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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