Museum Metadata Exchange (MME)

The Museum Metadata Exchange (MME) provides a finding aid for researchers and others by describing what is held in our national collection and where to go for further information.

It is an aggregator service  that integrates multiple data sources from contributing museums and organisations for discovery by researchers using the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). It contains Collection Level Descriptions (CLDs) which are a different approach to documenting collections. Instead of focussing at the object or item level, it concentrates on collection level metadata. This has the benefit of providing an overview, a meaning and a scope that can be hard to ‘see’ at object level – especially if you were, say, looking for which museums had shoes made in the 1950s and worn in Australia. The other benefit of CLDs is that the objects grouped in this way don’t necessarily need to be online or digitised (yet) in order to be discovered. Overall it drives the sector to improve the consistency of collection level material.

The MME provides data in a standard RIF-CS [1] format for transmission to the ARDC. This same RIF-CS data can be downloaded as either XML or JSON formats by others interested in the data. The MME also allows institutions to contribute data via several methods, including automatic ingestion via an OAI API.

Currently the site is operating with contributions from Australian cultural institutions only, however the codebase will shortly be open-sourced allowing similar CLD Metadata aggregation services to be established in other territories, with the ability to inter-contribute via the OAI feed APIs.

By standardising terminology within the museum sector and establishing an automated ongoing harvesting of data from cultural and historical collections the MME has:

• Raised the profile of museum research repositories.
• Enhanced their value in research, education and policy input.
• Assisted collection managers to gain further expertise in creating, managing and sharing data in a form which can be directly accessed by Australia’s researchers.
• Museum Metadata Exchange website frontpage screenshot (with search results): Museum Metadata Exchange website frontpage screenshot (with search results)Allowed researchers to discover the full range collections previously unavailable to academics and generic search engines.

Long term the MME expects that:

The data held by the ARDC will lead researchers back to the source museum and potentially foster new research collaborations between museum and scholarly researchers.

The ARDC can also potentially feed data back to institutions about researchers’ use of the collections; highlighting the value of this data and allowing museums to better align with researchers.

Museums Metadata Exchange screenshot (institution view): Museums Metadata Exchange screenshot (institution view)

1. RIF-CS: http://ands.org.au/resource/rif-cs.html

Museums Metadata Exchange screenshot (RIF-CS XML output): Museums Metadata Exchange screenshot (RIF-CS XML output)