Material Order

 In 2011, GSD and RISD sought funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to establish a materials collection database and discovery system. Reviewers’ comments from that proposal prompted the organizations to reconsider that approach, and instead organize an international symposium, supported by a National Forum grant that clarified the fundamental issues and challenges, formulated solutions, and promoted the role of libraries in serving material collection curricular and research needs of faculty and students in art, architecture, and design disciplines. The symposium provided a platform on which to promote, test, and share emerging models for materials collections across the world. 

Materials Education and Research in Art and Design: A New Role for Libraries, held in June 2013 at RISD, assembled a roster of international keynote speakers, funded fifteen participant librarians and directors from stakeholder institutions, and ultimately gathered nearly one hundred attendees for a multi-day and multi-format event, including a workshop for forty librarians. Speakers, participants, and attendees all communicated the growing need for students in art and design programs to become better educated when selecting and using materials in projects with an eye toward their post-graduate professional life—and, specifically, the need for a centralized information resource. There was also wide acknowledgment of the absence of a resource for material classification and description in design-related fields, unlike those found in materials science and engineering. The existence of such consensus, even among widely varied institutions, provided the basis for an emerging community—loosely knit but united around a common need. 

In response to this clear and widespread need, remaining grant funds, paired with funding from GSD-RISD, were used with IMLS’s approval to begin development of a shared online database, work that was completed in 2015 with a functioning beta model of a database that operated at the administrative and cataloger levels. Final revisions of the database, along with plans for Phase II—developing the discovery system—resulted in untenable future developer costs and prompted the project team to consider a new direction. With its strong and proven experience in developing management platforms for object-based collections, GSD-RISD believe CollectionSpace is the right partner for further defining and developing this project to completion.

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design-Rhode Island School of Design (GSD-RISD) materials database project team was introduced to CollectionSpace at a June 2015 series of meetings in Cambridge surrounding the capacity of CollectionSpace to serve Harvard Library needs, including the Materials Collection at the GSD Frances Loeb Library (the RISD Material Resource Librarian was in attendance). Since that time, CollectionSpace staff and GSD-RISD project team members have conducted frequent and regular group teleconferencing meetings to examine CollectionSpace potential for the materials database and for development of a consortium of materials collections. Specifically, CollectionSpace staff have reviewed the GSD written Materials Classification Protocol and its GSD-RISD derivative Database Schema and gained a thorough understanding of the project as both shared and local implementations. With that understanding and the experience of other CollectionSpace client projects, staff believe that a sizable portion of existing CollectionSpace programming can be redeployed for the materials database, requiring few customizations.

Progress to date with CollectionSpace includes the drafting of a Project Overview, Assumptions, and Expectations including Goals, Project Objectives, and Scope of Work.