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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