Added by Megan Forbes, last edited by Megan Forbes on Jan 21, 2010  (view change)

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Introduction

One of the goals of the CollectionSpace project is to develop a platform for a collections information system. Within that platform, we intend to deliver a set of modular solutions and services that match functional requirements for managing museum collections and publishing them for various use-cases. Rather than develop a traditional collections management system, however, we are interested in pursuing a service oriented solution so as to take advantage of new open source technologies that to date, have not been used within the museum community. By creating services tailored to specific tasks that museums engage in daily, such as acquisitions, loans, inventory, audit, we will be better able to develop flexible, customizable, and extensible solutions to fit a wide range of staff needs, collection types, and institutional sizes.

The CollectionSpace functional team is working toward delivering an application that is:

  • A core resource, used to manage every aspect of a collection - from location and condition to display and dispatch;
  • Familiar to its core users, reflecting the way they interact with collections each day;
  • A tool for collecting insight and knowledge in order to build a collective intelligence;
  • A way to bridge gaps between a museum and its community; and
  • A way to de-couple information process and function, reconciling conflicting information uses within an institution.
On This Page

View the complete list of CollectionSpace Functional Requirements. Join the functional requirements working group to contribute to the ongoing discussion about this list. The project team is always interested in institutional use cases, which help us expand our functional requirements, create inclusive designs, and develop services that accurately reflect our community's needs.

Development activities in CollectionSpace Phase One (through May 2010) will center on a subset of eight SPECTRUM procedures (workflows): Object Entry, Acquisition, Location and movement control, Cataloging, Object exit, Loans in, Loans out, and Retrospective documentation. Functional requirements for the eight procedures, along with requirements for functionality that supports the procedures, is below.

The first development milestone, to be reached in the spring of 2009, will represent a significant integration effort of various tools and technologies around the core procedure of object entry. This work will lay the groundwork for ongoing development, and includes: resolving technology stacks; developing and testing tools and workflows; designing and implementing the testing strategy; setup of the code repository and commit standards; installation and experimentation with development platforms; finalizing service families and detailing the initial service contracts; establishing lightweight governance mechanisms for services shared with other projects such as Kuali Student Services (KSS); designing the configuration and customization language and tools; and prototyping the application's user interface with Fluid/Infusion tools.

Requirements

As the system design and development process moves along, the language used by the CollectionSpace team will change and evolve. Below is a list of commonly used terms/concepts in the functional requirements, all of which are subject to change as a result of testing and user feedback.

  • Objects: Used as shorthand for single objects, groups of objects, objects with physical and digital form, parts of objects, and so on. An object record may describe a box of unidentified sherds, or a single painting.
  • Organizational records: Used to capture and manage information with extrinsic relationships to object records, such as authority files, thesauri, storage locations, and support media. Support media records are used to capture and manage information about images, documents, audio, video, and other media added to support or represent object, procedural, and organizational records.
  • Procedural records: Used to capture and manage information that revolves around a specific collections management workflow such as intake, acquisition, loans, or cataloging.
Collections Management

Object Entry
Acquisition
Inventory Control
Location and Movement Control
Cataloging
Object Exit
Structured Object Management
Retrospective Documentation
Numbers
Conservation

Object Condition Checking and Technical Assessment
Conservation and Collections Care
Customization, Configuration, and Installation

[End User Personalization]
[System Administrator Customization]
[System Technician Customization]
Dashboard
Collections
Interface

Data Management

Collections Exposure
Data Import and Export
Search
[Metadata Configuration]
Reporting
Batch Processing
Cross-functional
Loans and Dispatch

Loans In
Loans Out
Transport
Policy / Legal / Insurance

Rights
[Risk]
Insurance and Indemnity
[Loss and Damage]
[Deaccession and Disposal]
Audit

Resource Management

Media Handling
Time-based Media Cataloging
[Non-collection Materials Management]
Use of Collections
Collection Systems Integration
System Administration

Audit Trail
[Notifications]
[Workflow Management]
Help
Roles and Permissions
Authentication
[Documentation]
Vocabulary + Authority Control

Vocabulary and Authority Overview
Name
Place
Storage Location
Subject
Event
Term Lists
Citations

Schemas

Standards and Guidelines

Use Cases

User Story Repository

Sample Collections Data