Hi everybody,
We have just issued a report called "Museum Data Exchange: Learning How to Share," which describes a Mellon-funded project to advance the sharing of standards-based art museum object descriptions. The report (http://bit.ly/aU3nkP) describes tools for extracting standards-based data out of museum collections management systems, as well as the findings from the data analysis of ca 900K records from nine museums. I've posted the executive summary for the report on our blog at http://hangingtogether.org/?p=766 - glancing at this will give you a very good idea of the scope of the project and key findings.
The Harvard Art Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum are currently using the tools and procedures generated through this project to explore regular data harvesting with ARTstor. Here is a full list of the institutions which participated in this work: 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; Yale University Art Gallery.
Please feel free to forward this message to your colleagues working in museum collections as well.
Cheers,
Günter Waibel
Program Officer, OCLC Research
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New Report: Museum Data Exchange: Learning How to Share
We invite you to read this OCLC Research report <http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-02.pdf> (.pdf) that describes the outcomes of a project funded by a grant <http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200695.htm> from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further develop standards for museum data exchange.
OCLC Research and nine art museum partners worked together on the Museum Data Exchange <http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/museumdata/default.htm> project to create tools for data sharing, build a research aggregation of museum records and analyze the aggregation to determine in which areas museums should invest in to upgrade their records, as well as what automated processes could be utilized to harmonize descriptions for retrieval. Their work resulted in the establishment of an infrastructure for standards-based metadata exchange for the museum community and modeled data sharing behavior among participating institutions, details of which are included in the report.
Contact Günter Waibel <mailto:[log in to unmask]> with comments or questions.
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