UK Culture Grid wants to know what developers need - get in!

Neil Smith from Knowledge Integration dropped by the Museums and the machine-processable web wiki to ask what users (developers) need to get data in and out of the Culture Grid:

To support the ambitious targets for increasing the number of item records in Culture Grid, we thought know would be a good time to review the venerable old application profile we use for importing metadata into the Grid. I've added a discussion page reviewing options at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/w/page/Culture-Grid-Profile.

We really want the community to be involved in helping ensure that whatever profile (or profiles) we support will meet the needs of users - not only for getting things into the grid but also for getting things out in a format that is useful to them. Although the paper focusses mainly on XML representations of metadata, we're also interested in your views on whether non-XML representations (e.g RDF or JSON) need to be supported.

So whether you work in a museum or are an external developer who'd like to use museum data, I'd encourage you to think about the four options Neil outlines, and to comment, ask questions, share sample data, vote for your favourite option, whatever, on the Culture Grid Profile page.  One of the options is to develop a new model - definitely more time-consuming, but a great opportunity to make your needs known.

As an indication of the type of content that's available through the Culture Grid, I've copied this text from some of their about pages: "It contains over 1 million records from over 50 UK collections, covering a huge range of topics and periods.  Records mostly refer to images but also text, audio and video resources and are mostly about museum objects with library, archive and other kinds of collections also included."  So, that's:

• "information about items in collections (referencing the images, video, audio or other material you offer online about the things in your collections)
• information about collections as a whole (their scope, significance and access details)
• information about collecting organisations (contact and access details)"

There's a lot of cultural heritage and tech jargon involved on the Culture Grid Profile discussion page - don't hold back on asking for clarifications where needed.  I'm certainly not an expert on the various schemas and it's a very long time since I helped work out the Exploring 20th Century London extensions for the original PNDS, but I've given it a go.

If you've read this far, you might also be interested in the first ever Culture Grid Hack Day in Newcastle Upon Tyne on December 3, 2010.

MultiMimsy database extractions and the possibilities for OAI-based collections repositories

I've uploaded my presentation slides from a talk for the UK MultiMimsy Users group in Docklands last month to MultiMimsy database extractions and the possibilities for OAI-based collections repositories at the Museum of London.

The first part discusses how to get from a set of data in a collections management system to a final published website, looking at the design process and technical considerations. Willoughby's use of Oracle on the back-end means that any ODBC-compliant database can query the underlying database and extract collections data.

The paper then looks at some of the possibilities for the Museum of London's OAI-PMH repository. We've implemented an OAI repository for the People's Network Discover Service (PNDS) for Exploring 20th Century London (which also means we're set to get records into Europeana), but I hope that we can use the repository in lots of other ways, including the possibility of using our repository to serve data for federated searches.

There's currently some discussion internationally in the cultural heritage sector about repositories vs federated search, but I'm not sure it's an either/or choice. The reasons each are used are often to do with political or funding factors instead of the base technology, but either method, or both, could be used internally or externally depending on the requirements of the project and institution.

I can go into more detail about the scripts we use to extract data from MultiMimsy or send sample scripts if people are interested. They might be a good way to get started if you haven't extracted data from MultiMimsy before but they won't generally be directly relevant to your data structres as the use of MultiMimsy can vary so widely between types of museums, collections and projects.

edna on the benefits of metadata repositories for educational resources

Some random doodling about the possibilities of using the functionalities of an OAI repository as an API lead me to information about metadata repositories, harvesting and edna (Education Network Australia, ' Australia's free online network for educators').

In linked document, Harvesting Overview, they state: "In addition, the edna search API is embedded into numerous other websites – providing access to the edna repository and indexes from external websites. The benefit to you is that, by providing your metadata records for harvesting by edna, you increase exposure to your valuable education and training related resources."

It's a good summary of the processes involved in setting up an OAI repository for harvesting and of the benefits for the organisation; including increased visibility of resources, maximising return on investment [ROI] for created resources and associated metadata and benefiting from services such as RSS that can be delivered back to the organisation.

Linking DSpace and OpenSearch?

Has anyone hooked up Opensearch and a DSpace repository?

We're just about to start using a DSpace repository for collections data - object metadata, media files and metadata and information record (people, places, events, publications) metadata - for selected records from our Mimsy XG collections management system; and I think an OpenSearch service would make the data a lot more findable and possibly a lot more useable.

I really should write it up properly at some stage, but I'm hoping that our repository will have a use beyond providing an OAI-PMH-compliant data source for partnership projects and our own internal requirements.

For example, other people may query the repository to build applications with our data; or use it as a central index of all the records we've published in digital projects over the years, following links to sites in which the object appears. Or it might enable us to try some semantic web-ish things...

I'd be curious to hear about anyone's experience with DSpace/OAI-PMH or OpenSearch for museum collection data, but I'd particularly love to hear from you if you've used them together.

Best Practices for Shareable Metadata

What looks like an excellent resource from the (American) National Science Digital Library, a wiki on Best Practices for Shareable Metadata including crosswalking logic, describing versions and reproductions, recommendations for classes of data elements and technical aspects.