Dear Mary, Thank you for your excellent reading suggestions. Your "Metadata for All" paper points out very rightfully one of the main challenges to achieving our interoperability goals: a legacy that is very specific to museums, which have never found a practical interest in standardization. This is understandable due to the different mission of museums and to the kind of information they handle and how they use it; but we are now at a point where sharing data is becoming more and more compelling and adoption of shared standards is key to this.
Libraries and archives, as you point out, have been systematically using standard vocabularies long before digital cataloging became widespread. Most museums, on the contrary, have been running for decades on home-brewed ontologies dictated by internal requirements. Changing this is a big challenge, both on a technical and an adoption level - my institution is right in the middle of it. Maybe the issue is more political than technical, though. Maybe all we need are some "pioneers" to encourage other museums to move in this direction. If a group of institutions can put together enough resources and spearhead the effort to establish some basic patterns, other institutions with less resources may feel more confident to follow a path that presents some concrete examples. Also, I think that focusing on interoperability within one institution first is safer, more manageable and more rewarding than aiming straight at inter-institutional interoperability. A successful case study of integration between a museum's collections, library and archives can grant additional confidence from the stakeholders to pursue interoperability between institutions. Thanks, Stefano On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 13:05:57 -0800 "M. Elings" <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Emmanuelle, > > This is a topic that I and my colleague Günter Waibel spent many years > exploring. I wanted to share an old but relevant article we wrote on > this topic: Metadata for All > <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__firstmonday.org_article_view_1628_1543.&d=AwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=e507lsOLMLpNWxMc9GIaKxb-mxZhbMJ1mY6SLgDKU0A&m=Mhq2GJdm6RCb7I4xZTxatQop6A7djdAQVYIHSGR9HU4&s=ov_2jIFIc4rPdGcMGS-xgtDJ1LG7pzgTbFZ-f8x2ieo&e=>, > which discusses the reasons behind our inability to have our data > interoperate or "play nicely" with other institutions. It is also a > useful history of efforts that came before and what worked and what > didn't. > > > > I think the promise of linked data and efforts like Europeana and > DPLA have shown us what is possible when we use network level > standards, which allow our data to reach outside the confines of our > local institutional systems. I don't think we will ever get to a > point where we all follow the same metadata practices but we can > extract and share our data in ways that are more universal. > > > > Other readings of interest: > > Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives > and Museums > <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.oclc.org_content_dam_research_publications_library_2008_2008-2D05.pdf&d=AwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=e507lsOLMLpNWxMc9GIaKxb-mxZhbMJ1mY6SLgDKU0A&m=Mhq2GJdm6RCb7I4xZTxatQop6A7djdAQVYIHSGR9HU4&s=z55EXfGSEjjjNvVPZWDVTh6KOIgVilCfAJHUQamMGSI&e=> > > > Think Global, Act Local – Library, Archive and Museum Collaboration > <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.oclc.org_content_dam_research_publications_library_2009_waibel-2Derway-2Dmmc.pdf&d=AwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=e507lsOLMLpNWxMc9GIaKxb-mxZhbMJ1mY6SLgDKU0A&m=Mhq2GJdm6RCb7I4xZTxatQop6A7djdAQVYIHSGR9HU4&s=X7xWGNlemcwO553CQv7fslJzCX5171zrQ3e9N25y_Ko&e=> > > > > Good luck moving the topic forward! As technology moves ahead, these > things will be easier to achieve. There also needs to a powerful > incentive, such as better serving user needs. We are getting there... > incrementally. > > -- Stefano Cossu Director of Application Services, Collections The Art Institute of Chicago 116 S. Michigan Avenue Chicago, IL 60603 _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: [email protected] To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
