Over the past three and a half years we, at Statens Museum for Kunst have been working on the implementation of CollectionSpace as our new Collections Management System. As early adopters we have gathered valuable experience participating in community driven open source development from the project out spring.
CollectionSpace is a web-based collections management system developed in open-source. Museum of the Moving Image, NY has been the project lead, while the technical development has been carried out by organisations in USA, Canada and United Kingdom. Early adopters include Fine Arts and Cultural Heritage Institutions, as well as University collections of a.o. Anthropology and Natural Sciences.
CollectionSpace is based on the SPECTRUM standard which is internationally accepted as a leading standard for Collections Management. CollectionSpace is designed to be independent of collection type; and to be configurable to each organization's needs. By multi tenancy it is possible to run several instances of CollectionSpace on one installation which is a great benefit for organizations with diverse collections.
In CollectionSpace there is a distinction between the Core application and different domains common to specific types of museums. As a leading art museum in the project we were asked to define the Fine Arts Domain in CollectionSpace. Other domains include: Performing Arts, Digital Media, Herbaria, Anthropology, and Visual Resources.
Besides presenting the CollectionSpace project and our implementation at SMK, I would like to discuss the considerations and reasoning leading to the decision to engage in an open source project as early on as we did; the risks involved in early involvement; as well as our experiences gathered in the course of the project. There is no doubt that it has been a substantially larger job than foreseen at project start, but we are still confident that our decision was the right one.
