With support from a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OCLC Research has released data exchange software for museums.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

COBOAT software is now available under a fee-free license for the purpose of publishing a CDWA Lite repository of collections information. It is a metadata publishing tool developed by Cognitive Applications Inc. (Cogapp) that transfers information between databases (such as collections management systems) and different formats. As configured for this project, COBOAT allows museums to extract standards-based records in the Categories for the Descriptions of Works of Art (CDWA) Lite XML data format out of Gallery Systems TMS, a leading collection management system in the museum industry. Configuration files allow COBOAT to be adjusted for extraction from different vendor-based or homegrown database systems, or locally divergent implementations of the same collections management systems.

OAICat Museum 1.0, an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) data content provider supporting CDWA Lite XML, is also available. It allows museums to share the data extracted with COBOAT using OAI-PMH.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Museums, OAI-PMH, OCLC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.