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Research : Activities : Museum Data Exchange

Museum Data Exchange

This project creates 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 detailing the analysis of records from nine museums shared using these (and other) tools is forthcoming.

Background

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. 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 include a provision which allows 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. If you are interested in performing research across this aggregation, please review this agreement document and contact Günter Waibel with a short proposal.
  • 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.

A forthcoming publication will detail the outcomes of an analysis of the research aggregation, embedded in a description of the overall project.

Software

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

More Information

Workspace

Please use the Museum Data Exchange WebJunction page to share insights or discuss problems, as well as to share configuration files for different collections management systems.

Team Members

  • Holly Witchey (Cleveland Museum of Art)
  • Doug Hiwiller (Cleveland Museum of Art)
  • Jeff Steward (Harvard Art Museum)
  • Shyam Oberoi (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
  • Piotr Adamczyk (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
  • Andrew David (Minneapolis Art Institute)
  • Peter Dueker (National Gallery of Art)
  • Greg Spurgeon (National Gallery of Canada)
  • Sonya Dumais (National Gallery of Canada)
  • Cathryn Goodwin (Princeton University Art Museum)
  • Alexander Macfie (Victoria & Albert Museum)
  • Tim Speevack (Yale University Art Gallery)
  • Thomas Raich (Yale University Art Gallery)

Sponsors

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation




Last update: 11 August 2009.