"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)."
A very fair point (although I suspect the focus of that comment is on
online collections rather than museum websites more widely), but
surely just another argument for those that do have resources to
direct them in a way that builds good open source tools for all to
use?
---
James Morley
www.jamesmorley.net / @jamesinealing
www.whatsthatpicture.com / @PhotosOfThePast
www.apennypermile.com / @APennyPerMile
On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Richard Light
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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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