Coming from that basic idea, there is now a second use case for museum-digital:qa: It is now capable of being used as a conversion tool. As usual, most formats supported for imports to museum-digital can be used to upload data – e.g. a simple CSV structure we regularly use for importing data previously held in table calculation programs – that is then converted to those XML formats to which users can export their object data in musdb (again recycling code from there).

At the moment conversions to LIDO (both versions 1.0 and 1.1) and EODEM are supported. Especially the latter may prove interesting: EODEM is a very recent extension of LIDO aimed at enabling a much simplified data exchange between different institutions in the context of loans. The lending museum exports the relevant objects’ data from their collection management system in EODEM; the borrowing institution then imports it and immediately has all the relevant information in their respective collection management system without having to manually re-type the data as has been usual for the last years. EODEMs utility in practice however depends on how widely it will be supported by the different collection management systems.

By offering a conversion option from different formats to EODEM, museum-digital:qa may thus help to make the benefits of EODEM available also to those museums whose collection management software does not yet support exports to the standard.

Image: Bell Telelphone crew with a dog, ca. 1892

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

museum-digital:qa reuses the importer‘s relevant functionalities to accept museum object data in a variety of input formats – both open standards and software-specific export formats – and allows running different tools concerning data quality on the uploaded data.This way we can make the quality checking functionalities that have thus far only been available as part of musdb accessible to museums almost regardless of the collection management system the museum uses.

At the same time, the tool can be extended with further checks that are not (yet?) built into musdb itself. As a first such check, museum-digital:qa can be used to check the object records’ conformity to the field set suggested for a minimum viable object record for publication of the working group of the same name (German: AG Minimaldatensatz).

While aspects of the import tool are reused extensively, no actual import takes place. On the other hand, this reuse means that museum-digital:qa will automatically support yet more input formats as more data of different sources can be imported to museum-digital, while actual maintenance work on museum-digital:qa should remain minimal.

P.S.: A long awaited check – checking the plausibility of the stated license status of images and media files linked to an object based on its creator / creation – has now been integrated into musdb as well as md:qa.