On 17/10/2013 09:53, Bonewell, Perry wrote:
>> Related to this, I'd be fascinated to hear of examples where organisations have not just used open source, but have contributed back to >the core technology in the form of modules/plugins/themes etc or even the underlying platform. I'd especially like to see examples >beyond the likes of 'install this plugin and you can put our collections on your blog' (although those are interesting too!)
> I'd be interested too James - I find it slightly frustrating that there isn't a strong (any?) museums strand to OS CMS development - apart from Omeka I guess. Time and again people complain that these systems don't fulfil some niche or other (image metadata quoted earlier in this discussion being an example) when they can be easily extended.
>
> Why aren't museums investing more in developing OS tools for platforms that everyone can use - and might help museums that don't have the budget to invest long term in something that is bespoke?
It's worth bearing in mind that this conversation is only relevant to
the tiny percentage of museums who actually have IT staff, and/or who
can afford "technology partners". Most museums will instead have a
"system supplier" (or a horrendous home-grown Access hack, but that's
another discussion). As Christiano mentioned a few posts back,
responsible suppliers will ensure that all their customers can benefit
from developments carried out for one customer which are more widely
relevant.
However, the issue of whether the underlying code is OS or not will be
completely irrelevant to most users, since they won't have the resources
to work at the code level anyway. They will be more than happy (I would
guess) with a reasonable level of control-panel customization.
I would assert that, for our community, shareable data is a more
important issue than shareable code. I'm currently working on a
Wordpress plugin for one widely-used museum software package, and would
have no objections in principle to sharing this more widely. However,
much of the plugin code relates specifically to data access mechanisms,
indexing support, etc., which are specific to the particular museum
database which underpins it. I am adding support for a second data
interface, which expects Linked Data, but again this will be of little
wider value unless there is community-wide agreement on (and
implementation of) a common Linked Data framework. Hopefully
Collections Trust's COPE strategy [1] (which isn't really new, Nick, but
is none the worse for that :-) ) will help to address this issue.
Richard
[1] http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/sustaining-digital/1766-cope
--
*Richard Light*
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