Background

Museums have been digitising material (particularly collections data) for dissemintation on the web for a number of years now. To date, many of these digitisation projects have been successful in terms of exposing our collections (and other content) to a wider audience.

In recent years, however, approaches for connecting data (for example extensive use of APIs or RESTful services) have advanced the possibilities for increasing this exposure manyfold. At the same time, these approaches can also reduce future development costs and help future-proof access to our content.

This document suggests that museums can capitalise on these approaches by taking some simple and easily achievable steps;

• when writing specifications
• when thinking about content and how it is made available online
• when engaging with (museum) system suppliers 

The Audience for this document

One of the major problems that the contributors to this document have identified is that the issues around the "machine processable web" are often technical in nature; as such the communication of these issues is often left to those who are technically savvy and not - necessarily - good at doing the communicating to content and budget stakeholders.

As such, the intended audience for this document is:

• decision makers
  • c-level executives
  • senior stakeholders
• content authors
  • exhibition staff
  • curatorial and research staff
  • education staff
• funders
  • NMDC (via National Collections Online feasibility study)
  • DCMS
  • MCG
  • corporate donors

The Problem

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10 suggestions

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