Dear MCGers,

Those of you with long memories may remember that I emailed a few months ago to solicit views on the Culture Grid<http://www.culturegrid.org.uk/> and its future development.

The Culture Grid is the UK aggregator for museum, library and archive metadata. It currently hosts ~3m records from collections all over the UK and acts as one of the main points of aggregation into Europeana<http://www.europeana.eu/> for English-language content.

One of the aims of our consultation was to identify demand for the Culture Grid as a service and to develop options for funding it on an ongoing basis. On the basis of this, we have set out a 3-part plan in partnership with Knowledge Integration, the developers of the platform and associated tools. I am writing to update you on this plan.

Culture Grid is now closed to new accessions

As of the 30th April, the Culture Grid was closed to new accessions.

We will be archiving the service website (http://www.culturegrid.org.uk). The API and index will remain accessible so that applications and services which use sector data from the Culture Grid will continue to function for the foreseeable future (and the dataset will continue to be available for hacks and other development events).

Europeana contributions will be via a 'dark' aggregator which we will continue to host

UK organisations wishing to contribute data to Europeana will be able to do so using the aggregator which was developed alongside the Europeana Connection Kit (ECK) last year.

The aggregator accepts data in the format (a profile of LIDO) produced by the ECK, which has been or is in the process of being integrated into most SPECTRUM Partner software platforms. It allows you to select records, associate them with permissions and batch-submit them for ingest into Europeana via a 'dark' aggregator which we will continue to host.

For further information about the ECK, talk to your Collections Management System vendor or see our blog post<http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/home/eck> for details.

We need to talk about Aggregation

As part of our future planning, we would like to invite a community discussion about the value of and support for metadata aggregation. A great deal has been learnt in the first wave of aggregation-based projects, and we would like to know whether there is an appetite in the UK/MCG network for developing these platforms as a community.

Some of the biggest challenges in sustaining an aggregation platform are resourcing quality-assurance and end-user support, and we feel that it ought to be possible to develop a self-supporting community around aggregation and online collections search to help overcome these challenges. We would welcome comments on this concept or expressions of interest from those of you interested in being part of it.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the MCG community for your support over the 7 years of the current version of the Culture Grid and to all of the participating institutions for the time and effort that has gone into preparing your metadata for aggregation and discovery.

Yours sincerely,

Nick




Nick Poole
Chief Executive
Collections Trust
Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 6080
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