Congratulations G. And Happy Valentines Day to you and Meredith
-Original Message-
From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of
Waibel,Guenter
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:41 PM
To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
Subject: [MCN-L] OCLC awarded Mellon grant to conduct museum data exchangestudy
Hi everybody,
I thought the information contained in the press release below would be of
general interest to an MCN audience. I've also blogged about the Mellon grant
at http://hangingtogether.org/?p=368, if you prefer a more informal summary of
what this grant aims to achieve, and what how we've fared during our first
project meeting.
Cheers,
G?nter
***
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Bob Murphy +1-614-761-5136
murphyb at oclc.org
OCLC awarded Mellon grant
to conduct museum data exchange study
DUBLIN, Ohio, February 11, 2008-OCLC, the world's largest library service and
research organization, has been awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation to further develop standards for museum data exchange.
The $145,000 grant will be used by OCLC to fund projects involving OCLC
Programs and Research and seven RLG Programs art museum partners to build an
information architecture and model behaviors that museums can use to routinely
exchange data.
This initiative will result in the creation of a low-barrier/no-cost batch
export capability out of the collections management system used by the
participating museums (GallerySystems TMS), as well as a test of data exchange
processes using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH). The test will create a large research aggregation of museum
records, which will be analyzed to determine in which areas museums should
invest in upgrading their records, and in which areas automated processes can
be utilized to harmonize descriptions for retrieval. Participating museums
will also discuss the evidence about the relative utility of the aggregation
with stakeholders from the museum, vendor and aggregator community.
We've seen a change in attitudes in the museum community over the last couple
of years, and increasingly, technological solutions are lagging behind
aspirations to share, said James Michalko, OCLC Vice President, RLG Programs.
We are grateful to The Mellon Foundation for their generous support of our
efforts to empower museums in their desire to exchange digital records and
images.
Project manager G?nter Waibel, Program Officer, RLG Programs, envisions that
the initiative will have far-reaching impact. While we're focusing our
initial efforts on TMS, we hope that our solution will be generic enough to
take us a long way towards addressing data exchange issues for other
vendor-based and homegrown systems, Waibel said.
Museums participating in the project with OCLC Programs and Research include
the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National
Gallery of Art; Princeton University Art Museum; Yale University Art Gallery;
Victoria Albert Museum (research aggregation only); and the Cleveland Museum
of Art (research aggregation only).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a kick-off meeting January 28-29 to bring
participants together and begin work on this initiative. The project is
expected to be completed by the end of March, 2009.
About OCLC
Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC is a nonprofit library
service and research organization that has provided computer-based cataloging,
reference, resource sharing, eContent, preservation, library management and Web
services to 60,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. OCLC and its
member libraries worldwide have created and maintain WorldCat, the world's
richest online resource for finding library materials. RLG Programs, part of
OCLC Programs and Research, supports exploration, innovation and community
building on behalf of libraries, museums and archives. For more information
about RLG Programs, visit www.oclc.org/programs.
More information about OCLC is at www.oclc.org.
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