Describing Collections So Visitors Can Find Them: A sampling of ways to get materials on-line Amanda Focke, Rice University

What are my options if I have… No software budget, no IT support? A small software budget, some IT support? No software budget, good IT support? A software budget, little IT support? What if we’re ready to try non-traditional Web 2.0 approaches?

No software budget, no IT support? Contribute your metadata and image files to existing projects which host materials for you, such as:  Portal to Texas History  Museum of Houston Site hosts Dublin Core metadata and image files related to Houston History, run by Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, hosted at Rice University.  We’ll also discuss Web 2.0 options later.

Small software budget, small IT staff? Traditional database with content management software  Structure your own data in a common database (Access, FileMakerPro)  Couple it with a content management system, such as Cold Fusion (proprietary) or Plone (open source)  Have an IT person to put it together in a nice web presence (Staff costs)  You can contract IT services to help set this up and maintain it as needed if you don’t have enough in-house IT.

Small software budget, some IT support? Museum database template exporting XML On-line Archive of California (OAC)  Digital Asset management Database (DAMD) built on FileMaker Pro  Exports to easily shareable XML formats such as METS  Use tool to share materials on your own site  FREE to cultural organizations  ey.edu/moac/ ey.edu/moac/

Small software budget, some IT support Past Perfect software   Turnkey system for internal management plus web presence– circa $870 plus $420 for Virtual Exhibit module  Investment is in the software, would not require sophisticated IT to keep it running.  “The company was founded in 1996 with the mission to create affordable software products for museums. Our major software package is PastPerfect Museum Software. In addition we have Virtual Exhibit, a web site design program, and other add-on products including Multi-media, Imaging, Scatter/Gather, and Barcode Printing museum clients worldwide.”  Catalog archives, art, archaeology, geology, historic objects, library materials, music collections, natural history, oral histories, and photographs

Past Perfect 4.0 Art Object data entry screen

Past Perfect Virtual Exhibit example

Institutional Repositories (IR) CONTENTdm  software cost and purchased IT support cost DSpace  no software cost but potential for high IT staff cost

CONTENTdm A turnkey proprietary on-line content management system which looks quite good on-line straight out of the box and is commonly used. Buy software and support, host on your own website.

Allen County Community Album (CONTENTdm software)

Allen County Community Album (CONTENTdm software) Browse screen

Allen County Community Album (CONTENTdm) Item screen

Content DM data entry Examples of ContentDM working screens from station/entering4.html

CONTENTdm internal search screen

CONTENTdm collection admin screens

DSpace and other open source IRs Open Source, so the software code is available free. The investment here is IT staff time to set up and administer the system on your website. Tech support comes from the community of users, often via listserv communications, blogs, wikis. (You can’t “buy” support, you rely on the community.) Code can be edited / tweaked to your liking (as long as you have the skills to edit the code). Other open source IRs:  Greenstone  Fedora  And more…

DSpace cont. DSpace uses Dublin Core for the data structure. It houses many kinds of file formats. It is Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant. It does some preservation tasks with the files, such as running check-sum reports. Item descriptions can currently be entered via a form, but to enter full descriptions takes a two step process – a little clunky.

DSpace data entry form

How Rice gets around DSpace’s clunky entry process / form DSpace administrator does a batch upload of digital files & data from a spreadsheet

Once on-line, getting the word out Share finding aids with a consortia such as Texas Archival Resources On-line  Hosts archival finding aids posted in EAD format  Share your materials with relevant consortia using OAI  Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative   See also initiatives for your type of museum

No software budget, no IT help, but interested in a Web 2.0 social tagging research project? “steve: the art museum social tagging project” Participate in this project researching social tagging for museum collections, which will share its findings with traditional metadata community Upload image files and descriptions, then let the users apply tags. Steve staff conducts research, funded in part by an IMLS grant.

steve: the art museum social tagging project

Join the steve discussion group Download the free tagging tool (software) and participate!

No IT help, no budget, and interested in a more casual, Web 2.0 site? For image files, try Flickr Pros:  It’s free! It’s easy! Your audience can interact!  See Library of Congress’ pilot at s/collections/ / s/collections/ / Cons: Not formally part of museum domain, doesn’t have a research agenda

Flickr

Tags & Comments Collections & Sets Maps & Geotagging Flickr Groups The Commons 

Flickr Tags & Comments

Flickr collections and sets

Flickr Maps and geotagging

Flickr Groups Mayborn Museum in Waco, TX

Flickr Commons