Subject: [CODE4LIB] "code 4 museums"

From: Ethan Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:12:54 -0400

Hi all,

I've been a software developer in a research library for several years, and
I have worked with objects typically viewed as museum collections to a large
degree (particularly ancient coins and eighteenth century European sheet
music).  Since I'm from a library and am familiar with library technological
standards as far as metadata practices and software applications go, I tend
to apply library standards toward the museum collections I have been in
contact with--which involves Encoded Archival Description for metadata,
opensource applications like tomcat, cocoon, and lucene/solr.  My knowledge
of museum practices is fairly limited, but I have noticed that many museums
have tended to adopt proprietary databases to describe their collections.  I
feel museums tend to lag behind their library counterparts with respect to
the adoption of opensource frameworks and open standards, but if you think
about it, museums are scarcely different than many archives/special
collections libraries in content and organization.  I'm thinking of
PastPerfect in particular.  It's quite common in the museum world and costs
almost $1000 per license.

I'm wondering if anyone else on code4lib actually works for a museum or has
first-hand experience in providing access to museum collections and has
noticed the same general differences between libraries and museums that I
have.

Ethan Gruber
University of Virginia Library

---

From: Grace Agnew <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:24:07 -0400

Ethan,

Mellon funded a project, "CollectionSpace" that addresses the needs of
museums specifically.  The Rutgers bibliographic utility, OpenMIC, which I
hope will finally go open source in May, also supports the needs of
museums in terms of rights and provenance information.  We designed the
utility to support a statewide consortium of libraries, museums,
historical societies and archives.  The museums were the most specific
about their needs for source, technical and rights metadata, and we tried
to address their needs in our METS implementation.

Grace Agnew
Rutgers University Libraries

---

From: Hilmar Lapp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:46:41 -0400

There is the Specify software for natural history collections:

http://specifysoftware.org/

The source code has apparently just recently been deposited on  
SourceForge.

	-hilmar

-- 
===========================================================
: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
===========================================================

---

From: Leslie Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:00:04 -0400

Hey Ethan,

I worked for a number of museums before moving into Library work.  I've
built web apps on top of museum collections before.

You might want to get on the Museum Computer Network email list:
http://www.mcn.edu/resources/index.asp?subkey=80 

There are a lot of folks in the museum community who are working with
FOSS for various aspects of their operations.  A museum collection
management system is not unlike an ILS in many ways — it's not just a
catalog, but manages the business operations of the museum related to
their collections:  aquisition, insurance, conservation records,
location tracking, exhibition and publication histories, shipping, etc. 
The museum vendor market is very similar to the library ILS market —
it's opening up to open source development, but isn't as far along in
terms of multiple options.  A LOT of smaller museums develop their own
databases on top of FileMaker, Access, MS-SQL, etc, because vendor
systems can be much more expensive that what you quote for PastPerfect. 

As to standards, there are some open data structure standards making
their through the museum community.  The community got into  Dublin Core
very early.  Now there's the Categories for the Description of Works of
Art (CDWA), the CIDOC Categories,VRA Core, etc.  There are a lot of
guidelines and vocabularies.  Check out
http://www.mcn.edu/groups/index.asp?subkey=987  

CHIN maintains resources about standards at
http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/Standards/index.html .

Leslie

----------
Leslie Johnston
Digital Media Project Coordinator
Office of Strategic Initiatives
Library of Congress
202-707-2801
[email-masked]

>>> Ethan Gruber <[email-masked]> 4/14/2009 3:12 PM >>>
Hi all,

I've been a software developer in a research library for several years,
and
I have worked with objects typically viewed as museum collections to a
large
degree (particularly ancient coins and eighteenth century European
sheet
music).  Since I'm from a library and am familiar with library
technological
standards as far as metadata practices and software applications go, I
tend
to apply library standards toward the museum collections I have been
in
contact with--which involves Encoded Archival Description for
metadata,
opensource applications like tomcat, cocoon, and lucene/solr.  My
knowledge
of museum practices is fairly limited, but I have noticed that many
museums
have tended to adopt proprietary databases to describe their
collections.  I
feel museums tend to lag behind their library counterparts with respect
to
the adoption of opensource frameworks and open standards, but if you
think
about it, museums are scarcely different than many archives/special
collections libraries in content and organization.  I'm thinking of
PastPerfect in particular.  It's quite common in the museum world and
costs
almost $1000 per license.

I'm wondering if anyone else on code4lib actually works for a museum or
has
first-hand experience in providing access to museum collections and
has
noticed the same general differences between libraries and museums that
I
have.

Ethan Gruber

---

From: "Mark A. Matienzo" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:27:09 -0400

While we're talking about coding for museums, I should announce that
I've just issued the first release of my Python module to interact
with the Brooklyn Museum Collection API. It's rough and really
lightweight, but it needs others to put it through its paces.

The module can be found on Bitbucket, at
<http://bitbucket.org/anarchivist/brooklynmuseumapi/>.

More information on the API can be found at
<http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/api/>.

Mark A. Matienzo
Applications Developer, Digital Experience Group
The New York Public Library

---

From: Ethan Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:52:00 -0400

Hi all,

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'll look into CollectionSpace.  I think that
has a lot of potential.  I'll get on the MCN list.  I'm familiar with VRA
Core's use in an art museum context, but I have found VRA Core to be fairly
limited and inflexible in its encoding capabilities, which is why I had not
adopted in the past.  It looks like CDWA fills some of the gaps left by VRA
Core.  I find EAD to be more robust than VRA Core in a number of ways, but
not many museums are using it to describe their collections.

Ethan