LYRASIS announced the release of Version 4.2 of CollectionSpace, its open source, web-based museums collections management and information system, on June 24, 2015. This version of CollectionSpace:
- Introduces its first “profile,” for Fine and Contemporary Art. Profiles help museums get a head start on managing their collections using CollectionSpace by providing fields, vocabularies, and other features that support the needs of a specific domain or community of practice. Additional profiles are planned for future CollectionSpace releases.
- Adds an Exhibition Planning procedure, to manage planning and tracking of the objects and people involved in exhibition activities.
- Updates several key underlying software components. CollectionSpace now uses version 6.0 of the Nuxeo enterprise content management system, as well as version 7.0 of the Tomcat web application server, and the OpenJDK 7 Java development kit and runtime environment.
Megan Forbes, CollectionSpace Community Outreach and Support Manager at LYRASIS, noted that:
“The CollectionSpace program team is thrilled that our first community-developed profile, for Fine and Contemporary Art, is included in this release. Not only will this profile make it easier for new implementers to get up and running faster, but it demonstrates the strength of our community – from collections managers, registrars, and curators to software engineers and UX designers. We could not accomplish all we do without our dedicated community, and look forward to more great contributions in our next release.”
The Exhibition Planning procedure was contributed by Ray Lee of UC Berkeley’s Research IT department, based on design work by Michael Black and others at the campus’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA), and by the staff of the Statens Museum for Kunst/National Gallery of Denmark. Ray and several of his colleagues in Research IT also contributed additional new functionality, bugfixes, and testing work to this release.
CollectionSpace is used in cataloging and managing five major UC Berkeley campus collections, and Research IT has long been a substantial contributor to its design and development.