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