Nach der Kameradatenbank (www.kameradatenbank.de) wird die Deutsche Kinemathek im November auch ihr zweites Projekt, das mit OpenCollection realisiert wurde, veröffentlichen. Es handelt sich hierbei um eine Anwendung zur Dokumentation von verlorenen Filmen (Lost films), insbesondere aber auch zur Dokumentation dessen, was Archive und Bibliotheken noch an Informationen und Dokumenten zu diesen verlorenen Filmen in ihren Beständen besitzen. Das Projekt ist langfristig angelegt und soll auch anderen Institutionen die Möglichkeit geben, dort „Lost films“ zu dokumentieren.

Außerdem begannen auch die Arbeiten an dem Projekt „Wir waren so frei … Momentaufnahmen 1989/1990“ (www.wir-waren-so-frei.de). Im Mittelpunkt stehen hier private Filme, Videos und Fotografien, welche den Mauerfall 1989 dokumentieren, aber auch Bilder, die im Umfeld dieses historischen Datums den Alltag des Einzelnen in Ost und West sichtbar machen. Für die Publikation dieser Bilder im Internet, aber auch für die Ausstellung wird ebenfalls OpenCollection eingesetzt.

Schließlich – und dies dürfte für den Bereich Film besonders interessant sein - arbeiten wir auch daran, OpenCollection als Sammlungsmangementsystem für den Bereich der Film- und AV-Archive aufzubauen. Ende des Jahres werden wir hierzu unsere ersten Ergebnisse vorstellen.

The paper Seth Kaufman, Yves Bontemps and I have written, entitled “Answering the call for more accountability: Applying data profiling to museum metadata”, is accepted for the Dublin Core conference, that will be held in Berlin in September. The paper sketches the background for the metadata quality and reporting tool that is currently under development. We’ll present OpenCollection and this exiting new feature during our talk and hopefully we will also have the opportunity to give a practical sessions and workshop on OpenCollection in general, perhaps in collaboration with the people from the Deutsche Kinemathek.

Here is the abstract of the paper: Although the issue of metadata quality is recognized as an important topic within the metadata research community, the cultural heritage sector has been slow to develop methodologies, guidelines and tools for addressing this topic in practice. This paper concentrates on the metadata quality specifically within the museum sector, and describes the potential of data-profiling techniques for metadata quality evaluation. A case study illustrates the application of a general- purpose data-profiling tool on a large collection of metadata records of an ethnographic collection. After the analysis of the results of the case-study, the paper reviews further steps in our research, and presents the implementation of a metadata quality tool within an open-source collection management software.  

Seth Kaufman’s passage at Faro in Belgium did not only arouse the interest of many museum and cultural heritage professionals but also of the local ICT press. In its May 23rd issue DataNews reported on OpenCollection being tested at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Belgium’s ex-colonial museum which is in a process of thorough renovation. Less hampered by the old imperial architecture which is dominating the displays in the museum, the RMCA is developing its collections database which should become online accessible early next year. No longer happy with the proprietary software which has been used so far, RMCA staff are looking at OpenCollection as a possible alternative. In his presentation, OC’s main developer Seth Kaufman presented the many useful features to manage and present collections data, which the RMCA is particularly interested in. These include the easy-to-use thesaurus tool, the way OC works with images, and the flexibility to customize user interfaces. The RMCA is looking forward to open its collections to a much wider international - including African! - public, and OpenCollection may well be the wizard who will make this happen.

Voici mon premier billet pour le blog d’OpenCollection, Comme l’a dit mon collègue néerlandophone, Seth, je suis en train de travailler sur la traduction du site en français. Cette traduction n’avance pas aussi vite que je le souhaiterais, mais ce n’est plus qu’une question de jours. Je l’espère en tout cas ! Sinon, concernant OpenCollection, c’est un logiciel que je découvre à peine, je profiterai donc de ce blog pour y consigner mes découvertes et mes réflexions. 

Although the issue of metadata quality has attracted quite some attention within the metadata research community, the cultural heritage sector is still waiting for the development of methodologies, guidelines and tools to tackle this topic in practice. In collaboration with Seth Kaufman (OpenCollection developer) and Yves Bontemps (lecturer at the Information Sciences department of the ULB), I’m currently writing a paper on why and how a procedure to analyze metadata quality could be implemented within a collection registration software, and more specifically into OpenCollection. 
Different analyzes on a set of 65,000 records from the Royal Museum of Central Africa with a simple and straight-forward data-profiler tool, written by Yves Bontemps, clearly prove that simple and inexpensive data profiling techniques can bring a great deal of problems or particularities within large sets of metadata to the surface quite easily. But applying external tools on a periodic basis remains too much an ad-hoc solution that requires too much attention and is thus too costly.    
We are promoting a pro-active way of dealing with metadata quality, by directly incorporating a methodology and tool in an open-source collection management system. This innovative approach will introduce more accountability into the whole metadata creation process, which is at the moment all too often considered as a form of black art.    

Momenteel wordt er gewerkt aan de Nederlandse vertaling van de OpenCollection website. De Nederlandstalige versie zal normaal gezien binnen een tweetal weken online geplaatst worden. Een Franstalige collega begint binnenkort aan de Franse vertaling, zodat de website een sterker Europees karakter zal krijgen.Achter de schermen wordt er ook druk gewerkt om de volledige back-end meertalig aan te kunnen bieden. Voor meertalige Europese landen, zoals België, zal dit een enorm voordeel bieden. Heel wat musea en culturele instellingen in Brussel bijvoorbeeld werken zowel in het Nederlands, Frans en/of het Engels. De meertalige invoer van metadata en het beheer van meertalige thesauri zorgt uiteraard wel voor de nodige logistieke/organisatorische problemen.