The First U.S. Conference on Museum Computing Occurs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

In April 1968 the Museum Computer Network and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with funding from IBM, organized the first U.S. conference on museum computing.

"Most people are not aware that MCN was born out of a cooperative computing project in the New York City area in 1967, under the direction of Dr. Jack Heller. Fifteen New York-area museums joined forces to explore ways that an electronic index of the Metropolitan Museum’s collections could be used beyond the Met. With funding from the New York Council of the Arts and the Old Dominion Foundation, the consortium formed the Museum Computer Network to create a prototype system for a shared museum “data-bank.”    Dr. Heller’s work resulted in a system called GRIPHOS (General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies), which was based on a data dictionary that could accommodate the diverse institutions participating in the project: a tagged record format that allowed for the description of individual objects with separate, linked records for artist biographical information and for reference citations" (https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/11/before-you-were-born-museums-had-networks/, accessed 9-2020).