Museum Metadata Exchange

The demonstration will show the newly developed Museum Metadata Exchange (MME) by the Powerhouse Museum for the Council Of Australasian Museum Directors and Museums Australia.

The MME is one of a number of projects leading to the development of a national program to make Australia’s cultural collections systematically discoverable and accessible to both scholarly researchers and the general public.

The Museum Metadata Exchange contains Collection Level Descriptions of cultural and historical collections from 18 Australian museums conforming to the Registry Interchange Format - Collections and Services schema guidelines (RIF-CS schema) for delivery into the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The project was funded to establish new infrastructure and practices of benefit to both researchers and the museums, and even more importantly, provides a space to increase research collaborations between them.

The demonstration will be of the MME, its technical architecture, automated harvesting arrangements, and number of additional services - geospatial, temporal and name authorities -  and tools which extend and enhance the data set for researchers. The MME is also intending to pilot a social vocabulary classification service in order to encourage interoperability between collections and the various researcher and user communities. To this end the Powerhouse Musuem’s Object Name Thesaurus is being provided as a base set for forking.