Museum Data Exchange: Learning How to Share

The Museum Data Exchange, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together a group of nine museums and OCLC Research to create tools for data sharing, build a research aggregation and analyze the aggregation. The project established infrastructure for standards-based metadata exchange for the museum community and modeled data sharing behavior among participating institutions. Tools The tools created by the project allow museums to share standards-based data using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). • COBOAT allows museums to extract Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) Lite XML out of collections management systems. • OAICatMuseum 1.0 makes the data harvestable via OAI-PMH. COBOAT's default configuration targets Gallery Systems' TMS, but can be adjusted to work with other vendor-based or homegrown database systems. Harvesting data from nine museums, the project brought together 887,572 records in a non-public research aggregation, which participants had access to via a simple search interface. The analysis showed the following: • for CDWA Lite required and highly recommended data elements, 7 out of 17 elements are used in 90% of the contributed records • the match rate against applicable Getty vocabularies for objectWorkType, nameCreator and roleCreator is approximately 40% • the top 100 objectWorkType and nameCreator values represent 99% and 49% of all aggregation records respectively. Significant improvements in the aggregation could be achieved by revisiting data mappings to allow for a more complete representation of the underlying museum data. Focusing on the top 100 most highly occurring values for key elements will impact a high number of corresponding records, and would be low-hanging fruit for data clean-up activities. For further analysis, the research aggregation will be available for third party researchers under the terms of the original agreements with participating museums. Impact In its relatively short life span to date, the project's suite of tools has catalyzed several data sharing activities among project participants and other museums: • The Minneapolis Institute of Arts uses the tools in a production environment to contribute data to ArtsConnected, an aggregation for K-12 educators. • The Yale University Art Museum and the Yale Center for British Art use the tools to share data with a campus-wide cross-search, and contribute to a central digital asset management system. • The Harvard Art Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum are actively exploring OAI harvesting with ARTstor. (Three additional participants have signaled that this would be …