Museum Data Exchange Project

Objective: This project will create tools supporting data sharing in the art museum community, and analyze the extent to which current museum data allows for meaningful search and retrieval in an aggregate environment.

Overview: RLG art museum partners share an interest in being able to exchange information about collection items within their own institution, with other art museums and with aggregators of content such as ARTstor or OCLC. By and large, collections management systems make no provisions for exporting data in a standard format or exposing it for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

With the generous support of a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a group of RLG Programs partners will:

1. Create a low-barrier / no-cost batch export capability for CDWA Lite XML out of the collections management system used by the participating museums (GallerySystems TMS)
2. Model data exchange processes using the Open Archive Information Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) at the participating museums
3. Create an aggregation of museum content within OCLC Research for analysis
4. Discuss the evidence about the relative utility of the aggregation with stakeholders from the museum, vendor and aggregator community

The following institutions will participate in phase one of the grant: Harvard University Art Museums; Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art; Princeton University Art Museum; Yale University Art Gallery. For phases two through four, they will be joined by colleagues from the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. These institutions present a subset of the participants in the Museum Collection Sharing Working Group, which incubated the grant.

Related Resources:

• Press release: http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200695.htm
• Blog post: Mellon funded Museum Data Exchange project
• Museum Collection Sharing Working Group
• OAICatMuseumBETA, open-source software which allows museums to disclose descriptions of collection items as well as pointers to digital surrogates. It can be used to efficiently share digital images with trusted partners who have requested access to museum content, or with the networked world at large.