Museum Data Exchange

This project created tools supporting standards-based data sharing in the museum community. The metadata publishing tool COBOAT, developed by Cognitive Applications Inc. (Cogapp), extracts CDWA Lite XML out of collections management systems, and works hand-in-hand with OAICatMuseum, an OAI-PMH data content provider managing the transfer of data from server to server. These tools were developed with the generous support of a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the active involvement of five museums from the RLG Partnership. A report, Museum Data Exchange: Learning How to Share (pdf: 2MB/50 pp.), was published in February 2010 detailing the analysis of records from nine museums shared using these (and other) tools.

Background

RLG Partnership art museums 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. By and large, collections management systems make little provisions for exporting data in a standard format or exposing it for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

Impact

Standards-based museum records drive an increasing number of processes, such as submitting data to aggregators like ARTstor or ArtsConnectEd; sharing data with other libraries, archives and museums in a campus environment; transferring data from collections management systems to presentation systems such as OMEKA; and submitting data to controlled vocabularies such as the Getty's Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA). A suite of shared and adaptable tools makes these activities economically feasible, and allows them to scale.

Details

With the generous support of a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the RLG Partnership and OCLC Research committed to:

• Creating 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)
• Modeling data exchange processes using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) at the participating museums
• Creating an aggregation of museum content within OCLC Research for analysis
• Discussing the evidence about the relative utility of the aggregation with stakeholders from the museum, vendor and aggregator community

The following institutions participated in the creation and deployment of the data sharing tools: Harvard Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Princeton University Art Museum; Yale University Art Gallery. The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the National Gallery of Canada and the Victoria & Albert Museum participated in the creation of the research aggregation, and the data analysis. These institutions represent a subset of the participants in the Museum Collection Sharing Working Group, which incubated the grant.

Outputs

Since the first project meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on January 28th and 29th 2008, we have passed the following milestones:

• Software: COBOAT and OAICatMuseum 1.0 software packages have been released for general community use.
• Research Aggregation: OCLC Research harvested 887,572 CDWA Lite XML records from nine participating museums and created a temporary research aggregation. Six of the museums used the infrastructure created by the project, three employed alternative mechanisms.
• Data Analysis: An analysis of the contributed records characterized the adherence to applicable standards within the research aggregation, and resulted in guidance to maximize the data's value.
• Discussion and dissemination: A final project meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on July 27th 2009 brought together all museum participants, as well as data aggregators and vendors, for a preliminary view of the data analysis, and discussions surrounding the production use of data sharing tools in the community.

The following documents were created to faciliate these efforts:

• Third Party Researcher Access Aggreement - The agreements with museums participating in the Museum Data Exchange included a provision which allowed, through 2010, a third party researcher to take possession of data from the project under the terms of the original letters of agreement to analyze the research aggregation and publish findings.
• Criteria for Scoring (CCO Evaluation) - This .pdf briefly outlines general findings from Patricia Harpring's CCO analysis of the ca. 900K CDWA Lite records aggregated as part of the Museum Data Exchange. The bulk of the document lays out a methodology for evaluating CDWA Lite against CCO.
• MDE Analysis Methodology - This .pdf file outlines the array of possible questions for the museum data in CDWA Lite XML format surfaced by the Museum Data Exchange project.
• CDWA Lite, CCO, COBOAT Mapping - This Excel spreadsheet lists all content-bearing data elements and attributes defined by CDWA Lite, maps them to CCO and indicates which of these data elements are part of the COBOAT default mapping.

Software

See COBOAT and OAICatMuseum for details about the software associated with the Museum Data Exchange project.

More Information

• Press release about overall grant
• Blog post: Mellon funded Museum Data Exchange project
• Blog post: What's up with museum data exchange?
• Press release about tools
• Blog post: Museum Data Exchange: Tools for Sharing
• OAICatMuseum 1.0, open-source software that allows museums to disclose descriptions of collection items as well as pointers to digital surrogates in CDWA Lite XML. 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.
• COBOAT, a metadata extraction tool that allows cultural heritage institutions to extract data from a database and publish it as a CDWA Lite XML repository of collections information. COBOAT can be used in conjunction with OAICatMuseum to make CDWA Lite XML records available for harvesting via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
• Blog post: Museum Data Exchange: Asking the right questions
• Blog post: Analysis Methodology for Museum Data
• Report: Museum Data Exchange: Learning How to Share (pdf: 2MB/50 pp.). This final report to The Mellon Foundation describes the overall project and details the outcomes of an analysis of the research aggregation.

Sponsors

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Most recent updates: Page content: 2011-11-30

Lead

Bruce Washburn