CollectionSpace: Cultivating Shared Software Solutions Among Communities of Practice

Museum of the Moving Image, in partnership with University of California, Berkeley, Information Services and Technology Division and the Walker Art Center, will cultivate shared software solutions among diverse communities of practice within the museum field. To realize this goal, the project team, along with participants from these communities of practice, will significantly advance and extend the CollectionSpace (www.collectionspace.org) open source collections information management software application. Funding will also be used to create the infrastructure needed for each community of practice to implement, maintain, and sustain shared software solutions under the "community source" model.

The project "CollectionSpace: Cultivating Shared Software Solutions Among Communities of Practice," will allow the project partners to implement CollectionSpace in five institutions representing distinct communities of practice, and to shape and extend the software to suit the needs of these communities. Schema extensions, metadata standards and formats, user interface templates, and workflows developed by each institution will be gathered together and released as "themes," for out-of-the-box implementation by future adopters. Museums with shared subjects and interests are likely to benefit from these customizations to CollectionSpace because of common interests in the use of specific data models and data content, structure, and value standards.

The institutions and themes are:

• Museum of the Moving Image (historical artifacts and memorabilia);
• Walker Art Center (performing arts);
• University of California, Berkeley, which will support three institutions:
• Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (anthropology);
• History of Art Visual Resource Collection (visual resources);
• University and Jepson Herbaria (biodiversity and life sciences).