Resource and Metadata Management in Museums, Archives, and Research Collections: Tools and Practices

Resource and metadata management in Museums, Archives and Research collections, with an emphasis on tools and practices for information and resource modeling, specification, and metadata migration. Students will build upon a range of I School topics, and learn to apply aspects of business process analysis and user-centered design, web architecture, and XML, HTML and related web tools, in the context of a practical, real-world deployment of a new collections management system for campus museums.

Topics covered will include Enterprise IT architectures (e.g., multi-tenant SaaS models), Enterprise Content Management, issues with dissemination, access and integration, use of standards, business practicalities, and internationalization issues. Particular emphasis will be placed on tools and practices, including Business Process Analysis, the intersection of User Centered Design and data modeling, basic XML tools to work with information and web-services, HTML templates, resource bundles, and configuration models for customization, ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tools used in metadata migration, data warehousing, etc., and report authoring tools.

Assignments will be drawn from (and will contribute to) a current migration of a campus museum from a legacy system to CollectionSpace, a community-source project in which UC Berkeley is a leading development partner. Student teams will interact with museum staff and work with collections resources and metadata in a series of exercises that explore key steps in the migration process.