museum-digital was founded in early 2009 in Bitterfeld as an initiative of museums who were to publish their collections online – together. Starting from the publication side, the project has grown to cover more and more aspects of the work of museums.
musdb, originally intended to be a mere input interface for the published object information, has grown into a full collection management system. To allow for a full interoperability of the data of different museums, a new set of controlled vocabularies that are filled and curated by the participating museums collaboratively. To allow presenting the objects not only by themselves, but embedded into a given context, we developed the “Themator” for creating topical portals and digital exhibitions. The “frontend” on the other hand has expanded to not only cover museums, collections and objects but now covers exhibitions, events and object groups and more. At the same time, more than a thousand museums are now present on museum-digital.
Still, some things do not change:
- The development is driven by the feedback of museums
- museum-digital shall be open for all museums, regardless of their size, financial situation or technological knowledge
This Blog
This blog is open for posts by any museum participating in museum-digital. Additionally, one can find contributions by the development team. The blog primarily covers the development (both in terms of contents and technology) of museum-digital, but broader discussions on digitization in the museum sector are always welcome as well.
Commenting
Like the work in museums, the development of museum-digital is mostly driven voluntarily. Since moderating comments takes time and additional effort, commenting is disabled on this blog by default. Authors can however activate the commenting feature on their posts.