Museum Data Exchange: Learning How to Share

by: Günter Waibel, Ralph LeVan and Bruce Washburn

The Museum Data Exchange, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together nine art museums and OCLC Research to model data sharing in the museum community. The project created tools to extract CDWA Lite XML records out of collections management systems and share them via OAI-PMH. OCLC Research harvested 900K records from participating museums and analyzed them for standards conformance and interoperability. This article describes the free or open source tools; lessons learned in harvesting museum data; findings from the data analysis; and the state of data sharing and its applications in the museum community. Museum participants were the Cleveland Museum of Art; Harvard Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; National Gallery of Art; National Gallery of Canada; Princeton University Art Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum and Yale University Art Gallery.

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