1. CollectionSpace Open source collection management system for museums Chris Hoffman UC Berkeley (Research Information Technologies)

2. Outline CollectionSpace: History and Background
Motivations and goals
CollectionSpace at UC Berkeley
The CollectionSpace community
From project to product while remaining a community
The LYRASIS organizational home
Governance and community
Development
Funding and resources
Next steps and challenges

3. CollectionSpace OSS Platform
What is a museum collection management system?
Here’s a screenshot from one of our CollectionSpace systems at Berkeley, for BAMPFA’s Art Collection.
This is just a snapshot of about 10% of the cataloging screen, customized from the core CollectionSpace schema.
Very rich metadata management and transaction support.
In fact, there’s a new Mellon-funded effort to rewrite this user interface, and UCB developers are very involved in that effort.
The tabs below the object number and title show transactions or relationships that this object can be part of -- loans, movement tracking, and so on.
Images and other media are handled as related procedural records, via Media Handling.
Museums very concerned with authorities and vocabulary control; see Terms Used on the right, which allows users to pivot to the vocabulary management screens for authorities such as artists, organizations, places…
CSpace also features robust reporting, searching, and batch processing capabilities.

4. CollectionSpace
Open source, web-based technical platform for collections information management in use at over twenty-five organizations
Current focus on building long-term sustainability
Community-source governance enables resource sharing at the institution, domain, or regional level
Supports system extension and connection with applications that are essential for researchers and public access via APIs, custom web-apps, and more - all of which enable the mobilization of collections for aggregation and sharing
Domain-specific profiles allow for use of CollectionSpace with minimal configuration across disparate domains such as art, material culture, and the natural sciences
I’ll provide some history on top of this general description or profile of CollectionSpace.
CollectionSpace as a partnership and project started in 2008
Need/opportunity: Museums needed an alternative to expensive vendor systems and homegrown fragile systems.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recognized the importance of this problem and the opportunity as well.
Vision: With community involvement, professional design and software engineering, a system could be built that was high quality and professionally managed but which was also flexible enough to meet the demands of different kinds of museum collections, from Art to Zoology. In addition with the right organization it could be affordable and sustainable. Beautiful vision; but how do we execute? CSpace as community source software: one of the survivors…
This is mature software and a mature team: Version 1.0 released in 2011, and v4.4 released this week.
Mature partnership: Museums have played a key role from the beginning
From project to a living and breathing product: LYRAS.IS, whom we’ll hear from shortly, became the organizational home at the beginning of 2014
Now, our goals as a community are to grow the impact of CollectionSpace, reach out to more of our museum community, and leverage what CollectionSpace can do at scale.

5. UC Berkeley Context (2008) Campus goals
12+ campus museums and collections, using 6+ collections management systems, failing to meet new needs
Long history of collaboration between IT and museums.
Campus goals
Drive down costs of managing individual collections
Use systems that are stable, secure, protect data, and are professionally managed
Facilitate innovations in research, teaching, and public service
Leverage investment across institutions and research grants
At UC Berkeley, when the request from Mellon came to be a core partner in CollectionSpace, we jumped at the opportunity.
Our situation was dire, as you can see outlined here. We had a strong history of partnership with the museums but our campus-wide approach was not sustainable. And we saw that Berkeley was at the same time, significantly ahead of the curve compared to many collecting organizations.
UCB developers AND museum professionals actively involved in the early stages of design and development, and today.
UCB first partner to deploy CSpace for production use in August 2011 (v1.8 for UCJEPS NSF-funded seaweed digitization project)

6. Five museum partners @ UCB
Over the next four years we deployed CSpace for 5 collections – making significant customizations, transforming and importing data, and building reports and data integrations.
Counts of objects and images for our five instances as of April 2016 – responding to increasing need to digitize collections. DAM-lite (UCJEPS) or integration with DAMS (BAMPFA)
With these deployments, we have successfully demonstrated that this platform can be used for very different kinds of collections without sacrificing excellence and quality
Through all this, all of us at UCB knew that we were not like most other museums. Our campus invests more than most in museum software, and we had built some very specialized systems. To that end, the developers and museum staff have always given back to the project – contributing code back to the core, performing QA and providing requirements, and importantly reaching out to potential adopters.
We spent much of the last year moving our instances of CollectionSpace from virtual machines we managed to separate Linux and Postgres services maintained by our IST colleagues.
This allowed one of our programmers to retire in peace (Glen Jackson), and it allowed us to reduce overall costs while putting the systems and databases in the hands of those with expertise and capacity. We could concentrate on working with the museums. Win, win, win!
NB: Counts as of 4/1/2016
* Not including 418,582 catalog card images and “not-for-public” images
** Approx. number in rapid flux

7. Using the CollectionSpace API
Portals: Public, Internal (museum staff), and media-only
Web applications: Inventory, bulk update, media upload
We also began building web applications and portals that leveraged CollectionSpace’s API and database in order to meet the most important strategic needs of the museums…
We can’t overemphasize how important the portals and web applications we have built have become for our campus museums. We are in the process of contributing those back to the core system, and have helped some museums (e.g., OMCA) set up their own portals. The new UI we are writing should make it easier to have these kinds of capabilities be part of the core UI.

8. The Community
CollectionSpace is used by a diverse array of museums and municipalities, including art museums, historical societies, herbaria, and botanical gardens.
Bolinas Museum, California *
Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt *
Litchfield Historical Society, Connecticut
Harvard University Graduate School of Design *
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, California
Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, Florida
Museum of the Moving Image, New York *
Alex Nowik and Willi Wolf, California
Oakland Museum of California *
Pacific Bonsai Museum *
Rhode Island School of Design *
San Diego Chinese Historical Museum, California *
San Diego Museum of Man, California
Seattle University, Washington
Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark *
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California
The University and Jepson Herbaria, California
University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley
The Walker Art Center, Minnesota *
The Watermill Center, New York *

9. From project to product …
… while remaining committed to:
The CollectionSpace community and museums generally
Principles of open source software

10. CS Organizational Home
Trusted name - LYRASIS provides organizational home support for the application and program team
Commitment - member-based Board supporting Technical and Functional Working Groups
Brand building, promotion and awareness - via conferences, webinars, social media and networking
Fiscal stewardship - full time attention to detail
End-to-end thinking - implementation, migration, and service provider support throughout adoption and implementation lifecycle
Identify and facilitate the creation of strategic partnerships with consortia, universities, and arts organizations
Funding - Grant writing and grant making (Mellon, Kress, NEH, mini- grants)
The CollectionSpace organizational home and program team serves as the steward of the CollectionSpace software; CSpace benefits from the longevity and stability of LYRASIS
The board and working groups set the overall direction for the project, provide technical guidance, and recommend and create requirements for new features and functionality.
Via conferences, webinars, and social media, serves as the hub for information about CollectionSpace and its implementers
Work to support individual implementations, develop domain expertise, and respond to RFPs
Develops strategic partnerships (such as this one); for example, working with the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design to create a profile for CollectionSpace that can be used by design materials collections in universities across the country (DOI here)Lead and support grant-writing efforts to organizations such as Mellon, Kress, NEH, and IMLS, either as lead organization or in support of implementer-led projects. Also serve as a re-granter of Mellon funds, providing seed money for new implementers.

11. From project to product
Governance and community
Three Working Groups: Leadership, Functional and Technical
Community outreach – within LYRASIS and by partners
Development
At LYRASIS
At UC Berkeley and other community members
Funding and resources

12. Next steps and challenges
Growing our membership and the community of museums and collecting institutions using CollectionSpace
Deciding where to focus
Addressing technical challenges
Rewriting the user interface (to attract more developers and simplify the stack)
Simplifying installation, configuration and data migration
Hosting and service providers
Leveraging the power and potential of museum collections
Addressing the strategic goals of museums and our broader community
Content sharing and integration in support of research, teaching and learning, and public service
Museums in higher education: very important but often technically underserved and on their own
A critical piece of UC’s ecosystem of digital content for research, teaching, learning, and public service
We have other UC’s now asking to use CSpace, but serious technical and support hurdles at other campuses
CollectionSpace is a mature and powerful platform ready for many domains and able to play with lots of other tools
New ways for Libraries to work with Museums
GLAMs, Calisphere, and CDL’s future service role
Others beyond UC in California!
UC as a world leader in this area

13. Thank you for listening!
Chris Hoffman
Research Information Technologies, UC Berkeley
Background: We are working now, with the support of a two year $850K grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation on deploying CSpace to as many museums to as many higher education institutions as possible. Mellon has provided 4 major grants to develop, deploy, and sustain CollectionSpace. We are now really focusing on growing deployments and long term investment.