Introducing CollectionSpace A collection management system for museums A-Z (Art to Zoology) Chris Hoffman and Marlita Kahn University of California, Berkeley

Agenda UC Berkeley’s collection management systems CollectionSpace How to learn more

UC Berkeley’s Collection Management Systems

UC Berkeley’s Collection Management Systems Specimen Management System for California Herbaria (SMASCH) (University & Jepson Herbaria) PAHMA Collections (BNHM Consortium, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology) SAGE (UC Botanical Garden) UCMP Specimen Database (BNHM Consortium, UC Museum of Paleontology) Essig Specimen Database (BNHM Consortium, Essig) MVZ/Arctos Specimen Database (BNHM Consortium, MVZ) Biocode Specimen Database (BNHM Consortium) HERC Specimen Database (BNHM Consortium, HERC) History of Art Visual Resource Collection (HAVRC) (Department of History of Art) Slide & Photograph Image Retrieval Online (SPIRO) (Architecture Visual Resources Library) CineFiles (Pacific Film Archives) Berkeley Language Center’s Archival Catalog & Circulation System (Berkeley Language Center) Plus … Bancroft Special Collections and many others Many collections, from Zoology to Art, many domains… Centrality of collections to mission. Collections include: Historical and cultural artifacts, specimens from many life science domains, VRCs from art history, etc., archival materials Across museums, archives, research, and faculty collections Here we show a list that is primarily but by no means exclusively Museums. Boundaries are fuzzy.

25 Year Technology Legacy Campus supports a broad range of collections, from Art to Zoology, but … Too many aging legacy systems Millions of objects, artifacts, specimens Managed in about 20 different collection management systems Running on about 15 hardware platforms Maintained by about 10 different technology groups, with various degrees of technical experience Inconsistent decision-making Insufficient and inadequate funding models in a time when university funding is challenged Campus-wide enterprise picture Does this sound familiar?

BNHM-IST Partnership Partnership formed between a consortium of natural history museums and central information technology provider to take on this problem Becoming a model for broader campus collections planning and decision-making BNHM is a leader in biodiversity collections-based research and in biodiversity informatics. We’ve worked with them for decades to develop and maintain collection management systems and related services (e.g., for geospatial mapping and species identification). UCB’s IST Data Services, an IT organization created to focus on Data and Content Management Technologies and Services for campus One of 4 major central IT departments Both Administration and Research Strong engagement with e-research & shared services – technically, programmatically Informatics Services, the team I manage has been working with museums and supporting collection management systems for many years. Starting with UC Berkeley, but we believe this is an approach that can work with other campuses in the UC system. As we’ll see the combined approach to services design, community-supported open source software, is aligned with UCB’s Operational Excellence initiative. The beginning of a campus-wide structure for planning and decision-making

Collection Management Systems – the center of a scholarly ecosystem Taxonomy and Thesauri Outreach and Data Sharing Digital Assets and Content Education Archives and Libraries Field Data Collection Field Station Sensor Network Exhibitions Molecular Lab Information Management Geospatial Services Collection Management Systems This ecosystem continues to grow, and unpredictably so (driven by science and discovery), exacerbating problems we all face – funding, decision-making, support. This is the problem we faced.

BNHM-IST Collection Management System Evaluation Criteria and weights 40% Functionality 30% Business case and sustainability 30% Technology and architecture Formal scorecard Natural history and other campus collections BNHM-IST Steering Committee decision to adopt CollectionSpace BNHM Directors sign agreement But each of these existing museums in the BNHM Consortium was using an existing collection management system and had developed its own technology direction. Context: Legacy systems that are placing a heavy burden on service providers and on museums, not meeting the current and emerging needs of museums. Our partnership with the BNHM has demonstrated that a shared collaborative approach is the only way to move forward.

Collaboration … is the key to sustainability! Within the BNHM-IST Partnership Across campus Across UC system Nationally and internationally Have this come in as a fly in saying “key to sustainability” and then each item also flies in

CollectionSpace Overview

CollectionSpace is an open source/open community web-based application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information – from artifacts and archival materials to exhibitions and storage. http://www.collectionspace.org http://wiki.collectionspace.org So what is CollectionSpace? A partnership and collaborative project using and building best practices for distributed software development across multiple institutions- Talk about shared infrastructure and tools here as key to efficient software development, deployment, and maintenance

CollectionSpace Design Features A platform for sharing collections information Designed to address the needs of all museum domains from cultural heritage to natural science collections Highly customizable and configurable Web-based Interoperable Local or hosted deployments Communities of practice What do we like about CollectionSpace? Functionality; business case and sustainability emphasis; technology and architecture Can support a range of hosting and deployment models, from dedicated servers, to cloud-based virtual machines, to robust data center environments Designed for small standalone museums and large multi-museum universities Designed for simple installs by small museums as well as enterprise-wide deployments and custom configurations From minimal technical support at a museum to enterprises with access to IT professionals. Multi-tenancy Flexible deployment models

CollectionSpace Sustainability Focus on sustainability from inception An emerging foundation-like partnership Communities, collaboration, and consortia Consortial fund-raising Working with vendors and service providers Exploring boundaries (libraries, archives, museums) Beyond higher education UC Berkeley and CollectionSpace project participating in a wide range of conversations about higher education and research cyberinfrastructure sustainability. E.g., talking to Archivists’ Toolkit (and Archon) projects about collaborative opportunities

Technology Approach

Web-Oriented Technology No exotic technologies: just the Web HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Open source: Java, MySQL, JBoss, jQuery Web services (REST) and plug-in architecture; enable data sharing and interoperability Accessible: Works great with keyboard and assistive technologies These are widely known and stable technologies enabling customization, extension and maintenance to be more available and cost effective

Enterprise-Class Services Platform as Strategy Addresses functional expectations for enterprise- class services secure, scalable, efficient Web-services approach enables re-use across multiple domain-specific activities such as cataloging, accession, loans, controlled- vocabularies, etc. Each domain has specific needs, but share much Art History may not need Stratigraphic-location mash-ups …and new applications not yet envisioned Not just an architectural fetish We’re building a new services-based platform to support a range of applications around management of museum and archival collections (SW dev)

Leveraging Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Today: Prevalence of content-centric applications Re-use is a necessity Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a natural platform upon which to build Provides rich, flexible functionality CMIS standards adoption (OASIS) -> emerging as abstraction layer ECM ≠ WCM (web-content management) Why ECM – common these across content-centric projects, the tools they provide, the disciplines the impose, the challenges they bring

SOA Re-use Requirements For real SOA re-use: Must align contracts (minimum requirement for SOA to make sense in enterprise) Should reuse code to save costs (realistic ideal) May share actual deployments (hard: must align schedules, ESBs, SLAs, cost models, etc.) None of this happens naturally, or for free Requires investment Requires governance How to do this in higher ed and across consortial projects? No top-down authority as in industry SOA applications as oxymoron

Schema Extension Model Herbaria UCJEPS Visual Resource Collections History of Art VRC Must support extension, customization Can add additional information beyond the core set for a given service Just edit the XML schema for a service to add these – the system manages the rest By dividing the extensions into two groups, we will facilitate sharing and re-use within sub-domains. Longer term, if a domain community standardizes their common extension schema, we can then consider adding domain-specific functionality that takes advantage of this. Schema model for a customized service deployment

Application Layer Bridges services and UI layers Supports configuration and extensions hide/rename field names to match museum use specify controlled-vocabularies and authorities Allows integration with other systems via plug-ins and APIs Business rules and workflows? Recast with services’ capabilities under Benefits of technical architecture

CollectionSpace at UCB

UC Berkeley Deployments Integrated with CollectionSpace 1.x-2.0 planning Principles for a campus-wide approach Aggressive, agile, 80-20 approach Careful resource planning Resource commitments Template-driven and document-driven Paired deployments Accelerated deployment timelines Especially relevant considering budget cuts. Based on need for more effective campus operations. Addressing the legacy problems identified earlier.

Deployment Team and Approach Lead by Informatics Services team in IST-Data Services Interaction with CollectionSpace developers Interaction with other CollectionSpace deployment teams Data analysis and migration with functional experts (open source ETL tools) Templates and documentation Testing and feedback to developers Informatics Services team has ongoing relationships with museums, and domain knowledge, managing numerous collection management systems right now. Talend and Kettle/Pentaho ETL tools Providing performance feedback with real data to the CollectionSpace development team.

Sample Mapping between Darwin Core (DwC), CollectionSpace, and University & Jepson Herbaria DwC Description catalogNumber object_number accession.accession_id An identifier (preferably unique) for the record within the data set or collection. institutionCode collectionCode responsible_department i.inst_name The name (or acronym) in use by the institution having custody of the object(s) or information referred to in the record. collection The name, acronym, coden, or initialism identifying the collection or data set from which the record was derived. decimalLatitude field_loc_lat_decimal accession.loc_lat_decimal The geographic latitude (in decimal degrees, using the spatial reference system given in geodeticDatum) of the geographic center of a Location. Positive values are north of the Equator, negative values are south of it. Legal values lie between -90 and 90, inclusive. decimalLongitude field_loc_long_decimal accession.loc_long_decimal The geographic longitude (in decimal degrees, using the spatial reference system given in geodeticDatum) of the geographic center of a Location. Positive values are east of the Greenwich Meridian, negative values are west of it. Legal values lie between -180 and 180, inclusive. year month day field_collection_date_earliest accession.early_jdate (calc) The four-digit year, month, or day in which the Event occurred, according to the Common Era Calendar. And so on… … DwC Univ. & Jepson Herbaria Customization and configuration is the key to success for our diverse set of museums, but we need to balance that against needs for efficiencies and standards to reduce burden of ongoing support while allowing flexibility for inevitable changes and growth. This slide demonstrates how during our schema mapping and data migration planning, we are modeling a Darwin Core mapping that can be shared across natural history collections (and extended as needed) to support data sharing and interoperability from the core. Darwin Core and IPT as a framework for data sharing from BNHM deployments of CollectionSpace

Future publishing models for BNHM museums using Darwin Core (DwC) The University and Jepson Herbaria DwC Standards-based publishing portals (DarwinCore, TAPIR, IPT) DwC + Paleo Extension Another example of our domain-based approach, this will facilitate data sharing and interoperability. CollectionSpace will have built-in common services for data extracts and interoperability. In our deployments, we are building extensions for natural history collections to accommodate data sharing standards (legacy, emerging, and future). We could say the same thing for our Visual Resource Collections: We will develop a VRA Core data publishing strategy. CSpace schema and process extensions have the advantage of being sharable back into the broader community by mapping to standards. This approach can work for multiple museums and is therefore more scalable than most other solutions. DwC + Cultural Extension

Demos Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology University and Jepson Herbaria

So why CollectionSpace? Has extensive and extensible functionality to serve all museum domains and sizes Campus-wide efficiencies Excellence for core missions True community-source and open-source solution Consortial community-based approach to funding and financial sustainability Campus-wide efficiencies: Best combination of functionality, business case for sustainability, and technology/architecture Core mission excellence: A framework and platform for research, education and outreach to support the missions of the museums and the university

CollectionSpace Status CollectionSpace Release 1.0 (summer 2010) Core procedures: object entry, acquisition, cataloging, loans in, loans out, and retrospective documentation. Vocabulary control, media handling, configuration, security, and documentation. Pilot deployments Domains from Anthropology to Life Science to Cultural Heritage Community-driven templates and experience (data migrations…) CollectionSpace 2.0 Goals: Stability, usability, and sustainability Expand baseline functionality Increase documentation Optimize software for service providers Implement CollectionSpace (community) sustainability plan How many other deployments are being considered? Many organizations coming to CollectionSpace to ask about testing. E.g., one state government testing CollectionSpace as a multi-domain. CS 2.0 partners include museums in …. CollectionSpace community design workshops attracted professionals from ## institutions. Emphasize that pilots are proceeding already, to maximize testing, feedback, and experience with tools for porting collections information Talk about the contributions that museums and service providers make to the total CSpace repository Note that there will be another wave of deployments in 2010 that will provide a good base set of schemas and templates for others to use, along with a community of practice to support one another, which will also support further adoption. Community-driven Expanded use of the collections: e.g., public-facing collections browser, interoperability and data-sharing Infrastructure for … 28

Getting Involved We would like to: Learn more about your institution’s needs Help you gain support for implementation of CollectionSpace within your organization Build a sustainable community of users and contributors We are looking for partners to help us make this a success!

UC Berkeley and CollectionSpace http://www.collectionspace.org http://wiki.collectionspace.org https://wikihub.berkeley.edu/display/istds/Inf ormatics+Services chris.hoffman@berkeley.edu marlita@berkeley.edu

Screenshots Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

Screenshots University and Jepson Herbaria

<. xml version="1. 0" encoding="UTF-8" <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ns2:collectionobjects_naturalhistory xmlns:ns2="http://collectionspace.org/services/collectionobject/domain/naturalhistory" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://collectionspace.org/services/collectionobject/domain/naturalhistory http://collectionspace.org/services/collectionobject/domain/collectionobjects_naturalhistory.xsd"> <fieldLocLongDecimal>-122.019440</fieldLocLongDecimal> <fieldLocLatDecimal>38.436390</fieldLocLatDecimal> <catalogDate>Mar 07, 1997</catalogDate> <fieldLocState>CA</fieldLocState> <phenology>Flowering/Fruiting</phenology> <fieldCollectionDateLatest>May 06, 1891</fieldCollectionDateLatest> <fieldCollectionDateEarliest>May 02, 1891</fieldCollectionDateEarliest> <fieldLocCounty>Solano</fieldLocCounty> <fieldLocCountry>USA</fieldLocCountry> <fieldCollector>W. L. Jepson</fieldCollector> <fieldCollectionDate>May 2 1891-May 6 1891</fieldCollectionDate> </ns2:collectionobjects_naturalhistory> --a108dfc0-5a62-49c9-bbcb-557aace48ddf label: collectionobjects_common Content-Type: application/xml <ns2:collectionobjects_common xmlns:ns2="http://collectionspace.org/services/collectionobject" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://collectionspace.org/services/collectionobject http://services.collectionspace.org/collectionobject/collectionobjects_common.xsd"> <otherNumberType>collector number</otherNumberType> <otherNumber>14079</otherNumber> <responsibleDepartments> <responsibleDepartment>university-of-california-herbarium</responsibleDepartment> </responsibleDepartments> <objectNumber>UC18876</objectNumber> <title>Sidalcea keckii Wiggins</title> <briefDescription>Mounted on Paper</briefDescription> <dateAssociation>catalog date</dateAssociation> <comments>North-Western Solano, California</comments> </ns2:collectionobjects_common> Do this in demo? Just by changing the URL for this object (a RESTful URL), we can get the data in XML format.