what will the museum of the future be like?

Cross-institutional websites?

I was wondering if someone here knew about websites / portals that combine collections from several museums? This here is called Culture Sampo: http://www.kulttuurisampo.fi/index.shtml and it is drawing information from 20 different museums and archives (unfortunately much of the material is only in Finnish language). Are you aware of any parallel developments?

I'm writing an article about sharing information and collections between museums and would be grateful of any ideas, thanks!

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Olaug Irene Røsvik Andreassen on February 9, 2010 at 6:48am

Hi Kaija,
I think there are many similar developments, but mostly in the national languages.
See f.ex primusweb.no for Norway, surdoc.cl for Chile and of course the Europeana.eu for all of Europe.
Good luck with your article,
oi

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kaija Kaitavuori on February 11, 2010 at 9:45pm

Thanks for these! Particularly interesting to try the search function when you are not too sure about the meaning of the words in another language... =) As for Europeana, language will be (just) one of the challenges too, we'll wait an see!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Amelia Bowan on February 16, 2010 at 12:16pm

Check out CAN

http://www.collectionsaustralia.net/collections

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kaija Kaitavuori on February 20, 2010 at 11:59pm

Thanks, Amelia.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by j trant on February 19, 2010 at 2:20am

You could try the papers from Museums and the Web and ICHIM, searchable online. A keyword search for 'portal' at http://conference.archimuse.com/biblio/search/portal finds 24 papers.

Good luck with your project.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kaija Kaitavuori on February 21, 2010 at 12:15am

Thanks, will try!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Paul Reynolds on February 22, 2010 at 4:48am

One great example is NZ Museums .
Its is designed to share collections across the NZ Museum sector - and is well used by smaller Museums who don't have the resources to run their own online collection web site.
http://www.nzmuseums.co.nz/

Declaration of interest. My company did the IA and interface design

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Lucie Paterson on February 22, 2010 at 8:13am

Hi Kaija, I manage the NZMuseums website that Paul mentioned. Let me know if you would like any further information about it. Here is some to get you started http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/NationalServices/HowWeHelp/pages/nzmuseum...

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Basil Dewhurst on February 22, 2010 at 12:59pm

Hi Kaija,

Over time the National Library of Australia has operated eight collaborative resource discovery services which include collections from collecting institutions across Australia (including, of course, museums). These services include Libraries Australia (http://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au) and Picture Australia (http://www.pictureaustralia.org).

In December last year we launched our integrated discovery service called Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au) and are in the process of migrating the existing discovery services to it. Trove currently makes available just over 51 million items from libraries, museums, archives, universities and other collections.

Other (cross-sectoral) examples:
- Canadian Heritage Information Network (http://www.chin.gc.ca/)
- SCRAN (http://www.scran.ac.uk/)

Basil

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Paul Rowe on February 23, 2010 at 11:05am

The UK equivalent will be CultureGrid - currently in development.

http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/culturegrid

At present they have around 750,000 records submitted from member museums in preparation for the initial launch this year.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jim Croft on February 23, 2010 at 4:52pm

Outside the library community, the first of these was probably the Australia's Virtual Herbarium (AVH) http://www.chah.gov.au/avh/ established in 1996(?). Using standards that had to be invented at the time, it enabled a real-time dynamic query of c. 6 million botanical specimens from the eight major Australian herbaria and displayed the results on an interactive map (before Google maps and online GIS were available) and as a downloadable data file. The original application is now dated is being redeveloped with additional functionality at http://www.sapac.edu.au/avh/. For performance reasons, the new application works on a regularly prepopulated cache rather than harvesting the data from each herbarium in real time.
With the later museum fauna collections equivalent, the Online Catalogue of Australian Museums (OZCAM) http://www.ozcam.gov.au/, the AVH will be contributing data to the new Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) http://www.ala.org.au/ to provide online access to descriptive information, images, distribution maps, literature, downloadable data and other scientific information about the biodiversity of Australia. The language of all these project is English.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Johanna Berg on February 23, 2010 at 9:36pm

Hi Kaija
I am now working for the Swedish National Heritage Board, and would like to report our Kringla application, www.kringla.nu, aggregating information on about 2,5 mil objects from 16 institutions (among the the swedish Primus users, also presented on www.digitaltmuseum.se). Would also be very interested in taking part of your article once you are ready. All the best from snowy Visby!