A New Harvesting Metadata Format for Museums?
In the last few months Collections Trust has been working with colleagues in the ATHENA project on a metadata harvesting format specifically aimed at museum data.
This new format is being largely based on a schema developed by German colleagues called museumdat. museumdat is “a harvesting format optimised for retrieval and publication, meant to deliver automatically core data to museum portals.” It has has built upon the work carried out by the Getty in the USA with its CDWA Lite (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) schema.
museumdat is also compatible with CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) and especially its ‘event centred’ ontology.
One question that you might be asking is: How does this fit in with SPECTRUM?
There are two aspects to this:
- SPECTRUM is aimed at recording all the data associated with museum collections, which includes collections management information, which museumdat does not cover, and also the descriptive metadata that museumdat deals with. Therefore it will be easy to export data from a SPECTRUM Compliant system into this harvesting schema.
- SPECTRUM is being used in this update to museumdat (which might have a new name - watch this blog for news). This means that the very a few SPECTRUM ideas are being incorporated in museumdat.
All this work is being carried out in the context of the EC-funded ATHENA project. I am posting on this topic at this time because I led a meeting on the standards working group of the project in Brussels this week. Here the nearly complete new version was first made ‘public’ and its use within ATHENA was approved.
