The Museum Data Service
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Leicester
Department Name: Museum Studies
Abstract
For as long as museums have worked together as a professional community, they have envisaged a day in which they could have a complete inventory of all the objects in their shared collections. A searchable national list of museum collections. Despite several false dawns, this dream has eluded the sector - thwarted by funding limitations, the complexities of leadership and ownership, and (of course) the technical challenge of designing an open, stable, usable, secure system. The new Museum Data Service finally addresses this need, delivering this national service at scale.
A partnership between University of Leicester's Institute for Digital Culture, Collections Trust, and Art UK, the Museum Data Service is a free new service that aims to connect and share all the digital object records across all UK museums, large and small.
The new Museum Data Service (MDS), uniquely, provides the raw material for any researcher wanting to work at scale with collections data from across UK museums. The MDS aims to bring together online, in one place, the object records of at least half the country's c.1,700 accredited museums within five years, and almost all of them within a decade. Between them, the three MDS partners have the connections and community trust needed to achieve this goal and truly unite UK museums large and small online.
Following FAIR principles, the MDS will ensure for researchers that this data becomes: 'Findable' (ingesting tens of millions of object records across the UK museum sector, and transforming these into web-ready datasets); 'Accessible' (for the first time providing the museum sector with a trusted 'back-up of last resort'); 'Interoperable' (for the first time enabling cross-searching across the UK's digital cultural record); and 'Re-usable' (for the first time a unique persistent identifier being assigned to every object - essential for reference and long-term research).
The Museum Data Service provides a core infrastructure for the benefit of all UK museums, and for researchers of those institutions' collections. MDS offers: a sustainable, low-cost mechanism to aggregate, manage, and index collection metadata from UK collections by harvesting this raw data and storing it in a cloud-based Data Repository; a simple, user-friendly web interface to browse and search across all collection datasets; managed storage for digital outputs created by museums and sector bodies such as the Subject Specialist Networks.
A partnership between University of Leicester's Institute for Digital Culture, Collections Trust, and Art UK, the Museum Data Service is a free new service that aims to connect and share all the digital object records across all UK museums, large and small.
The new Museum Data Service (MDS), uniquely, provides the raw material for any researcher wanting to work at scale with collections data from across UK museums. The MDS aims to bring together online, in one place, the object records of at least half the country's c.1,700 accredited museums within five years, and almost all of them within a decade. Between them, the three MDS partners have the connections and community trust needed to achieve this goal and truly unite UK museums large and small online.
Following FAIR principles, the MDS will ensure for researchers that this data becomes: 'Findable' (ingesting tens of millions of object records across the UK museum sector, and transforming these into web-ready datasets); 'Accessible' (for the first time providing the museum sector with a trusted 'back-up of last resort'); 'Interoperable' (for the first time enabling cross-searching across the UK's digital cultural record); and 'Re-usable' (for the first time a unique persistent identifier being assigned to every object - essential for reference and long-term research).
The Museum Data Service provides a core infrastructure for the benefit of all UK museums, and for researchers of those institutions' collections. MDS offers: a sustainable, low-cost mechanism to aggregate, manage, and index collection metadata from UK collections by harvesting this raw data and storing it in a cloud-based Data Repository; a simple, user-friendly web interface to browse and search across all collection datasets; managed storage for digital outputs created by museums and sector bodies such as the Subject Specialist Networks.