Cogapp software to enable museum data exchange
March 2009

OCLC Research has recently released a suite of software to allow museums to publish and share information with each other and with content aggregators, ultimately improving access to items in museum collections across the world. A major component of this software suite is Cogapp's COBOAT tool.

The COBOAT software was developed by Cogapp over the last five years, as part of its work helping museums put their collections online. One of COBOAT's primary functions is to enable metadata to be transferred and transformed from collection management systems into new electronic publications. For this project, Cogapp adapted the software to generate standards-based records in CDWA Lite XML format, initially from Gallery Systems’ TMS software, and publish it to an OAI compatible repository.

A substantial part of the effort went into making the transformation between collections management data and CDWA Lite format easily configurable, allowing each institution to reflect their own policies and styles of recording data about their collection.

Cogapp has made a special arrangement with OCLC Research to make COBOAT (normally only supplied to Cogapp’s direct clients in the museum community) available to any relevant institution for this purpose, at no charge.

The Museum Data Exchange Project has been made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was realised in collaboration with museums that will benefit from it, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The National Gallery. Many of these had already been considering ways of sharing their data more efficiently, but by combining the input of several institutions, the project will be of use to a much broader range of establishments, and will in future allow the collective data set to undergo analysis as a whole.

Project Manager Günter Waibel, Program Officer for OCLC Research, said: "By making a joint investment of time and effort, we were able to come up with tools which benefit the wider community, rather than just an individual museum."