the person, I forget his title but he was the head of museums—the national museums or whatever, in Scotland. And there had been a steady influx of people coming in to see the work that was been done at CCI and CHIN and what-have-you and Bob asked this guy, he said, “You know, why are we were receiving so many international visitors?” And he said, “Because, you know, museum collections are museum collections, but what Canada's doing because of the national programs is innovative and new.” And so, it was the support from people like Jennifer, Bob and also Ian Christy Clark who was Secretary General at the time that we did the shift between the National Inventory Program and CHIN. He was Secretary General of the National Museums and went on to become Canada's ambassador to UNESCO and the chair of the Moveable Cultural Property Program. And Ian—and I can still remember we actually named CHIN in Minneapolis because when we did the shift, we weren't sure how we were going to find the funding to get the technology there was necessary to support this new vision. And Control Data, which was one of the large computer companies at the time had developed a system called the Pictorial and Artifact Retrieval Information System [PARIS] and they had designated that system to go to a country in Europe and the deal fell apart and so they approached us and offered us a really significant incentive to adopt it and that was the PARIS system that we ended up using. And, so we were down with Bob, Ian and myself meeting with the founder of Control Data in Minneapolis and I can remember sitting there and having an argument one night. Ian wanted to call it the Canadian Heritage Information Program. And, I was adamant that it be the Canadian Heritage Information Network because I thought network was component—was an important part and then I pointed out to Ian that the CHIP program [Canadian Home Insulation Program] was the program that encouraged people to put urea formaldehyde foam in their houses. And, so that name went by the wayside very quickly.
KJ: [Laughing] That's how you won that…(laughter)
PH: It was an incredible opportunity I mean, it talked me out of university. [Laughter] 37:29
[Music: “Here’s Where Things Get Interesting” by Lee Rosevere from the album “Music for Podcasts 6.” Style: Electronic Minimalism]
Thank you to Peter Homulosand to my co-host Kelly Johnson
NNM: "CCI and CHIN in Our Words" is a production of the Canadian Conservation Institute, Department of Canadian Heritage.
Our music is by Lee Rosevere.
Production assistance provided by Pop Up Podcasting
Who would you like us to interview as a part of this podcast? Find us on Facebook at Canadian Conservation Institute and let us know.
Next time on the podcast:
“I remember I was sent with Jane Holland, we were sent to a Museum in Miramichi. Both of us were textile conservators and we were sent there, and this was the museum for chainsaws. (Laughter)
END