Background Museums create and maintain a variety of rich, descriptive information to support activities as diverse as exhibitions, education, public programs, research, conservation and the like. This information is usually developed using a suite of software applications that reside in various departments throughout the institution. Islands of information develop throughout the institution. Before long, there are many complex databases containing redundant content that exist in obscurity. This is a familiar scenario.
Content is expensive to create and can be difficult to deliver.
With recent advances in information technology and standards, however, museums are in a position to develop a new business model for re-purposing important existing content. Museums serve many audiences, each with different requirements. These questions may not all be new but the means to provide the answers are. This project follows on recently completed work involving the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and public access to museum resources wherein participants defined a way to effectively use metadata to promote and enhance broad level resource discovery. Questions remain, however, as to how museums can effectively move to the next level and provide access to more highly complex descriptive information that museums currently create and maintain in electronic format.