Tag Archives: CIDOC

EODEM update 5

Development of the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model (EODEM) reached an important milestone yesterday with the formal release of version 1.1 of the LIDO data-sharing standard. This is significant because EODEM is defined as a profile of LIDO – that is, an EODEM record comprises a fixed sub-set of LIDO data elements and values. And this in turn means that, if a collections management system vendor implements a LIDO 1.1 importer or exporter, they will have done the bulk of the work required to produce an EODEM importer or exporter.

Continue reading EODEM update 5

EODEM update 3

It’s a couple of months now since my last update on progress with EODEM (the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model) – so what have we been doing? The short answer is: issued a further draft of the standard; and drawn up a stylesheet which demonstrates how XSLT can be used to transform a heavily-nested EODEM LIDO XML document into a flatter structure (actually CSV, as flat as they come), closer to many that used by many collections management systems.

Continue reading EODEM update 3

EODEM update 2

Since I last wrote about EODEM (the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model), three months ago, we have been busy. The net result is a new draft of the standard (now available via CIDOC’s new document repository, by the way.) Whilst this is not yet final, it marks a significant evolution of the draft, and we don’t expect to make too many more changes.

Continue reading EODEM update 2

Send me your loan forms!

We’re coming up to the autumn conference season, and once again I’ll be going to the annual conference of CIDOC, the international committee for documentation that forms part of ICOM, the International Council of Museums – this year it’s in Heraklion, in Crete. Before the conference proper, I’ll be running a workshop on Sunday 30 September, along with colleagues from CIDOC’s Documentation Standards Working Group, for developers of digital collections management systems, focussed on the development of ‘EODEM’, an Exhibition Object Digital Exchange Mechanism.

We plan to kick off the development of a mechanism that lets users of different collections management systems share as easily as possible the information about their objects, and those objects’ requirements, that is needed when objects are lent from one institution to another. The lender should be able to just press a button to share the data, and the borrower just press another to import it into their system. This would eliminate a huge amount of the retyping that goes on when different museums exchange information about objects that they are lending and borrowing.

First, though, we need to identify the information that museums need to share. We’ll base the core information that identifies and describes the objects themselves on an existing standard, Object ID; but we need to know what information museums needs to share about borrowed objects’ requirements.

And here’s where I hope you can help us: the easiest way to do this will be for us to look at the information different museums request when they borrow objects. This is often requested using a ‘loan object information request form’, which the lending museum is asked to fill in for each object, giving its environmental needs, minimum security levels, etc. We’d like you to send us a copy of your museum’s ‘loan object information request form’ (blank, of course: we really don’t need sensitive individual object information, just the empty form so we can understand what you need to know). Drop me a line in the comments box at the foot of this page, and I’ll email you an address you can send the form to.

Once we have the forms, my colleagues and I will collate them all, draw up a list of the different pieces of information museums are asking for, and pass it to the system developers to incorporate into EODEM.

If all goes according to plan, future generations of registrars, exhibition organisers, and documentation staff will be forever in your debt!

Too much information: a CIDOC blog post

I’ve been keeping quiet about what I’ve been doing since starting work as Collection Information Manager at the National Gallery in February last year: much has been routine, and I was still planning the more ambitious part of my work, the Gallery’s Collection Information Project. But the project is now underway, with a project manager and data wrangler both now at work.

However, rather than post something here, I’ve taken the opportunity of an invitation to write a piece for the blog that has just been set up by CIDOC, the international organisation for museum documentation, to describe the problems that we face at the Gallery, and how the Collection Information Project plans to solve them. You can read it here.

A snapshot of #MuseumDocumentation

In preparation for a short talk which I’ll be delivering with Angela Kipp of the Registrar Trek blog at one of the CIDOC strands at the ICOM 2016 conference in Milan, I’ve been looking at how the #MuseumDocumentation Twitter hashtag has been doing, using a snapshot of the last nine days provided by TweetReach. I’ve Storified the top tweets and contributors, and you can see the results here.

Recognise yourself amongst the top tweets or contributors?

What I did this summer, or: CIDOC 2014

Being responsible for the Horniman Museum’s documentation, I normally find myself sitting in front of a computer screen, or in meetings. Every once in a while, though, I’m allowed out to meet my colleagues from other institutions, find out what they’re doing, and compare experiences. Previously, this has usually been at the annual OpenCulture conference run by Collections Trust; but this year I spent four days in Dresden at the 2014 annual conference of the Comité International pour la Documentation (CIDOC), the branch of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) interested in documentation.
Continue reading What I did this summer, or: CIDOC 2014