MMI Workshop Invitation

Museum of the Moving Image Community Design Workshop Invitation

You are cordially invited to participate in a dialogue on cataloging digital objects.

The initiative

With the support of a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Museum of the Moving Image and its partners at the University of California, Berkeley and the Walker Art Center are working to change the way museums and other collecting organizations work together on software development, use, and governance. By bringing together institutions grappling with similar issues, we hope to develop a model for sharing knowledge, resources, and experiences in order to create solutions to our common problems.

The task set out for the workshop at the Museum of the Moving Image is to define what it means to acquire, catalog, and manage information about digital objects within the context of the museum setting and in relation to those objects as part of a permanent collection. Moving Image will then design, develop, and implement a set of software tools and templates based on that definition. Everything that we develop will be made freely available for use by all as part of the CollectionSpace collections management system.

The meeting

The workshop on the topic of cataloging digital objects will take place on January 13th, 2012, at the Museum of the Moving Image. We have invited you because we think your prior excellent work, thought, and experience all but guarantee that you’ll have much to contribute to a focused and lively discussion about what it means to document and describe digital objects. Questions we will consider include: What are the information gathering workflows for curators? For collections managers and registrars? For conservators? How can these workflows align to ensure that all descriptive, technical, and preservation metadata is gathered? What information can we capture during acquisition and cataloging to assist future exhibition and preservation efforts?

Invited participants include curators, collections managers, conservators, and other museum professionals representing organizations from across the country including collecting organizations, academic institutions, archives, museums, and libraries. We will be contacting you in advance of the meeting to help us shape the conversation by contributing examples from your own institutions and answering a few survey questions. A draft agenda for the workshop is available on the CollectionSpace project wiki.

Travel details

For out-of-town guests, the Museum of the Moving Image will provide lodging for two nights (January 12th and 13th) and reimbursement for transportation costs (up to $500).

Next steps

If you are interested in attending, or have further questions about the meeting and related project, please contact Megan Forbes at mforbes@movingimage.us or 718-777-6834.