# /programs/ourwork/collectivecoll/sharecoll/museumdata.htm

originally: http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/collectivecoll/sharecoll/museumdata.htm

# 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: 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) Status as of March 2009: Released COBOAT and OAICatMuseum 1.0 software packages. Model data exchange processes using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) at the participating museums Status as of March 2009: Harvesting from 9 museums complete. Create an aggregation of museum content within OCLC Research for analysis Status as of April 2009: Research aggregation with ca. 850K records from 9 museums has been created. 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, Washington; Princeton University Art Museum; Yale University Art Gallery. For phases two through four, they will be joined by colleagues from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the National Gallery of Canada and the Victoria & Albert Museum. These institutions represent 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 Blog post: What's up with museum data exchange? Museum Collection Sharing Working Group 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 |
RLG Programs staff liaison Günter Waibel Program Officer waibelg@oclc.org