+Community+

CollectionSpace is pleased to announce a collaboration with the [Walker Art Center|http://www.walkerart.org/index.wac]. As a recipient of the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, the Walker Art Center will create an online catalog to address contemporary art as a repository for the primary source material assembled and generated during the acquisition process and beyond. To achieve their goal, the Walker Art Center will implement CollectionSpace for the management and delivery of their online scholarly content. We look forward to the start of this exciting collaboration in September 2009.

The entire project team would like to extend thanks to those institutions that have submitted use cases and participated in user testing, including the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the History of Art Visual Resources Collection at the University of California, Berkeley. We are still looking for use cases, user testing volunteers, and service description reviewers - email talk@lists.collectionspace.org if you're interested.

The project team will meet up in Toronto in mid-June for an all-hands meeting. The meeting will include progress reports from all teams, discussions around integration, and hands-on collaborative development sessions. Check the wiki in late June for slides, photos, and meeting notes. Several project team members will stay on to participate in the kick-off meeting for [Fluid Engage|http://www.fluidproject.org/projects/fluid-engage/], a newly funded project devoted to addressing the challenges of incorporating new technology into the web, mobile, and physical spaces of museums and galleries.

+Design+

The design team continues to focus its energy on wireframes and user testing that support creating and editing objects, authorities, and acquisitions. Team members have conducted [user tests|Design|#User Testing] with a number of community members, resulting in a great deal of useful feedback on existing wireframes. Work has begun on the software's graphic identity, with several [look-and-feel|Look and Feel] explorations available on the wiki.

+Development+

Hello, World! The project team is close to its 0.1, or Hello World, release. This release will serve as the initial integration test across all three of the system's layers, with the goal of accepting text entered into a web-based Object Entry form, and flowing that data from the user interface layer, to the application layer, to the services layer, and into persistent storage.

Initially scheduled for April of this year, the release has been held back to allow for significant foundational work to be completed by the services, application, and user interface developers. We are confident that the time spent creating this foundation will serve us well as the complexity of the project's deliverables increases.

Now in the hands of the application developers, the release is scheduled for mid-June.

In addition to their work in support of the 0.1 release, the user interface team has been busy with the release of [Fluid Infusion 1.1|http://fluidproject.org/products/infusion/], an integral part of the CollectionSpace user interface architecture. The services team is working on a number of architecture issues, including drafting requirements for multi-tenancy support. The team is readying several service descriptions for community review, including [CollectionObject|CollectionObject Service Home], [ID|ID Service Home], [Person|collectionspace:Person Service Home], [Organization|collectionspace:Organization Service Home], and [Contact|collectionspace:Contact Service Home]. Reviews will begin the first week in June; email talk@lists.collectionspace.org if you would like to learn more about becoming a reviewer.

+Functionality+

The functional team is finalizing requirements, schema, and use case scenarios for the functionality required over the next six months of development. The team is also working with the designers to incorporate different information presentation styles (textual, visual) into the wireframes and look-and-feel explorations.