Online Computer Library Center, OCLC releases software suite to help museums exchange data, press release, May 22, 2009. (Thanks to Information Today.)

OCLC Research has released a software suite to help museums exchange object descriptions and share data, the result of a cooperative effort made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further develop infrastructure for museum data exchange.

OCLC is using the Mellon grant to fund projects involving OCLC Research on behalf of the RLG Partnership and its art museum partners to build an information architecture and model behaviors that museums can use to routinely exchange data.

Museums participating in this effort have a common interest in being able to share information about collection items and digital images from their own institutions, with other art museums, and with content aggregators such as ARTstor or OCLC.

The software was released as part of the OCLC Research Museum Data Exchange Project, which supported museums from the RLG Partnership in defining requirements for tools, and created or contracted the creation of code. …

Museums now have access to COBOAT and OAICatMuseum 1.0 software. COBOAT is a metadata publishing tool developed by Cognitive Applications Inc. (Cogapp) that transfers information between databases (such as collections management systems) and different formats. …

COBOAT software is now available on the OCLC Web site under a fee-free license for the purposes of publishing a CDWA Lite repository of collections information …

OAICatMuseum 1.0 is an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) data content provider supporting CDWA Lite XML. It allows museums to share the data extracted with COBOAT using OAI-PMH. OAICatMuseum was developed by OCLC Research and is available under an open source license …