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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 >