In February 1888, Henry Maurice Platnauer, Keeper of the Yorkshire Museum, wrote to his counterparts around the country, 'It is proposed to call a meeting of the curators of a few provincial museums... to discuss the possibility of obtaining... a compendious index of the contents of all provincial museums and collections.' Such an index will soon be a reality thanks to the generous funding of Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The Museum Data Service (MDS) is a three-way partnership between Art UK, Collections Trust and the University of Leicester. It will build real world digital infrastructure to transform the way museums share their object records and knowledge. It will allow Art UK to scale up its operation adding millions more artworks over time. Thanks to support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Art UK will also build a new state-of-the-art e-commerce platform to generate much-needed commercial income for its partner collections.
In due couse, the MDS will act as a data repository for tens of millions of raw object records drawn from UK museums and other public collections. High-level information will be provided about each participating collection. Researchers and other users will then be invited to transform the records for their own use, with the range of uses expected to cover public access initiatives, collection rationalisation programmes and major higher education research projects.
The MDS has been a long time in the planning with significant pilot work and research already completed by Art UK and Collections Trust. The initiative builds on the aggregator concept developed by Collections Trust and the long-standing artwork data harvesting needs of Art UK. The pilot work for the latter involved a number of major collections including Tate, The National Gallery, National Galleries Scotland, National Museum Wales and the Government Art Collection. That pilot was funded by The National Gallery Trust.
How it works
The technical solution offers a sustainable, low-cost mechanism to aggregate, manage, and index collection metadata from UK collections by 'harvesting' this 'raw' or 'native' data and storing it in a cloud-based Data Repository. Initially, this will not include images. MDS will provide tools for public users and authorised partners to find, select and make use of the data in third-party systems and services, subject to rights and licensing restrictions.
There are five key parts to the process: HARVEST, STORE & MANAGE, INDEX, DISCOVER, USE.
Art UK and Collections Trust would operate the harvester, requesting both art and non-art records to be deposited in the Data Repository by participating collections. As trusted sector organisations, Art UK and Collections Trust will play a key role in liaising and encouraging collections to participate in the MDS, ensuring the benefits of participation are shared equally by large and small collections alike.
A suite of generic Data Connectors will provide the basis for establishing harvesting scripts for individual collections based on the data management system that is known for each participating collection. Collection Profiles will store data connection scripts, ingest methods, a harvesting schedule, and other collection-related details to create and manage the harvesting pipeline for each participating collection. A simpler process will be offered to smaller collections.
Catalogue data harvested from participating collections will be stored in the central Data Repository. The University of Leicester's Institute for Digital Culture will manage the Data Repository and ensure the integrity of the harvested data and its compliance with FAIR principles. The MDS will assign Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) to all catalogue records ingested into the central Data Repository.
Data for each collection will be uniquely identifiable using the Collection ID established in the Collection Profile. This will include licensing information for onward use. Only non-confidential data will be collected and only metadata about images rather than the image files themselves. A central search index will provide a single endpoint for searching metadata across all collections in the Data Repository.
The MDS website will offer a simple, user-friendly interface to browse and search across all collection datasets. This will reveal high-level information about each collection as recorded in the Collection Profiles and, where possible, a summary of what is held in the museum's collection. A dashboard will provide participating institutions with information about the onward use of their data.
Use cases
Art UK will constitute the first major use case of the Museum Data Service with the result being a transformative increase in the number of artworks (and, importantly, their accompanying images) joining its platform over the next few years and the mechanism to enable Art UK to keep these records updated seamlessly. Bloomberg Philanthropies funding will also cover the cost of a brand-new state-of-the-art e-commerce platform which will support Art UK collection partners grow substantially their commercial income from their image assets.
Other use cases have been identified and will be announced over the next few months.
The University of Leicester's newly established Institute for Digital Culture will bring to bear the cross-disciplinary might of the wider university to enable the three partners and the wider sector to manage, process and enhance the large data sets that will be generated – in brief, to ensure the sector benefits fully from the vast potential of this project. The three partners are delighted that the Open Data Institute will play a key role in guiding them on the creation of the Museum Data Service.
Early adopters and governance
A number of early adopter collections from across the four home nations, ranging from national museums to small collections, will participate in the Discovery Phase of the project and will be the first to share their data when the Museum Data Service goes live in October 2023. At that point, all collections will then be invited to participate.
As this will be digital infrastructure for the sector, the appropriate governance structure will be put in place so that the infrastructure's development is guided by its stakeholders. The governance structure will include a Management Board comprising principally the three partners; a Strategy Advisory Group; and a User Advisory Group including the early adopter collections. More information on the governance structure will be announced in due course. At the end of the grant period which ends in May 2024, the core MDS infrastructure will be jointly owned by Art UK, Collections Trust and the University of Leicester.
Art UK, Collections Trust, the University of Leicester, December 2022