BNHM-IST Steering Committee December 8, 2009

BNHM-IST Steering Committee Membership enlarged on interim basis for the collections management evaluation Reminder: Key On-Going Topics for the Steering Committee this year 1. Collections management system strategy 2. Financial sustainability 3. Portfolio review and assignments 4. Building the Informatics Services team 5. Communication (and more communications) Today we focus on collection management strategy. Revisit all topics as well as membership soon.

Goals for Today Hold part 1 of a 2 (or 3) part conversation so that we can Define and Ratify the Collection Management Strategy for the BNHM-IST Partnership for … next 5 years or more. Today: be clear what we are talking about and what we are deciding. Update folks on where we are. Lay out preliminary thoughts from me and IST team.

Collections Management Strategy: What we are deciding about 1. Collection Management System Platform: a decision about the platform for collections management so we can focus our diminishing resources, 2. Transition Plan: an aggressive yet flexible transition strategy for the next one to three years for each museum, BNHM-focused but incorporating planning related to other campus collections A plan for concerns and mitigating risks, including a fallback strategy. “Triggers” 3. Collaboration Plan: a plan to connect and collaborate between platforms and initiatives by sharing data, building interoperability, blending solutions, and possibly combining teams….

1. Choosing A Platform

Principles Selecting a platform that can be extended and integrated across all collections on campus, including non-natural history collections. Make optimal use of our resources while ensuring excellence. Guarantee operation of existing systems that are supported for the museums until they can be migrated to a new solution. Museums may elect to not participate in the use of a shared platform. If this is the case, they will cover all costs for deployment and operations themselves. Existing legacy systems will be put on "life support" with a focus on keeping them available, and freezing enhancements. Exceptions to this will be submitted for approval to the BNHM-IST Steering Committee. In general, functional criteria are easier to address over time than core business and architecture considerations. Architectural criteria should be seen as directly enabling functional and business goals. Regardless of final decisions, we should seek partnerships with the other solutions we have evaluated.

Platform vs Applications Be careful to not confuse these. We’ve tried to educate here, but we will need to do more. We are not just looking for a replacement or upgrade “system” or “application” for each individual museum. We are looking for a “platform” upon which we can build “web services” based applications and tools for many museums, archives, and related collections needs across the campus. A collections research platform for the future – Integration platform with core cyberinfrastructure for Research, Teaching, Public Service

What we have done so far in assessing existing options Done. Spring 2009: Presentations by CollectionSpace, Arctos and Specify teams. Done. Summer and early fall 2009: Identify functional, business, and technology criteria (Advisory/Technology committee) Identify principles, must-haves, and weighting of criteria (Steering Committee) Done. September and October 2009: Initial evaluation and scoring of CollectionSpace, Specify, and Arctos. Done. October and November 2009: Discussions with individual museums, BNHM Directors, combined Advisory/Technology group, and Steering Committee. More information on the Partnership wiki.wiki

Key factors: platform evaluation Functional: Platform must provide a wide range of functionality (including e.g., loans and taxonomic identification) for a wide range of data models. Business: Financial sustainability and governance (especially given campus climate and mandates); a healthy, vibrant, open-source community-supported project that UC Berkeley can endorse and be involved in at a high level. Technology: Platform must support BNHM-IST shared services goals, flexibility and customization, stability and reliability, integration with other systems; built on a web- based, services oriented architecture (SOA), multi-tenant, scalable and flexible architecture.

CollectionSpace Timing Release 0.3: JUST RELEASED. Current version. Object records, intake, acquisition, simple vocabularies, number pattern chooser, and simple schema customization Release 0.4: Late Jan. / early Feb. Enhanced search, relationships and related records, enhanced vocabularies, person/org/contact … … Intermediate releases documented on the wiki Release 1.0: May Customized deployments summer and Fall 2010.

Scoring Transparency: process and assumptionsprocess assumptions Evaluation: scorecardscorecard Evaluation based on over 150 data points in three broad criteria areas Criteria/ System Functionalit y (40%) Business (30%) Technology (30%) Overall Specify Arctos CollectionSpace CollectionSpace now

Feedback From directors and museum staffmuseum staff From November 9 group discussionNovember 9 group discussion A range of reactions: from enthusiasm to skepticism CollectionSpace, while strong on paper, needs to show more tangible evidence to gain broader support, such as Import a significant quantity and diversity of natural history data Provide evidence of functionality and data fit And so on …

Status of preliminary efforts PAHMA Herbaria Essig

How to think about what is important

Campus Financial Crisis: Mandate to invest in common solutions with common good funds.

Or: “Collaborate or die” – C. Moritz

Deciding for whom? Campus good BNHM Consortium good Individual Museum good Individual good

Scoring Transparency: process and assumptionsprocess assumptions Evaluation: scorecardscorecard Evaluation based on over 150 data points in three broad criteria areas Criteria/ System Functionalit y (40%) Business (30%) Technology (30%) Overall Specify Arctos CollectionSpace CollectionSpace now

Which directions are these scores going in the future?

Scoring Transparency: process and assumptionsprocess assumptions Evaluation: scorecardscorecard Evaluation based on over 150 data points in three broad criteria areas Criteria/ System Functionalit y (40%) Business (30%) Technology (30%) Overall Specify Arctos CollectionSpace CollectionSpace now

Scoring Transparency: process and assumptionsprocess assumptions Evaluation: scorecardscorecard Evaluation based on over 150 data points in three broad criteria areas Criteria/ System Functionalit y (40%) Business (30%) Technology (30%) Overall Specify Arctos CollectionSpace CollectionSpace now

Scoring Transparency: process and assumptionsprocess assumptions Evaluation: scorecardscorecard Evaluation based on over 150 data points in three broad criteria areas Criteria/ System Functionalit y (40%) Business (30%) Technology (30%) Overall Specify Arctos CollectionSpace CollectionSpace now

How do we get there? Technical Platform Strength LowHigh Adoption/ Impact Low High Target What is the best route to our target?

How do we get there? Technical Platform Strength LowHigh Adoption/ Impact Low High Specify Arctos CollectionSpace Now Target What is the best route to our target?

How do we get there? Technical Platform Strength LowHigh Adoption/ Impact Low High Specify Arctos CollectionSpace Now Target What is the best route to our target?

Considering all campus collections… Technical Standardization LowHigh Adoption/ Impact Low High Specify Arctos CollectionSpace Now Target

2. Transition Plans

Example Museum Migration Phase I: Analysis and Planning – Start up; analyze functions, schema and existing data; develop plan for Phase II and III. Three months to six months. Phase II: Deployment – Migrate data, test, training and documentation. Six to nine months. Phase III: Post-deployment monitoring and tweaking. Three months. Transition to production support Overall: 12 to 18 months (followed by production support). Time to deploy should get shorter as we gain experience. Resources will determine whether we can work on two or three migrations across campus at the same time.

Strawman transition plan (2/year) Start PAHMA [BNHM(1)] and Herbaria [BNHM(2)] Build core abilities plus initial required extensions Define collaborations with Arctos and Specify Complete PAHMA and Herbaria Start BNHM(3) (Bot Garden/XDB or UCMP/GO?) and non- BNHM(1) Build basic research and interoperability support Build basic data sharing with Arctos and Specify Complete BNHM(3) and non-BNHM(1) Start BNHM(4) and non-BNHM(2) Build enhanced research, interop, and Arctos/Specify collaboration

Strawman transition plan (2/year) Complete BNHM(4) and non-BNHM(2) Start BNHM(5) and non-BNHM(3) Build advanced research, interop, and Arctos/Specify blending and beyond Complete BNHM(5) and non-BNHM(3) Migrate remaining campus collections Build advanced research, interop, and Arctos/Specify hybrid, e.g., with BNHM(6)

To Complete Transition plan o Planning, communication and assessment activities o Develop estimates for deployments and maintenance o Identify and build skills needed in team o Develop Plan B o Develop funding and sustainability plan o Meet with Directors in January or February o Review with BNHM-IST community in spring o Verify CollectionSpace functionality, customizations, data diversity, data volumes, performance o Review CollectionSpace in September 2010 o Review progress on museum transition plans yearly, adjusting plans as needed

3. Collaborations with Arctos and Specify

Next steps for decisions Done. Gather feedback from community on Nov. 9 notes Today: Discuss recommendation with Steering Committee December: Develop collections management strategy for BNHM-IST Partnership from strawman Mid-January: Start Herbaria Initial Engagement project (project proposal)project proposal Steering Committee meets in January / Feb. to make next level decision Meet with Directors in January and February? Review decisions with campus CIO, VC Research, CTC

Discussion