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

> 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
>