To: The conservation profession and to the museum, library and archive community that conservation serves From: Kenneth Hamma, Project Manager Subject: An open source application for conservation documentation: The design phase www.conservationspace.org With funding from the Research in Information Technology Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://rit.mellon.org), two community design meetings for conservation documentation will be held in 2009, the first in early March at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, primarily for North American participants; the second in early April at the National Gallery, London, primarily for UK and European participants. The focus of these meetings is solely on the requirements, as described by professional conservators and conservation scientists, for a software application that would support and help to manage their work, its documentation, and related scientific data. This narrow focus on design is intended to increase the likelihood of achieving a comprehensive requirements document for application development later in the process, while setting aside for the present the related topics of specific technology and standards. (Because it will be difficult for conservators to discuss requirements without mentioning standards, two experts will note and record standards-related issues for later discussion, so that the meetings can retain their focus on the functional requirements.) The core team, listed on the website, has been selected from a broad range of potential participants for these meetings, taking into account their individual engagement with information technology as well as their conservation and science expertise. Serving in an advisory capacity, they identified potential participants from a variety of collecting institutions: libraries, archives, and museums of art, archeology, anthropology, natural history, and science. While the number of participants that could be accommodated at each of these meetings is necessarily limited, all resulting documents will be public and available for community comment and input. This includes narrative summaries of the discussions as well as initial drafts of a requirements document for the development of an application. It is expected that there will be two such public drafts before a final document is prepared at the end of 2009. Their availability will be announced to the conservation field, and feedback will be solicited, as widely as possible. The website identified above has additional information on the core project team, closely related efforts, and the full narrative from the application to the Research in Information Technology Program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Kenneth Hamma +1 310 270 8008 khamma at me.com 368 Patel Place Palm Springs CA 92264 www.becomingdigital.org www.conservationspace.org
