Project Description

CollectionSpace is a collaboration that brings together a variety of cultural and academic institutions with the common goal of developing and deploying an open-source, web-based software application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information. This report includes an update on the project team's activities for April 2009. The next update will be released Friday, June 5th.

Updates are emailed to the Announcements list and posted to the project wiki the first Friday of every month.

Accomplishments - April 2009

Community

The project team would like to thank those institutions who have submitted use cases to our wiki or work list. We are still actively collecting, so please feel free to email your cases to the project Talk list, or create a login on the project wiki and add directly to the use case page.

Carl Goodman, Patrick Schmitz, and Megan Forbes participated in a public webinar with John Little and Tim McGeary of the OLE Project. OLE is a multinational group of libraries developing the design for an Open Library Environment, an alternative to the current model of integrated library systems. Check the project wiki in May for a link to the webinar on YouTube.

Design

The design team continues to focus on user testing and wireframe development for object entry, new object creation, new authority creation, and the software's personalized dashboard. If you're interested in participating as a UI tester, please contact the designers through the Talk email list.

Development

The development teams have completed their individual "Hello World" efforts, and are working toward integration. Those interested in viewing the code can use the project's Fisheye instance available at http://fisheye.collectionspace.org. A viewable instance of the integration will be available at http://demo.collectionspace.org in mid-May.

Functional

A detailed draft of the functionality planned for the next six months of development is available on the project wiki. The functional team continues to gather use cases and sample data from the community, to be used in creating domain-specific demonstrations of CollectionSpace's capabilities.

Goals - May 2009

Community

Carl Goodman, the project's Principal Investigator, will participate in the panel "Open Source for Museums: The Next Experiment in Museum Technology," at the American Association of Museums Annual Meeting. The panel is scheduled for Sunday, May 3rd, at 2pm.

Chaired by Jim Spadaccini of Ideum, the panel will include "a frank discussion of the origin, forms, promises and potential pitfalls of open source software in the museum. See how open source software applications are being used in science, art and history museums." Additional panelists include Scott Sayre of Sandbox Studios, Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and Bryan Kennedy of the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Design

In addition to continuing to test and refine existing wireframes, the design team will begin work on the system administrator's interface. This is one of the most important elements of the CollectionSpace system, as from the beginning, one of the project's basic assertions has been that configuration work currently done by developers and IT staff could be more efficiently managed by collections staff with better tools. An example of one such tool can be seen in the draft wireframe for pattern number creation, which will allow system administrators to create patterns for number generation that facilitate validation and reduce operator error without inhibiting workflow.

Development

Developers will expand the early version of Object Entry to include support for complex identification numbers, and the ability to create and manage vocabularies and authorities. In addition to the work that directly supports May's deliverables, the services, application, and UI teams will continue the bigger picture development work that ensures that the system will support the use of innovative interactions, services that work independently to avoid the monolithic application approach, and an application layer that does not require any institution to find the right fit but, rather offers them the opportunity to take what they need and make it their own.