Hi all,
Great thread, and sorry to come to it rather late in the day! Pretty much everything I would have said has been said already, particularly in Jonathan Whitson Cloud's comments, but I offer one or two further observations.
It has been interesting watching the conflation of Collections Management System and Content Management System in this thread. From our perspective, a key issue in the years ahead will be the question of systems integration, and how integrated systems can better support the overall process of delivering museum services in future.
Currently, most museums we talk to operate standalone systems for different functions. Hence in a medium-to-large museum, you might find:
- One or more departmental Collections Management Systems
- A web Content Management System
- A Digital Rights Management System
- A Digital Asset Management System
- User/access control systems
- Local Area Network containing files/documents
- School Group Bookings Systems
- Office/productivity systems (including Contacts systems)
- Customer Relationship Management Systems
Alongside all of these systems, you will also have the human infrastructure of tacit knowledge and expertise as well as the very significant but largely invisible output of individual/personal learning, research and response associated with the Collections.
Under the current model, each of these systems is effectively a silo, with the result that investment made in generating knowledge in one system is often effectively invisible to the others. This militates against both flow and serendipity, and it makes it difficult for the museum to leverage the strength of the totality of intellectual potential that is running through it.
I am, therefore, less bothered about whether a CMS (or any of these other systems) is open source or not, and much more interested in whether they are *open* in the sense that they can be made to interoperate in a proportionate and sustainable way with the other systems in the institution - and hence support rather than retard the process of capitalising on our knowledge assets.
It seems to me that the two critical developments here are (a) modularity and (b) Software as a Service. I believe that we need to be specifying modular systems, or systems which are capable of expressing content within a consistent framework (along the lines of the BBC Digital Public Space), so that we don't give ourselves the overhead of hard-wiring particular forms of semantic interoperability. This modularity is much more scalable (and therefore affordable) if we allow vendors to supply the software as an evolving service rather than a boxed product. I understand why people are resistant to SaaS for their Collections data, but this inertia is holding back the development of more scalable approaches to museum systems.
Underpinning all of this is the idea that museums have experienced a real paradigm shift in that the core functional model of a museum has expanded to incorporate publishing and broadcast as well as locative experience. An effective publishing workflow is one which decouples raw material (knowledge and assets) from delivery, permitting an infinitely extensible set of use cases. Museum knowledge and information management is still very siloed and lossy and it will only be when a piece of information published in one system can be effortlessly repurposed into a number of other systems (without prior knowledge of the internal structure and workings of the destination systems) that our knowledge of collections can fulfil its potential to support the broadest range of forms of engagement.
This model of flow can, of course, also be extended beyond the institution. The underlying promise of Linked Data, it seems to me, is that it will enhance the flow of contextual references both into and out of the museum systems. It might be that the most open Content Management System for a museum would involve using the Web as a CMS in much the same way as the BBC (http://derivadow.com/2009/01/13/the-web-as-a-cms/). It is interesting to speculate what lies at the end of that concept - in which the question of which repository your data sits in is much less important than how you configure the applications you use to interact with it.
Anyone can build a Collections Management System - just take SPECTRUM and build it (not to belittle the achievement of those that have!). Making the software and making it open source is not the problem. The problem is in creating solutions which will support the ever-evolving needs of museums and which will scale across the vast differences in technical competence across the museum community and then creating a viable organisation in the process. I think most of our SPECTRUM Partners would agree that they are less in the software business and more in the consultancy and professional development business.
From our point of view, the next big game in town will be in the middleware that maximises the flow of knowledge and value across and beyond the organisation and the extent to which the value of the sunk investment in separate systems can be brought out through integration and/or interoperability.
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive
Collections Trust
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Tel: 0207 250 8340
OpenCulture 2012
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mia
Sent: 16 August 2011 12:28
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What would an open source museum CMS look like?
On 16 August 2011 10:49, Bonewell, Perry <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Which sounds exactly like the sort of thing that would interest me: a
> platform that solves all the core issues (whatever they may be) from the
> off but with the flexibility to be easily developed and extended.
Assuming that something like 80% of what museums need to do online -
give venue information and directions, list events, provide outreach
and educational resources, encourage financial support - is very
similar, and that how people think about publication and interactions
around their collections and interpretation is where the variation
comes in, I think that's a good model. Most visits to a museum
website are for the basic 'visit us' info, and if you can take care of
that easily, it frees up resources for tailoring the digital
experience for your institution.
Platforms like Drupal and WordPress that provide core functionality
and are extensible through plugins are pretty established in museums
these days. I haven't played much with Drupal but suspect it takes a
bit more effort to get it up and running than WordPress, so which
platform you choose might depend on your immediate needs and
resources.
While I'm here, I thought this recent blog post provides some good
case studies on museums re-thinking their 'main' web presence:
http://oonaghmurphy.com/2011/08/16/museums-dont-need-a-website-to-be-online/
Cheers, Mia
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