Dear all,
[and apologies to Helen Bleck for slightly re-purposing a similar title she
used for a post made to MCG in June 2010 when she was planning the
brief/spec for a heritage portal for East Lothian Council Museums Service!
BTW I've taken note of the extremely useful comments made by Linda Ellis
and others in reply to that original post.]
Here at the Ashmolean we're currently trying to pull together a brief for a
tender for a new international (wider than EU), but focused (single
curatorial area) heritage portal. Basically we wish to provide a way to
browse and cross-search a number of geographically disparate collections
through a single 'portal', though also with the option to search/browse
just a single institution's collection through the portal. Not all of the
partnering institutions will have an existing online collections website,
but for those that do, we would like to be able to link back front he
portal to the relevant object record on their own collections website.
The intended audience for this is primarily researchers, but it needs to be
accessible for a non-specialist, but interested (adult) audience too.
Like Helen in her original post, I'm looking for any advice or tips from
others who've attempted something similar (even if narrower in geographical
reach). In particular, if anyone has any portal briefs/specification docs
that they don't mind sharing with us (we don't need to see cost
information...), then that would be fantastic!
There are a number of issues here that make such a portal potentially
challenging, in addition to the "usual" issues (e.g. mapping data that has
been catalogued in quite different ways and with different thesauri to a
single schema, variable data quality etc.) faced by national/regional
portal projects.
First, because the partner institutions that may be involved (and we don't
know exactly which ones these will be yet, as the list may grow over time)
will be worldwide, as far as I'm aware this would prevent just directly
piggy-backing this focused portal onto, say, CultureGrid/Europeana, as a
number of the partners are likely to be from outside of Europe and, as I
understand it, would not be able to have their content in Europeana, for
example.. On the other hand, we *do* want to be able to feed any content
supplied to the portal from UK/European institutions (where licensing
permits) to CultureGrid/Europeana...
Secondly there is the issue of potentially either having to support
multiple languages (for the object data fields) or of translating these
(either manually or automatically - at least for searching), as its likely
that at least some of the potential partner institutions will not have
English language versions of the key fields currently available (e.g.
titles, descriptions, materials, techniques, associated places - though
thesaurus-type terms should in theory be a *little* bit easier to create
mappings for, though of course different institutions will be using
different thesauri...).
There are also, of course, a whole host of potential
collaboration/political issues involved, but that's another matter...
We pretty much know what we need to achieve in terms of functionality, but
*how* to implement this is a different matter. One of the issues with
trying to put together a brief for such work is the *range* of possible
technical approaches to achieving this (or any portal project, for that
matter). We've tentatively discussed the project with a number of UK-based
suppliers, most of which have outlined quite different possible technical
approaches (some *very* different...) and different schema (including
Spectrum XML, LIDO XML, CIDOC-CRM, ESE and other DC-based ones etc.) to map
to.
At present we're "technology agnostic" in the technical solution to this,
as long as it will work and meet our functional requirements and adheres to
common standards that can easily be mapped to others (e.g. those used by
CultureGrid/Europeana). Its therefore a little difficult to know how
*specific* to be about technical requirements and standards in the brief
for the tender, as we don't necessarily wish to exclude different
approaches at this stage - part of the initial work for the tender will be
in fleshing out and enhancing the specification - but we need to give the
potential suppliers enough to go on!
We have identified three main components, though the way this works in
practise may differ, depending on the technical approach taken:
1) A means of exposing and harvesting the object data from each
participating institution, after mapping the data that comes out of their
collections management system to some common schema (tbc)
2) Software that will store, index and make the harvested data available
for querying (e.g. via an API) or available for further harvesting
3) A user front-end (i.e. the website) that will enable the user to search,
browse, compare and utilise the data in a variety of ways.
Beyond this (and specifying the typical range of fields we're considering,
and providing more detail about the desired front-end functionality), what
further level of detail do we need to go into for a brief for such work?
Ideally we would like the user front-end to be independent of the the
back-end system, to avoid "lock-in" to a single delivery approach. It is
not entirely clear to us if we should be tendering for the development of
the front-end separate from that of the back-end, but on the whole I think
we would prefer to go to tender for an overall package to deliver both,
though not necessarily (or even preferentially) from a single supplier.
I would be very interested to hear (on or off list, or via Skype/phone)
from those on the list who have been involved with other portal projects,
even if they're regional, rather than national or international ones.
regards
Paul
--
Paul Groves
Project Manager
*Eastern Art Online: Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art*
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
University of Oxford
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