The Museum Metadata Exchange (MME) project is a joint project of the Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) and Museums Australia which has been set up with support from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative. The project is being hosted by the Powerhouse Museum. The MME has been designed to harvest collection level descriptions from a number of major museums and the National Film and Sound Archive and to supply that data in a standardised format to the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The selection of collections and search terms will be assisted by academic researcher communities. This ensure that, for the first time, many museum collections of particular interest to Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) researchers will be readily discoverable through the ARDC.

How will this be achieved?

• The MME project will achieve its aims in a number of practical ways. In particular, it will:
   assist Australia’s major museums to prepare collection level descriptions in a standardised format
• create a virtual exchange capable of feeding collection level descriptions into the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)
• establish routine capture and publication of museum collection descriptions into the ARDC
•  work closely with individual academic researchers, academies and universities to identify research priorities and common search terms; and
•  provide a common collaborative sector-wide thesaurus as a a two-way service to assist museum data providers and to facilitate searching by researchers .

The project will challenge previous obstacles to collaboration of this type by:

•  standardising terminology and infrastructure within the museum sector to enhance interoperability; and by
•  establishing, over time, an automated ongoing harvesting of data from cultural and historical collections which can be expanded as further resources are secured.

Project Outcomes

It is envisaged that the project will have a number of beneficial outcomes for museums and academics:

•  The MME will raise the profile of museum research repositories and enhance their value in research, education and policy input.
•  The MME will assist collection managers to gain further expertise in creating, managing and sharing data in a form which can be directly accessed by Australia’s collections.
•  The MME will allow researchers to discover collections (previously below the radar of online academic and generic search engines) – to gain a sense of the full range of resources available in museum collections.
• The data held by the ARDC will lead researchers back to the source museum and potentially foster new research collaborations between museum and scholarly researchers.
•  The ARDC can also potentially feed data back to institutions about researchers’ use of the collections; highlighting the value of this data and allowing museums to better align with researchers.

Museum Collaboration

The CAMD – MA partnership in the MME project aims to build museum collaborative ‘muscle’ so that a greater sharing of collection data and expertise can be instituted across the nationally distributed collections and peak museum bodies will present a strong coalition to Government. While the initial project will represent a modest start on releasing the enormous and relatively untapped resources held in Australia’s collections, it will build infrastructure, tools and services which hold the potential for a sustainable and expanding program. The model created will lead to the development of a national program to make Australia’s cultural collections systematically discoverable and accessible.

Who is Involved?

Academic researchers will be approached to assist in providing subject descriptors which my be included in the thesaurus. The project will work closely with HASS researcher communities, primarily through its research partners.

•  The Australian Academy of the Humanities
•  The Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS)
• The Donald Horne Institute, University of Canberra
• Flinders University
• Monash University
• Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University through the Design Research Institute
• The University of Sydney

The principal contributors to the initial metadata repository project will be the major museums which are members of the Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA).

Project Phases

• Site Coordinators nominated | 20-27 Sept 2010
• Pilot data gathering | Sept – Oct 2010
• Initial site contact | Sep – Oct 2010
• Site visits | Sept – Nov 2010
• Technical development of repository and data services | Sept 2010 – Feb 2011
• Ongoing liaison and support to data contributors | Nov 2010 – Feb 2011
• Thesaurus development | Dec 2010 – July 2011
• Researcher evaluation | Feb – June 2011