• About
  • Connect
RSS  Subscribe:  RSS feed
museum geek
exploring museums, technology, and ideas

The Museum Metadata Exchange and archival tactics for museum collections

Posted on April 23, 2011

1


I was just checking out the recent postings by Seb Chan on his fresh + new(er) blog, and saw a link to the Museum Metadata Exchange, a project that started in mid-2010 (and which my friend Heath Killen has apparently been working on). The project has been “designed to harvest collection level descriptions from a number of major museums and the National Film and Sound Archive and to supply that data in a standardised format to the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).”

One of the commenter’s about Seb’s post writes:

The concept of collection-level description by and large tends to be foreign to large swaths of the museum community, whereas of course it’s a major strategy in archives. MARC collection-level records (or rudimentary EAD finding aids) can let the public know that an archive has a large collection of something, even if it hasn’t been described at a deeper level, let alone digitized. I was involved in an effort in the natural history community to create a standard for collection level descriptions (http://www.tdwg.org/activities… and at the Smithsonian, the Field Book Project has incorporated the standard into their approach (http://libreas.eu/ausgabe18/te… Don’t know of too many other projects using collection level descriptions for museum content…

This is one of the interesting implications I am curious about for changing practices within the online museum collection. Are museums now using a more archival approach to collections online as a way to make them more accessible/usable/findable to non-specialist users? Gunther’s comment that collection-level description is a major strategy in archives that we can now see being deployed in projects such as the Museum Metadata Exchange would suggest that this is a possibility.

And so I wonder whether museum collections, although created under different curatorial premises to archives, are now moving towards a more archival approach to online collection management, particularly given that the Internet is itself essentially a giant archive? And if so, is this a legitimate tactic for opening collection up more effectively to non-experts?

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Tagged: archives, Museum Metadata Exchange, Powerhouse Museum
Posted in: Museums
← To be cont.
Narrative, sharing and memory →
One Response “The Museum Metadata Exchange and archival tactics for museum collections” →
1 Trackback For This Post
  1. Interning with the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney « museum geek →
    May 23rd, 2011 → 9:11 pm

    […] already, and got to check out some of the quirky museum objects; do a little bit of work on the Museum Metadata Exchange; and to write a couple of blog posts for the Museum’s Photo of the Day blog. This first of […]

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Side Projects

Museopunks is the podcast for the progressive museum. Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

Humanizing the Digital: Unproceedings from the MCN 2018 Conference is a collaborative response to the MCN 2018 conference, filled with 17 conference-inspired responses to the state of museum technology in 2018, including essays, reflections, case studies, conversations, and an experimental in-book zine.

CODE│WORDS was an effort to gather and harness the discourse occurring among the museum technology community.

The 2nd experiment in the CODE | WORDS series was called A Series of Epistolary Romances. It consisted of exchanges between authors on topics of import.

Recent Posts

  • Reflections on teaching museum digital practice in 2019
  • Because they are hard… Reflections on #MCN2019
  • VOX POPS: Crowdsourcing Museum Definition perspectives for Museopunks
  • Teaching a new course on museum ethics
  • a new punk.

Popular Posts

  • Provocation: Society doesn't need museums.
  • About
  • Museum objects and complexity
  • Do museum professionals need theory?
  • Can institutions be empathetic?
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Blogroll

  • Archives Next
  • fresh + new(er)
  • Koven J. Smith
  • Museum 2.0
  • Open Objects
  • The Museum of the Future
  • Thinking about Exhibits

Archives

Website Powered by WordPress.com.
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
<span>%d</span> bloggers like this: