Tag: Museum Metadata Exchange

Interning with the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

I don’t remember when I first became interested in issues associated with digital heritage… but I know that my interest was piqued after I stumbled upon Seb Chan’s Fresh + New(er) blog years ago. Thus when Seb sat near me at a session at MW2011, I decided to introduce myself.

He was mobbed by people immediately after the session finished, and I thought I had missed my chance… but fortunately that wasn’t the case. Seb approached the small group I was in not long after and on the spur of the moment, I decided not only to say hi but also to ask whether I could become an intern with the web team at the Powerhouse. And excellently, Seb said yes.

So I’m now interning at the Powerhouse Museum one day a week – something that will be great for my research and hopefully ground it far more in reality (I know I can be an academic idealist at times). I’ve been there a couple of times 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 these posts is up today, which is pretty awesome. So if you are interested, check it out: Fritzi Scheff demonstrating Magnavox for Fifth Liberty loan in New York City.

This is just the next in a lifetime’s worth of internships I’ve taken on… I have occasionally seriously considered writing my profession as ‘intern’ on forms. But every single one has led to interesting opportunities and great new knowledge – which is the same reason I do things like volunteer with MCN2011. And which is also why it is very cool to have the chance to work with the same team that first inspired me to pursue this career.

The Museum Metadata Exchange and archival tactics for museum collections

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?