The Steering Committee held it’s regular meeting on 12 July 2011.
Seb Chan, Head Digital and Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum gave a demonstration of the MME Website. Features include:
- New menu to allow Regional Museums to be listed by State. A sample of Regional Museum collections have been added.
- Image grid relating to Museum Victoria collections eg A J Campbell Collection. This feature is possible if an Institution has provided an API for it’s on-line collection. The image grid will be implemented for the Powerhouse Museum shortly.
- OAI-PMH implemented and tested with National Museum of Australia. OAI is a metadata standard for the web which allows data to reused. The NMA has established an OAI repository for it’s collection level descriptions which eliminates the need for manual data entry or import/export from spreadsheets.
Data Submitted by Museums
The committee was delighted that the quota of 700 CLDs had been met and exceeded with 949 collections in the MME at 30 June 2011.
Data Upload to Research Data Australia
MME data has been delivered to the RDA Sandbox and is now undergoing quality assurance by ANDs. It is anticipated that some adjustments will be required as a result.
Evaluation Workshops
The committee also reported on the first evaluation workshops held in Melbourne with academics from Monash University and RMIT. In general, the workshops were very positive about the concept behind the MME ie the inclusion of collection level descriptions online.
- Some of those participating already utilise online museum data and/or visit museums to view collections.
- Those who have not used museum collections to date were impressed with the potential research data which could be brought into the academic domain.
- Most saw the concept of accessing information about museum collections online as ‘fabulous’ and ‘potentially powerful’.
- They also saw its inclusion on Research Data Australia (RDA) as ‘a useful tool at the beginning of a project, to help establish what’s available in a particular field or class of material … and also at its end in allowing researchers to tell others about their work’.
- Comments were received that the collections were not always easy to scan by eye. Changes. Some changes were made to layout of the MME Website based on this feedback The list view now shows the complete brief description and coverage details.Comments were also received about the search capability of the site. It was noted that the MME was intended primarily as an aggregating site for Research Data Australia. More sophisticated search capability may be investigated in the future.
Further evaluation sessions will be undertaken once MME data is available in the RDA.
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