Open Source Collections Mangagement System

[Robin Boast]

Many of you may not know about a project in the US to develop an Open Source Collections Management System. It is called CollectionSpace, and is run out of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, in collaboration with the University of Toronto, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Cambridge. It is funded, for the time being, by the Mellon Foundation, but will have to become a distributed open source project supported by its many museum partners, at some stage.
There are a number of issues here, not least what is documentation, and what should it be, but I thought I would open the idea up to the Museum 3.0 community to see what people think.

[Amelia]

I think it is a fantastic idea. When we had our lecture on the various CMS that museums were using today and our lecturer raised the issue of cost, the very first thing I thought of was "Why isn't there an open source project working on this?" I meant to go and look it up online to investigate but haven't had time in the last few weeks.

[Robin Boast]

This is certainly one of the major problems. Not only does the vast majority of commercial CMS systems look, and function, like the were developed in the stone age, but you have to pay 1,000s for the privilege of using these stone age solutions. I remember building far better CMS systems, and far better looking too, out of DB2 back in the mid1980s. That is a very embarrassing situation for museums.
However, I think what is far more important about the open-source CMS is that it can challenge the highly standardized, locked and centralized documentation practices that the existing systems so rigorously enforce. Open-source CMSs are potentially a means of breaking the documentation dictatorship that has come to dominate.