The Partnership Blueprint for a Collaborative Museum Discovery Portal

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Rachael Cristine Woody. My name is Bradley, and I will be your moderator for this webinar titled The Partnership Blueprint for Collaborative Museum Discovery Portal.

Before we start, I would like to take a moment to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions as well as knowledge management and library automation systems. Our brands include ArchivEra, Argus, Presto, and SydneyDigital.

Now I’d like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Rachel Christine Woody. Rachel is the owner of Relicura and provides services to museums, libraries, and archives. She specializes in museum collections management systems, digitization technology, and digital project management, and digital usership. During the course of her career, she has successfully launched multiple digital projects that include advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management systems. She is also a popular guest author for Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog and has provided us with many great webinars that are listed on our website, so please feel free to check check those out after today’s session. Take it away, Rachel.

Great. Thank you so much, Bradley, and thank you to Resideo for hosting us today and to you for joining. We are going to talk about discovery portals and specifically the blueprint for what it takes to support and have an effective discovery portal.

Get into it, we’re gonna talk about what shared collection discovery is, especially in the context of a portal. We’ll go over key components of what that looks like. There are two main partnership models that typically lead to or support a discovery portal. And then we’re gonna go through several different areas of our data and how we use our respective collections management systems to ultimately support the actual discovery function in those shared portals. So there’s the blueprint part of what it takes to have our data play nicely with other institutions’ data and ultimately be more powerful in the search and discovery part for our users.

Part of that includes the, blending of best practices especially when there’s multiple institutions and different collections involved. There is a challenge aspect to shared vocabulary of which they’re depending on the portal there can be some functionality to help make that more flexible. For example the power of field aggregates that can be available to you. And then we’ll talk about the the last aspect of when your data is actually in that discovery portal how the connections through your data and through going through that blueprint and ensuring that your data is successful at playing with others. How we can help make those connections, uncover hidden collect, connections to other collections, and how those connections can be highlighted in a discovery portal environment. So we’ll take a look at a couple examples and how, each of those portal examples offer those connection discovery points.

And then we’ll take a look at affinities in action and some of the specifics of what that can look like with your collections playing together nicely with others, and having those connections really be highlighted.

So to begin with some foundational, knowledge here, sure we’re all on the same page, what is shared collection discovery? It is going to involve more than one institution. So the the aspect of it is there needs to at least be more than one. Otherwise, it’s just your collection portal and the blending of best practices and everything else that comes after it in the blueprint is not quite as, rigid or necessary.

And with that, the other major aspect is that there’s going to be one unified access point. So while your collection individually may still have its own, public facing discovery side, Your data will also be in this larger aggregated discovery portal, and that discovery portal aspect is that one point of access across multiple institutions. So it’s one unified interface for the collaboration of that discovery portal, not necessarily talking about your own interface.

With the discovery portal, another key aspect is that it supports cross collection searching. That’s part of the whole point.

Primary point of having a discovery portal is to have all those collections in one place so that they can be searched together.

And with that, we have also found ways in that discovery portal to highlight those connections that we will get into some specifics on and highlighting the the actual cross connections in a more specific and intentional way.

For the, key components of shared discovery, there’s that, unified access point, but we also need to make sure that we have collaborative standards in place and that we can highlight that interconnected data. So those are sort of the three things we need to keep in mind as we start looking through the blueprint aspects of getting our data for our collection ready to enter an, arena essentially of multiple institution collections.

And for partnership models for getting into a discovery portal, there are two main ones and you can see a little bit of variation in flavors as you start looking at examples of discovery portals. But the two main ones are going to be sharing a single database and then a singular and unified, discovery portal. And those are a little less common because it does require data to enter into that one singular system.

This is less common because it’s hard to get institutions to go into one system together, though it’s certainly not impossible. It may be, advisable for institutions that are part of like a larger agency.

But it could also be because, not necessarily having access to a lot of budget or, technical expertise. It may be that it’s easier to accept, exports of your data and import it into one singular system for that discovery portal. So a little bit of variation but essentially the point is that the data is entering into one database system and then putting that, public interface into a discovery portal. The second one and one that is by far more common and especially is the model for the ones that we see of the larger discovery portals is that everyone is maintaining their own separate database.

Their data does not need to go into any other database to, then be shown in a discovery portal aspect and instead is essentially referenced and having that link in that, data sort of referenced in their discovery portal atmosphere, but not necessarily in their database. So it’s a little bit, more sophisticated in terms of technology. It requires more budget and more technical infrastructure. And that’s partly why we’re seeing it with those much larger databases. So, again you’ll see some variations of these two different models but essentially they’re the undergirdings of those discovery portals will fall into those two camps.

Alright for the blueprint part of this regardless of which model you are going into as a partnership into discovery there are, blueprint aspects to make sure that we have our data in way, format, flavor to help connect and play nicely across other institutions collection data. We all know that we tend to follow similar best practices but ultimately in every institution there will be some local best practices. We also know and it is very natural that our data can be messy, bad past practices or perhaps there was no sort of standards adoption early on all of which are very common.

There could be some data remediation or sort of a realignment of standards especially as you enter into a collaborative partnership that’s going to start with best practices. So as our sort of foundational piece for building towards that shared discovery, we need to take a look at what our catalog record template is.

So for us, especially in the museum, fields, we tend to share based on object or item level.

And so the primary record template that we need to make sure we have an alignment is for that object or item level record. It does not mean that we need to have exactly the same record templates. Our fields may even be slightly differently labeled, but there needs to be an overlap and alignment in what sort of data is in what places and how that may connect to where everybody else’s data is.

For some of those, primary and important fields, for example, date fields, we need to make sure that we’ve adopted and aligned a data format. I mentioned date specifically because those can be in a variety of formats and it can impact not just searching but also the faceted aspect of when we get our search results in that discovery portal. Depending on what format all of the different dates on can really impact whether or not faceting or the concept of timeline can work in a discovery portal with our data. So, something to think about as we are assessing our data is not just are the fields there, but what are the what is the format of our data, especially for some of those key fields where format is extremely important. And the last major one to review as we’re looking at our data and sort of get into closer alignment is vocabulary.

Again, as with standards we all know that we have standards to reference and use similar with vocabulary there’s some key, thesauri that are the ones the go to ones for us to use, but we also know that we have local vocabulary that we’ve adopted depending on the systems you’ve had in the past or currently may or may not support the actual direct connection to any of like our standardized vocabulary.

And also just past practice that it could have been that standards weren’t adopted until much later. So vocabulary is one of those areas where for a variety of reasons it may not be exactly standardized and maybe an area for us to sort of massage our work with, especially since vocab will be a major player in that connection of data across the other institutions and their collections. So it’s a very important aspect not just for the discovery of our content but for the interconnectedness of how it may relate to other institutional content.

Just to highlight the because there’s work involved right for getting our best practices back into alignment and for making sure that we’re in at least a good alignment with our potential partners. I do wanna highlight why it is important and sort of the power of making sure that we have blended best practices with everyone else. And it’s going to improve search results. It’s going to improve and make sure that our collection stuff shows up appropriately when a community of users is looking for something.

It will help with that cross searchability because our data is going to be in the expected fields and the same fields that are used with our other institutional partners. It will help with that synchronized filtering and timelines. So if you remember my date example and how sometimes that faceting or that timeline can be messed up depending on if our dates are formatted in a helpful way. So helping, once those are in place they can be used in sort of these powerful ways of going through search results or, tools that can help us explore our data in a more visual way.

It helps to ensure data consistency, which is good for everybody, especially for us as collection stewards. And it helps provide a unified collection experience. So it really helps our community of users who may not know or care who owns which collection. They just want to find all of the things for the subject that they searched, and they want to have a consistent and unified experience in what they’re looking at and how they’re experiencing and receiving information of our collective collections information.

So the challenge will be with varied terminology, and this gets back really to our vocab aspects.

And when we have different vocabs even in the simplest sense of whether something is plural or not, it introduces ambiguity. And not just ambiguity for us as humans, but ambiguity for the actual machine reading that happens for the actual technical aspects of the discovery portal.

With that very terminology there’s little flexibility and this is especially true if however the Discovery Portal is built is not built with a function that is, that functions like an aggregate which we’ll talk about in a moment.

If there’s not something that helps build in flexibility for vocab then that means there is no flexibility for vocab. So if people are searching for, oil paint or oil paints If the system can at least be based on keyword or if the user is smart enough to use a keyword search, they may still get the same results. And other systems just may not be that supportive to handle even just that small level of ambiguity.

And it requires an adoption of standard vocabulary. So, again, if we don’t have that flexibility, then the rigidity of the vocab we use, specifically in the formats and even down to things like is it plural or not plural, becomes so incredibly important. Otherwise, it could negatively impact and take away all of those benefits and the power of having our collections together.

So I want to talk about aggregates for just a moment. It may be called different things. The word we’re going to use today is aggregates, but I’ll explain sort of what the criteria is so you can keep an eye out for it. Because essentially we’re looking for a tool that can help tell the system that these two things are alike and that there should be flexibility in searching for those things.

So it helps connect fields of data. So for example, if we assign an aggregate and we basically want it to be a keyword search across several different fields. So I’m assigning an aggregate, and when somebody searches for this, particular, area, I want it to check my object names, description, and subjects. And so I will tell the system, a human telling the machine, if somebody’s doing a keyword search for this type of data, I want you to actually search across these three different fields and only these three fields if they’re doing something like a keyword search.

Depending on your discovery portal, you can make dozens and dozens of these types of aggregates, that can help build in flexibility. So if somebody’s trying to search for something in medium but other collections used the materials field there is a, connection in the back end essentially where the system is like well I know that person searched medium but as they’re doing this keyword search, I will also go over and I’ll check the materials so that materials and medium are searched together. Of course, with discovery portals, there are ways for users to be very specific in their advanced searches.

So if they know for sure they only want medium, etcetera, they can still get around it. But for the majority of our users, the keyword searches and the aggregates behind them is really the more used and more powerful aspect.

These aggregates, of course, help support machine readability because at least right now for the machine capabilities they need us as humans to actually tell them where these connections are and where they can be intentionally connected and searched across in a flexible keyword search way.

And it helps to remove the barrier or the labor of help, like, our users to know which fields to search or that if they search Medium and only get records for this institution, it means they have to search materials in a secondary search to find materials from another institution. So it takes away both the inaccuracy but also sort of the burden on the user to somehow know that and do those double type searches.

Alright. So with some of those blueprint aspects in place, I want to spend a moment focusing on how connections are present in our data and how those can be highlighted in a discovery portal environment, especially since that’s one of like the whole point of having a discovery portal is to have these connections with other institutions and have our collections play nicely together.

So major areas, of our data that can help uncover those hidden connections with other institutions are going to be the big names that you think of. So like object name field, artists, cultural communities, subjects, geographic regions, and the materials medium essentially the format of materials.

These fields, as you can tell quite a few of them are vocabulary or they controlled lexicon driven.

In fact all of these in subsystems can be quite controlled, and in other systems depending on what you’ve elected could be perhaps more free text. But you can see how these fields would be the most primary targets for our community of users as well as how these fields, because they are the most common and most of interest, will also be present in our partner institutions data. So with these fields in mind, there are ways that we can help highlight and in the discovery portal layer pull out and, share, intentionally and specifically where the affinities lie across our collections. Because, again, as a community of users, they usually don’t come in knowing, only wanna see this institution’s data. They’re at the Discovery Portal. They wanna see what’s relevant to them regardless of institution.

So how do these connections manifest on the Discovery Portal? Because it’s one thing for us to know that, like, the object names should play nicely together, for example. It’s another thing to actually provide these as engageable aspects in a Discovery Portal setting.

There are four main ones at least that we tend to see across the major discovery portal platforms. Though, of course, I look forward to seeing many different innovations over the next years of how we provide our data.

But the main ones for now are the concept of galleries. So putting together some intentional galleries, of topically or gallery of, paintings across all collections for a particular artist. Could even do by region. Many of our discovery portals are actually regionally driven, so regional history art culture. And we’ll take a look at an example in just a moment. So we’ll have galleries based on pretty much anything you want that can pull from one or more fields to help make sure that all of our collection content that’s relevant gets pulled into a very easy browsable gallery.

We can also create browse by topic so it doesn’t necessarily need to be a built constructed gallery but instead, a thumbnail that is a browse by topic where it’s like please show me everything that has horses in it.

As a very simplistic example. And so browsing by topic, as, like, predetermined thumbnails, quite a few discovery portals tend to do them thematically based on, like, what month it is. Like, March is women’s history’s month, so there might be women’s history thematic browse by topics that then launch our users into a search with all of those pre pulled collections items that relate to that topic.

Another major example that tends to show up on portals is the concept of online exhibits. It can use the the gallery function but one of the primary differences is that it’s a more intentional curation of an exhibit with perhaps introductory text, more thematic gatherings, perhaps sort of like a sub galleries concept. So it’s a bit more complex and it’s a bit more content provided and shaped around the concept of an exhibit, but in this case online.

And the fourth one that of course is very popular especially when portals are grant funded is the offer of curriculum support. So whether that is predetermined, or pre created lesson plans or, sort of assembled materials that can be incorporated into supporting lesson plans, having a specific area for education, or different, teaching, methodologies or mechanisms to have in that discovery portal section that can be used for K to twelve education most commonly. Though if your discovery portal is actually in service of like university overhead then it may be actually elevated into more of like the post K through twelve the college graduate levels.

So seeing sort of those, affinities and actions so those intentional connections that we’ve helped to make connections that can be made on the fly because we’ve blended our best practices and how those can show up I want to, have us talk through three of our digital portal examples. The first one is Digital Public Libraries of America. This is one of the bigger, discovery portals. It’s national. It’s been around for a while. A lot of people when you say discovery portal, this is usually the first one that they think of.

We’ll then take a look at, examples that are in Kalisphere, which is state of California at this point, but I believe was started and majorly seeded by the collections of California State Libraries. And then the Northwest Digital Heritage, region which is a Oregon Washington at this point, regional hub and the different ways they showcase affinities on their portal.

So for DPLA which again is national it’s the largest it’s been around for a minute it has the most ways to highlight affinities across the three examples we’re looking at today which makes sense especially given its size.

They have the browse by topic aspect that we talked about. They also introduce a create list feature, which is very helpful and interesting to users, especially when hosted on a discovery portal where users can go in not necessarily need to log in and create their own little collection list for whatever reason that makes their heart happy. They have the online exhibits which as we know is another major example of how affinities are highlighted in these discovery portals.

They have primary source sets. So related to, curriculum perhaps more research based, so perhaps more geared toward, that more college or post college level where we’re getting primary source sets that we can review and take a look at as part of research or, coursework and not necessarily the predetermined or pre creative lesson plans.

And they also have user guides, which, is not necessarily about the content directly, but does help users, especially those who are most interested in using the discovery portal, like, the max, tells them how to use it, where to find things, how to use some of these additional functions beyond just search or browse. And so it can be incredibly helpful to have, especially on a platform that is so large and attracts a varied, spectrum of users.

For Calisphere, this is at the state level. And so the amount is not nearly as much as DPLA with how they highlight their affinities, but they do use, heavily the exhibitions concept. So they have, exhibitions specifically, so a bit more intentional and curated. Then they have grouped exhibitions, which tend to be more by topic.

This is, in my brain at least it is actually more akin to browse by topic, but they have differentiated as a different type of exhibition on their portal.

And for Northwest Digital Heritage, again smaller, in region so not as big as DPLA. They show up in a little bit of a different way in how they want to highlight affinities. They have featured topics so things that rotate or change out, but help to get in that browse by topic affinity sort of way, getting users in to, search across the collections via a, specific topic.

And then this one is interesting because they do then connect to DPLA. So you could search, in this case you could have three ways. You could start from your own institution’s collection and Northwest Digital Heritage is the type of hub where everybody still has their own database.

And so you have that one first layer of just your institution. You have the secondary discovery layer of contributing your content to Northwest Digital Heritage.

And then now you have this third potential discovery layer because NWDH contributes their content or at least, up until recently has been contributing content to DPLA, which means that all of our institutional content, if we so choose, makes its way up into the National Discovery Portal. So while this particular regional hub only has the, few ways that it helps highlight affinities, you know, due to size of the portal and available budget and functionality. It then feeds it into DPLA, which has all of those other ways that the affinities can be highlighted and explored. So this one in particular is a very interesting aspect of how you can contribute not just at the regional level, which can be very important, especially for folks who are interested specifically in regional or the regionality of collections, but then gets all of the benefits of being part of the more national, more robust, and more available features and functionality of the DPLA portal.

Alright. So we covered quite a bit. We talked about what shared collection discovery is, specifically when we are talking about a discovery portal with, crossed institutional collaboration. We took a look at key components and the two main creative partnership models that tend to lead towards or support a concept of a collaborative discovery portal.

We then got into, like, the very specific blueprint aspects of being in a ready state to contribute our collection data into a discovery portal, including the importance of blending our best practices with our institutional partners, reviewing the challenge of varied terminology and how one could address that, how that might be impacted. We talked about the power of field aggregates, which for systems and or discovery portals that those are available help introduce and support flexibility and more keyword based but intentionally crafted across specific fields to search instead of the more rigid, rigid searching that can happen in more simplistic portals.

We talked about highlighting those hidden connections across the different institutional collections, how we can do that intentionally, and how we can highlight that on the various discovery portals going through examples, seeing those affinities in action with DPLA, with Calisphere, and with NWDH.

So I did want to highlight the websites for the three portals that we talked about. Of course, they’re also easily Googleable, but I encourage you to check them out just to see the different flavors, even just the splash page of how cross collection content is being displayed, and is being presented to users.

Just to get a sense of ideas, especially if you’re entering newly into a potential collaborative partnership, it can be really great to see what others have been doing and really see those affinities in action to help inform any of the work that you may be doing to get ready for your discovery portal.

Before I let you go and speaking of discovery portals, they are majorly helpful for helping tell stories in your collection. And we have recently collaborated, Lucidea Press and I, on a storytelling book focusing on digital, stories or, published online stories based on our collections. So if that is something that interests you, especially, like, massively using what we have available to us digitally, please check it out. Lucidea Press is offering a courtesy free e copy. So I hope you enjoy it because I really enjoyed writing it.

And with that, I’ll hand it back over to you, Bradley.

Thank you, Rachel, for the wonderful presentation. And to our audience, if you’d like to learn more about our Museum of Collections Management System called ARGUS, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales@lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

If you have any more questions on any of our software or our company, our contact details are on the screen, and please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to this series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today, and until next time. Thank you.