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

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

# Museum Collection Sharing Program Total projects: 2 Problem statement: Museums face increasing pressure from researchers and scholars to more comprehensively describe, digitize and disclose their collections. In both the art and natural history context, a fledgling standards infrastructure for sharing descriptions has recently emerged: art museums can now encode and share descriptions using CDWA Lite XML and OAI-PMH, while natural history institution may share collection-level records using NCD. Across the board, museums are struggling to leverage existing local tools such as Collections Management Systems (CMS) to move their collections to the network level using relatively new standards, and create the appropriate policies to guide the sharing activity. Impact: This effort will provide the museum community with the tools to implement a nascent suite of standards and lower the barrier for sharing descriptive metadata and digital images. As a result, more structured descriptions of collections from art museums and natural history museums will be available, giving local aggregators (e.g., universities, statewide digitization projects) as well as global aggregators the opportunity to build services on top of this pool of data to satisfy research needs. ## Projects Collection Descriptions in Natural History Institutions Museum Collections Sharing Working Group Museum Data Exchange |
For more information Günter Waibel Program Officer waibelg@oclc.org