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. For example, information about collections, exhibitions, people, educational activities, publications, events, and the like. Providing access to this information involves not only learning about audience needs but also awareness of the types of information available to fill those needs and formatting that information so that it can be delivered in an efficient and effective way.