In keeping with the dimunitive size of our organizations, the Small Museum SIG meeting at MCN was likewise small. Howard Goldstein and I were there to present on the findings from our recent survey about the preservation needs of small museums, a group we tend to refer to as the "long tail of cultural heritage."
Some attendees talked about the extreme small budgets and difficulty in just getting software that can be used to manage collections and to begin a digitization project. I would guess that this issue affects small museums and archives significantly more than other organizations. We also talked about the DuraSpace "Small Archives" solution community on which Howard and I have been working with staff from the former DSpace and Fedora communities (now known as Duraspace). I think what we concluded is that it is critical is not just to come up with simpler ways to install and maintain Fedora by non-technical people, but that we need a Fedora installation which comes with a light-weight digital asset management system, or better yet, gives you the option of plugging in to existing systems (and into existing content and collection management systems). One possible collaboration moving this idea forward came from conversation with Rich Cherry, of San Diego's Balboa Park consortium. The consortium represents a diverse collection of 17 cultural heritage organization and offers an interesting, potentially productive test bed from which to implement, test, document, and make available simplified Fedora installation with connectors to common DAM systems. It also offers an opportunity to look at what a hosted solution might offer--can one installation of Fedora support the needs of 17 diverse organizations, each with its own content models, dissemination needs, preservation plans, and front end. I think this is the sort of situation that Fedora was designed for. It will be fun exploring this further. We did not adequately discuss how to stay in touch as small museums throughout the year, other than to encourage all SIG members to make use of the MCN-L list. I will turn further discussion on this issue over to our leader, David Farrell. Before I do so, I think that MCN as an organization may want to consider ways to do better outreach to Small Museums--these are the organizations with the fewest resources, and ones that both benefit significantly from networking with peers and offer many of the innovative ideas (we've been "doing more with less" since our founding) from which other organizations can learn. Many thanks to all SIG members, and in particular, attendees at this year's meeting, Ari Davidow
