[Dspace-general] DSpace for Museums

[James Rutherford]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 02:53:38PM +0000, Joachim R?th wrote:
> does anybody out there deploy DSpace as an IR in the museum field?
>
> If you have to report advantages and disadvantages of using DSpace in
> the context of the Arts, I would be quite interested in as many
> details as possible. Your answers will influence the decision-making
> process of a network of German museums contemplating the use of DSpace
> for their needs.

You may be interested in reading this paper on d-lib by our good friend
Dr Tansley: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july06/tansley/07tansley.html which
outlines the architecture of the China Digital Museum Project which
sounds startlingly similar.

> There are two questions of special importance:
> 
> 1) In which way do the DC elements adapt to the description of objets
> d'art?

The approach taken for the project in China was to use a core set of DC
terms and to also adopt custom metadata schemas for certain classes of
content within the museums (I think there were 5 additional schema in
total).

> 2) And to which format (e.g. CDWA Lite) are you mapping for metadata
> harvesting?

I think this was all captured in a big mess of METS :) but I'm not 100%
sure of the approach taken here. Reducing the metadata to a few core DC
terms for harvesting purposes might be fine if you primarily care about
making metadata available for discovery (rather than, eg, replication).

cheers,

Jim

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