The Museum Metadata Exchange (MME) project is an exciting digital initiative which will map new pathways for discovery and collaboration between museums and academic researchers in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) sector. The project is also an important opportunity to significantly advance eresearch practice amongst Australian HASS researchers and to ensure Australia’s HASS collections are readily discoverable by both Australian and international researchers. The collections held by Australia’s major museums provide a rich resource base for research of national and international significance in the humanities, arts and social sciences.
The Museum Metadata Exchange will allow researchers to discover collections hitherto below the radar of generic search engines and to gain a sense of the full range of resources available across a variety of different institutions and locations. The data available from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) will allow the researcher to follow their interests back to the museum and potentially foster new research collaborations between museum curators and academic researchers. Museum collections have a unique contribution to make in advancing the national research agenda in the HASS sector and fostering a culture of innovation and exchange. The collections of national significance held by museums across Australia already support an impressive range of research projects, but also have enormous untapped research potential. The Museum Metadata Exchange will enable Australia’s research academics to discover and make better use of the rich historical and cultural collections held in the nation’s major museums. The data sent to ARDC will allow researchers to find information in a wide range of institutions including national, state and major regional museums across Australia’s States and Territories.
The MME project will build on existing partnerships and experience between universities and museums. The types of collections covered include objects, data, archival and audio-visual collections. They range from every-day domestic items to technological and professional tools; from advertising signs to material collected from great Australian writers; from swimming costumes to haute couture; from union banners to maritime signals and to many more collections which capture the essence of national life and identity. This concentration of information will work to support new approaches to disciplinary research across the commonly understood knowledge ‘silos’ and open the way for a more complex and innovative approach to historical and cultural studies. Museums have a unique multidisciplinary capacity to highlight such issues of social concern and interest as health, education, sustainability and the exploitation of digital and cultural infrastructure, as well as broader questions of identity and tolerance and to assist in designing solutions. The project will allow Australian HASS researchers to discover, exchange, repurpose and merge collection information from museums and other researchers in new ways.
The Museum Metadata Exchange project will allow interrogation of the data in a way which enables researchers to hone in on and extract data from collections which might, at face value, have appeared unconnected with the research topic in question. For example: the Justice and Police Museum (Historic Houses Trust NSW) crime scene photographs provide details of the street fashions and interiors quite at odds with their depiction in the domestic magazines of the time). Collections, sometimes of seemingly mundane objects, can open up important historical, medical, ethical and sociological strands of enquiry. For example: researchers from medical, history and ethics departments at the University of Melbourne are working with curators from Museum Victoria to utilise its Psychiatric Services Collection (of over 1,600) objects to investigate day to day life in Victoria’s main mental hospitals as part of an ARC grant.
The development of appropriate licensing and access protocols will make the rules surrounding access to restricted material clearer. The Museum Metadata Exchange will allow researchers to do their work faster and in a more cost-effective manner while opening up the promise of new materials and new approaches to enrich their research methodologies.
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