Workshop Slides
View and download the slide deck here
Also, check out Nik Honeysett’s full “Collection Management Systems in Context” slides from this year’s AAM conference, which he gave a sneak preview of in the OC-CoP workshop!
Outline
- Recap
- What happened in 2017
- State of the Data
- How much is out there? Quick overview of what’s out there now
- What’s the Point?
- Discussion: Is natural history more connected than cultural? Why?
- What’s the Difference?
- Discussion: Are aggregation practices and standards keys to success?
- Putting it in practice
- Survey results from Nik Honeysett
- Collections dashboard / EMudata from FMNH (if we have time)
- What next?
- Looking forward and how to participate in the CoP
Workshop Notes
Discussion 1
State of Data – what’s out there?
- How much is out there – natural vs cultural history?
- NH Records are kept in a variety of repositories (gbif, idigbio, etc.)
- CH records are kept institutionally, or aggregators
- Order of magnitude difference from institutions to aggregators
- What’s the Point? Why are we or should we be doing this?
- Why can NH institutions get things out more efficiently then CH institutions
- NH has well defined goals and purposes for getting data out there
- Specific stipulations on what NH institutions must do with their information (Convention on Biological Diversity)
- WHAT ARE THE EQUIVALENTS IN THE CULTURAL WORLD (discussion/Question posed to audience)
What is the point?
- Accessibility, making common connections across our collections
- Why? Educational component, stuff that people cant see, expanding the reach
- Support and sustain our mission
- Public institution – who owns the data
- What we really stand for, modern contemporary museum
- SFMoMa, discussing how social injustice (gun violence in schools), students standing up for what they believe, what do institutions believe in and what do they stand for
- Accessibility, access to collections, bringing in new audiences, helping current audience find what we have
- Let the public access the collection broadly, fundamental to allow access and leave doors open (physically) 9-5, allow access all the time through online collections portal
- Interest in online collections can bring people in
- Democratizes the collections
- Meeting donor expectations, most donors expect to see collection on exhibition which isn’t always possible physically, but can be accessed online digitally
- Communities out in the world, that are stakeholders in online collections decision making (not all internal)
- Driver to unlock collections, making collection available beyond the walls of the institution
- Distributing data to create a wider body of knowledge
- Promotes a strand of a window shop view to the institution, promotes the commercial aspects of the collection as well
Why are we doing this?
- To connect, share information about artists, and promote education
- Proliferation of knowledge, our work fuels scholarship and from this, more scholarship is developed
- What’s happening in academic and how it can help others beyond that
- People expect to know what we have, remaining relevant
- Research, access for teachers and educators
- Having reach beyond the walls of the institution
- Research in a broader sense, curatorial research across institution – virtual repatriation of resources. People across the globe can see collection information even if they can’t travel to institution
- Open movement: discussing the difficulty of putting both natural and cultural history collections online together
- We want people to connect with collections, but we also want to connect with institutions
What are the common goals for cultural collections?
- Providing materials to artists and their projects
- Felt it was the institutions goal to make collection available to the public
- Education and accessibility
- Get something back from sharing information
- Maybe it’s not possible due to copyright reasons to put in public domain, could you devise a quick way to get it out there (concept of digital loan system)
- Promote collections, accessibility and education across collections
- History shows that NH and CH were collected together – allowing that relationship to be maintained and presented online
- Scientific culture (quantitative concept of big data) which drives this community and sharing of information
- Different driver towards what is put online
- What we make accessible aligns more with the stories we tell about ourselves, online collections allow us to share different stories – promotes diversity of stories when discussing objects and materials that may be in storage rather than on display at the museum
Discussion 2
Aggregation vs Institutional levels of putting information out there
- NH World – GBif, Atlas of living Australia
- What are the aggregators in the cultural domain
- Europeana, EU platform for digital heritage
- Virtual museum of canada, federal initiative
- Administered by the Canadian museum of History
- How it requests input – rather than uploading all records, they produce virtual exhibitions requiring narratives to be shared about the collections
- Standards: DwC, CIDOC CRM (linked data community)
- Who is best placed to be the aggregator?
- What would an ideal aggregator look like?
- What kind of standards should/would be enforced?
- Can/should Natural History and Cultural Heritage share?
- API utilization to share data
- Getty thinks they are in the best place to be an aggregator
- Getty portal, digitized art history books
- Libraries do this very well, digital library of california (not really a library aggregator, shares cultural history information)
- Art museums: concern that everything be vetted by an expert, within collections data – europeana can do what they do because there isn’t the obstacle of vetting regarding the data
- Aside from dealing with copyright, also dealing with website that can support API and backend development – funding and development is an issue in cultural sector
- API – many people know what it is, only one person can use it, but difficulty is that IT staff don’t necessarily know the collections data (need that crossover)