The Museum Data Service is a free online platform that enables museums across the UK, regardless of their size, to share and connect their object records.
Remember the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage and Common European data space for cultural heritage? [And of course Preservation of Digital Heritage in the data space]
The Museum Data Service connects all UK museums, sharing their object records and bringing together raw materials, enabling anyone to manipulate this tremendous amount of information.
Art UK, Collections Trust, and the University of Leicester foster this initiative with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Museums, scholars, and other organisations are unable to collaborate and struggle to bring innovation to the understanding of collections. Though the collection catalogues have been digitised extensively in recent decades, there are still an estimated 80 million object records scattered over hundreds of offline UK museum databases that cannot be searched or used.
In addition to gathering and sharing data from UK collections for various uses, the Museums Data Service is providing a national overview of these collections by summarising them and gathering detailed object records and transforming them into FAIR data – findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable- As raw materials for others to work with when funding permits.
Our Take
The Museum Data Service is an exceptional initiative that connects museums across the United Kingdom and allows them to share and connect their object records. This platform encourages collaboration and innovative thinking in the interpretation of collections. There are millions of object records scattered across hundreds of offline UK museum databases, but the Museum Data Service provides hope by summarising and transforming them into FAIR data. Thanks to the Museum Data Service, museums, scholars, and other organizations can now collaborate and bring fresh perspectives to the understanding of collections, benefiting everyone in the process.
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Want to know more about Data Management and Digitisation? Check some of our related articles:
Digital cataloguing outlines 10 helpful principles
Ethically Digital Contested Cultural Heritage in Digital Context
Digital Libraries and Research Data Management by APAC
and from above, the EU efforts to gather and consolidate data:
European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage
