David A. Greenbaum
Director, Data Services
University of California, Berkeley
Patrick Schmitz
Semantic Services Architect
University of California, Berkeley
The campus information technology (IT) division at the University of California, Berkeley, has been pursuing a number of enterprise IT strategies to develop and operate shared technology-services supporting data- and content-driven tools across museums, the arts and humanities, and parts of the social and physical sciences. The ideal strategy includes formal partnership models with faculty leaders in disciplinary clusters to guide IT investments, and community-source partnerships with other institutions to build new open source solutions. The organization is pursuing service-oriented architectures (SOA) on best-of-breed platform technologies to reuse software and integrate with other applications, and enterprise content management platforms are being exploring to build a campus wide foundation for digital asset and Web content solutions. As part of a reorganization of Berkeley’s IT division, a new department has been created to focus on data and content technologies across both academic and administrative domains. A focus on efficiency and long-term financial sustainability are essential.
These principles are being applied to work on CollectionSpace, a collaboration that brings together 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 consortial project is providing a powerful, easy-to-use application for small to mid-sized museums across the world. Berkeley is deploying CollectionSpace for a wide range of campus museums and research collections from art history through vertebrate zoology.
This talk will draw upon experience developing CollectionSpace to tell an unfolding real story of the struggles and successes in building a common collections platform that can support data models across many disciplines. Convincing campus departments to phase out homegrown, legacy applications is a difficult endeavor. Developing software in a multi-institutional consortium, using new architecture, in an agile model of rapid sprints, presents considerable challenges in project management and coordination. Traditional SOA methodologies and design patterns must be modified to fit agile development practices, and to reflect distributed governance models. Changing a campus IT culture that knows how to operate big administrative applications and infrastructure but is still grappling with e-research as an institution takes time and persistence. Doing this when campus budgets have been cut by 20% makes it even more challenging, and more necessary, to find common solutions.