Tinplate toys, which reached their peak in Portugal between 1920 and 1960, represent an underexplored part of industrial heritage. One of their defining features is also one of their most fragile: the mechanical system, a miniaturised descendant of clockwork mechanisms. These mechanisms are small, often inaccessible, and rarely understood by the professionals responsible for the collections in which they are preserved. As inventorying is the first act in the preservation process, the consequences of imprecise terminology are significant, leading to fragmented and inconsistent records that ultimately fail to protect the objects they are intended to preserve. However, producing accurate descriptions requires mechanical expertise that most collectors, owners, and museum professionals neither possess nor can easily acquire.
To bridge this gap, we developed a structured knowledge model. Each object is functionally decomposed into main mechanical sub-systems encoded as a controlled vocabulary, a taxonomy, and a dichotomous key. Through a short sequence of simple, guided questions, non-specialists can produce standardized, technically accurate descriptions suitable for inventories, catalogues, and exhibition records.
In this talk, we will describe the foundation and process that supports cultural heritage stakeholders in creating inventory-related documentation. This includes a wide range of information, such as detailed descriptions of materials and mechanical features. Additionally, knowledge of mechanical features is expanded by acquiring and processing dynamic signatures of objects in operation using open-source tools to assess operational condition.
We present this work as a project in transition. Our validated prototype was developed on a proprietary, rapid-to-deploy, no-code platform, but it was ultimately incompatible with the openness required for cultural heritage documentation. We are sharing this experience as both a lesson learned and the rationale behind our next step: releasing the vocabulary as open data and reimplementing the tool as free, open-source software that any institution can deploy, adapt and host on its own infrastructure. For small museums and community collections, this openness is not just convenient, it is a prerequisite for standardisation, interoperability and sovereignty over a shared cultural record.
