One of the contributions made by OCLC Research to its Museum Data Exchange project was the OAICatMuseum OAI-PMH repository software. OAICatMuseum is an extension to OCLC’s OAICat software that included support for delivering records in the CDWA Lite XML schema.
Since that project completed in 2009, work has continued within the cultural materials community towards improving the ways in which object descriptions can be conveyed in machine-readable form. One result of that work is the LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) schema. Version 1 of the schema was announced at the ICOM/CIDOC conference in November 2010. LIDO was built upon the success of CDWA Lite, the German Museum Association’s museumdat, and input from the community and technology professionals.
Though a relatively recent descriptive standard, LIDO is already seeing increasing use, particularly in Europe. To facilitate its use, over the past few months we worked closely with David Parsell of the Yale Center for British Art and with Ben Rubenstein and colleagues at Cognitive Applications to extend OAICatMuseum to support LIDO XML output.
The updated version of OAICatMuseum (version 1.1) is now available from the OCLC Research website.
Bruce Washburn (retired, 2021) was a Principal Software Engineer in OCLC Research. He provided software development support for OCLC Research initiatives and participated as a contributing team member on selected research projects. He operated the ArchiveGrid discovery system and provided software development support for selected OCLC Products and Services.
Congrats, Bruce. It’s great to see that the Museum Data Exchange keeps on giving!