Tag Archives: CIDOC DSWG

EODEM update 8 – launch

It’s been a while coming but … today, 1 September 2023, the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group (DSWG) announced the launch of its Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model (EODEM) as a live, finalised standard. Specification files can be accessed via the project’s pages on the CIDOC website, and developers can obtain support via email.

The aim of EODEM is to save people working in museums from wasting their time continually cutting and pasting (or even worse, retyping) information between different collections management systems (CMSs) when they’re borrowing objects for exhibitions.

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EODEM update 7 – public beta

I’m delighted to announce that the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model (EODEM) public beta was released today, 22 May 2022, with an announcement made during a workshop for software vendors at the 2021 [sic] CIDOC conference. Specification files can be accessed via the project’s pages on the CIDOC website.

We now hope that vendors and suppliers of museum collections management systems and related software will help us test the model by starting to implement EODEM exporters and importers in their software. As well as the resources available form the specification page, you can obtain support via email, and we have a (currently very quiet) Slack workspace. And if you wish to get more involved in the finalisation of the standard by joining our monthly meetings, please get in touch with me via the contacts page on this site.

EODEM update 6

Work on the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model, EODEM, continues, and we’ll be hosting two workshops during the CIDOC annual conference, in a few days’ time.

We invite developers and suppliers of museum collections management systems to a vendors’ workshop at 14:00-17:30 EEST on Sunday 22 May 2022. The workshop will be hybrid: both online, and in Tallinn, Estonia. It will introduce the EODEM standard, mark its formal release as a public beta, discuss the challenges likely to be met in its implementation – and hopefully identify some solutions to those challenges.

If you develop or supply collections management software for museums, we hope to see you at the workshop; if you know someone who develops or supplies such systems, please pass this information on to them. Attendance is free of charge, and is independent of attendance at the rest of the conference. To reserve a place, please contact me.

If you’re attending the conference, and would simply like to learn more about EODEM, then please come to the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group’s session at 16:00 EEST on Tuesday 24 May; again, this will be hybrid, both online and in Tallinn.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Collections Trust 2020: systems, interoperability and aggregators

Conferences have not been the same this year: I’ve particularly missed the opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues, and the random conversations and encounters in queues that compensate for the quality of the coffee one is waiting for. We have been left with the formal proceedings, and I wanted to say something about the papers presented at the (comparatively) recent Collections Trust conference, held online over two half-days on 1 and 2 October 2020.

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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!

The Encyclopaedia of Museum Practice

I’ve just (well, the month before last – but in terms of my writing on this site, that counts as ‘just’) got back from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where I was attending the 2017 annual conference of CIDOC, the international organisation for those working in museum documentation.1 As well as a fascinating range of papers from many countries, visits to Georgian museums (and opportunities to sample Georgian wines), I facilitated a couple of sessions dedicated to the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group (DSWG)’s Encyclopaedia of Museum Practice – ably helped by my co-facilitators, Maija Ekosaari and Jan Behrendt, and filling in for the DSWG’s co-chair, Jonathan Whitson Cloud.

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  1. I’ve also written about the 2014 CIDOC conference, in Dresden, and the 2016 conference in Milan. []