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

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Leslie Johnston <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>
> >>> Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> 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
> University of Virginia Library
>