On 2 April 2013 09:55, Nick Poole <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I thought you might be interested in a new post that went up on
> Collections Link this morning looking at the 'Create Once, Publish
> Everywhere' (COPE) model for museum information and the work Dominic
> Oldman and his team are doing at the British Museum on the ResearchSpace
> project. All comments very welcome!
>
> http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/sustaining-digital/1766-cope
>

Nick, thanks for sharing this.  I have lots of questions, but to make sure
I'm reading the article as you intended, I wondered if you could expand on
the types of data or information you're thinking of?  And is COPE a
solution for museums looking to make as much internal use as possible of
their existing collections data (clearly a good thing), or is it also a
solution for publishing content to shared external platforms?

Thinking aloud, in my experience, re-using tombstone data (e.g. the basic
who, what, where, when) internally is unproblematic, and re-using
contextualising information such as extended descriptions and
interpretation is usually fine.  While re-publishing content written for
past exhibitions, catalogues etc to make the most of the knowledge created
around objects has always seemed like an effective use of existing
content, thematically-focused content can be less useful when read out of
the context in which it was created, so some 'repurposing by hand' is
required to create content that makes sense to the general reader.

When it comes to shared platforms, it's relatively straightforward to map
to a shared data structure (your 'title' is my 'name' field, etc) though
some detail is lost each time that's done, but finding a structure that
works for objects across the range of museum collections is tricky, as
every partnership project that's ended up with a lowest common denominator
schema shows.  The same goes for term lists/vocabularies - my Bronze Age
might cover a different date range to yours, or your materials list might
be much more detailed than mine.  I suppose I'm wondering how this solves
the tension between highly specific collections records tailored to and by
the history and objects in each museum vs the desire to link collections
across the sector as a whole that's complicated the move towards linked
open cultural data over the past decade or so?

Or are we COPEing internally and doing the work of transforming to shared
schemas for partnerships, cross-sector aggregations and open cultural data
as necessary?  This might at least save external developers having to deal
with CIDOC, which tends to baffle even experienced GLAM developers; so my
final question is how intimately is the idea of creating once and
publishing everywhere is tied to CIDOC?

I hope it's clear that these questions are meant constructively, and
apologies for any incoherence (I'm sneaking time from other writing to
post).

Trevor, both links worked for me, perhaps the URL was shortened or broken
by the Jiscmail software?

Cheers, Mia

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