Collection Sharing Beyond Libraries Program
Quick facts
Total projects: 2
Problem statement: Museums
face increasing pressure from researchers and scholars to more
comprehensively describe, digitize and disclose their collections. In
both the art and natural history context, a fledgling standards
infrastructure for sharing descriptions has recently emerged: art
museums can now encode and share descriptions using CDWA Lite XML and OAI-PMH, while natural history
institution may share collection-level records using NCD. Across the board, museums are
struggling to leverage existing local tools such as Collections
Management Systems (CMS) to move their collections to the network level
using relatively new standards, and create the
appropriate policies to guide the sharing activity.
Impact: This effort will
provide the
museum community with the tools to implement a nascent suite
of standards and lower the barrier for sharing descriptive metadata
and digital images. As a result, more structured descriptions of
collections from art museums and natural history museums will be
available, giving local aggregators (e.g., universities, statewide
digitization projects) as well as global
aggregators the opportunity to build services on top of this
pool of data to satisfy research needs.
Projects
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Librarians' Toolbox:
