Hello friends of CollectionSpace, The October 2008 status report is below. If you would like to continue receiving status updates from the CollectionSpace project team, please sign up for our announcements <http://lists.collectionspace.org/mailman/listinfo/announcements_lists.c ollectionspace.org> list. Updates will be emailed to the announcements list and posted to the project wiki <http://wiki.collectionspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=65575> the first Friday of every month. Sincerely, Megan Megan Forbes Collection Information and Access Manager CollectionSpace Project Manager Museum of the Moving Image www.movingimage.us <http://www.movingimage.us/> 718-777-6834 ======================== Project Description 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 September 2008. The next update will be released Friday, November 7th. Accomplishments - September 2008 Communication The project wiki has been re-launched, with a new web address <http://wiki.collectionspace.org> and updated information architecture that ensures that the rich content on the site is easy for our project team partners and community members to find, contribute to, and edit. Email lists for project announcements <http://lists.collectionspace.org/mailman/listinfo/announcements_lists.c ollectionspace.org> and working groups <http://lists.collectionspace.org/mailman/listinfo/talk_lists.collection space.org> have been implemented to ease communications between the project team and community members. Community Initially formed at the CollectionSpace community design workshops in March and May of 2008, the CollectionSpace working groups continue to expand as new community members share their experience and insight with the project team. In September, working groups were given a dedicated email list for questions and conversation, and their input will continue to inform the development process. Design The design team will continue to lead the work on persona development using information gathered from the community design workshops and personal interviews with community members. An in-depth design review will assess user interface and accessibility facets of a variety of software applications, in order to identify best practices that can be referenced as we begin building a model for the CollectionSpace user front end. Development A high level services map, based on the functional requirements articulated during the community design workshops, has been developed. The technical team has also drafted a list of potential service candidates, which will be evaluated and prioritized by the team in cooperation with the community. The technical team continues its analysis work, looking at server-side presentation frameworks, and open-source technologies with the potential to serve as the base for CollectionSpace. The Fictional Museum <http://www8.caret.cam.ac.uk/fmus/record.php?id=0> dataset, created by the application development team at the University of Cambridge, will be used by the technical team for software evaluation in a cultural heritage context. Goals - October 2008 Community The project team will begin 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. Design Working group members will continue to open their offices to members of the project team in October. Design team members will observe working group members as they use their collections management systems, and then use these observations to refine the project's persona development. These personas will help the entire team share a consistent understanding of our users, and inform preliminary work on the software's information architecture. Development Based on the analysis work performed throughout the summer of 2008, the technical team will prepare a report with initial technology recommendations. This will include technologies for content storage and data persistence; indexing, storage, and retrieval mechanisms; enterprise service bus and other web services tools; programming languages and development environments for the service and application tiers; and web and user interface tier technologies, including presentation frameworks, validation support, and user interface toolkits.