There is the Specify software for natural history collections:
http://specifysoftware.org/
The source code has apparently just recently been deposited on
SourceForge.
-hilmar
On Apr 14, 2009, at 3:12 PM, Ethan Gruber wrote:
Hi all,
I've been a software developer in a research library for several
years, and
I have worked with objects typically viewed as museum collections to
a large
degree (particularly ancient coins and eighteenth century European
sheet
music). Since I'm from a library and am familiar with library
technological
standards as far as metadata practices and software applications go,
I tend
to apply library standards toward the museum collections I have been
in
contact with--which involves Encoded Archival Description for
metadata,
opensource applications like tomcat, cocoon, and lucene/solr. My
knowledge
of museum practices is fairly limited, but I have noticed that many
museums
have tended to adopt proprietary databases to describe their
collections. I
feel museums tend to lag behind their library counterparts with
respect to
the adoption of opensource frameworks and open standards, but if you
think
about it, museums are scarcely different than many archives/special
collections libraries in content and organization. I'm thinking of
PastPerfect in particular. It's quite common in the museum world
and costs
almost $1000 per license.
I'm wondering if anyone else on code4lib actually works for a museum
or has
first-hand experience in providing access to museum collections and
has
noticed the same general differences between libraries and museums
that I
have.
Ethan Gruber
University of Virginia Library
--
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: Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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