CollectionSpace is a collaboration that brings together a variety of cultural and academic institutions with the common goal of developing and deploying an open-source, web-based software application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information. This report includes an update on the project team's activities for October 2008. The next update will be released Friday, December 5th. Updates are emailed to the Announcements <http://lists.collectionspace.org/mailman/listinfo/announcements_lists.c ollectionspace.org> list and posted to the project wiki <http://wiki.collectionspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=65575> the first Friday of every month. Accomplishments - October 2008 Administration Please join us in welcoming Richard Millet to the CollectionSpace team. Richard will be the project's Senior Services Developer, working out of the Information Services and Technology group at the University of California, Berkeley. He has 15 years of experience as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, for companies such as Apple Computer and ValiCert (now Tumbleweed). Community The CollectionSpace team is also proud to welcome the first members of its Advisory Board, which is comprised of cultural heritage community leaders who serve as trusted advisors to the project on matters of scope, direction, and sustainability. * Robin Boast, Senior Curator for World Archaeology University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology <http://maa.cam.ac.uk/home/index.php?page=1> * Robin Dowden, Director, New Media Initiatives Walker Art Center <http://www.walkerart.org/index.wac> * Kenneth Hamma, Information Consultant to Non-Profit Collections * Douglas Hegley, Deputy Chief Technology Officer Metropolitan Museum of Art <http://www.metmuseum.org/> The project team has begun planning the next community design workshop, to be held at the University of California, Berkeley, in Spring 2009. The workshop's proposed themes are cooperation, interoperability, and sustainability. Information about the workshop, including an agenda and list of invitees/attendees will be posted to the wiki over the next month. Carl Goodman, Megan Forbes, and Patrick Schmitz will be speaking about CollectionSpace at the 2008 Museum Computer Network <http://www.mcn.edu> Conference in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, November 15th. Design The design team is indebted to those members of the community who opened their doors throughout October, allowing the team to observe, ask questions, and generally make nuisances of themselves. Notes from meetings across the United States, Canada, and the UK have been added to the wiki, and were used to enhance the persona work begun during the second community design workshop in May 2008. The design team will also use information gathered during those meetings to inform workflow analysis and design. Development The technical team continues their development platform planning work. Team members have identified candidates and made initial recommendations for the services and user interface tiers; these solutions will be paired with additional recommendations to form the larger CollectionSpace development framework. These recommendations will be presented to the community in November or early December for comment. A draft list of candidate services is under construction on the project wiki <http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Candidate+Servi ces+and+related+notes> . These candidate services will be refined through the coming months, with emphasis placed on those that support the basic CollectionSpace functionality <http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/CollectionSpace +Development+Plan+Phase+One> defined by the project team and our community partners. Goals - November 2008 Design The design team will continue to create workflow analysis models, ensuring that all project team and community members have useful visual models for the system's proposed functionality. They will also produce information architecture and designs for the basic collections management functions that the development team will begin working on in the first quarter of 2009. Development Development work in November and December will focus on creating the high-level system architecture that will sketch out the rough shape of the services and application design, showing the various modules and dependency boundaries within the system. This will be an iterative process, which evolves as the project progresses. As noted above, the list of service candidates will evolve, with a shallow analysis performed across the board, and deeper analysis reserved for those services that support the project's proposed phase one functionality. ___________________________________________ MEGAN FORBES COLLECTION INFORMATION AND ACCESS MANAGER COLLECTIONSPACE PROJECT MANAGER MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE 35 AVE AT 37 ST, ASTORIA, NY 11106 TEL 718.784.4520 DIRECT 718.777.6834 FAX 718.784.4681 MOVINGIMAGE.US