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

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

3. UC Berkeley’s Collection Management Systems

4. 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.

5. 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?

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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

10. CollectionSpace Overview

11. 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.
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

12. 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

13. 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

14. Technology Approach

15. 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

16. 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)

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. CollectionSpace at UCB

22. UC Berkeley Deployments
Integrated with CollectionSpace 1.x-2.0 planning
Principles for a campus-wide approach
Aggressive, agile, 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.

23. 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.

24. 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

25. 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

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

27. 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

28. 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

29. 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!

30. UC Berkeley and CollectionSpace
ormatics+Services

31. Screenshots
Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

38. Screenshots
University and Jepson Herbaria

43. <. xml version="1. 0" encoding="UTF-8"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ns2:collectionobjects_naturalhistory xmlns:ns2=" xmlns:xsi=" xsi:schemaLocation=" <fieldLocLongDecimal> </fieldLocLongDecimal> <fieldLocLatDecimal> </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 May </fieldCollectionDate> </ns2:collectionobjects_naturalhistory> --a108dfc0-5a62-49c9-bbcb-557aace48ddf label: collectionobjects_common Content-Type: application/xml <ns2:collectionobjects_common xmlns:ns2=" xmlns:xsi=" xsi:schemaLocation=" <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.