Email sent to IST staff by Michael Mundrane, DCIO, on March 3, 2011
Colleagues,
I would like to take a moment to spotlight a great example of the kind of partnership that IST can provide to our campus community. For several years, a team from Data Services (DS) has been working with the Berkeley Natural History Museum (BNHM) consortium to advance the informatics capabilities of museums and researchers in BNHM member museums in a sustainable and manageable manner. While the BNHM-IST Partnership program is working on an array of issues, the most central of these has been the future of the collection management systems used by BNHM museums to manage their physical collections and related information.
Following a lengthy evaluation, the BNHM-IST Steering Committee adopted CollectionSpace as the strategic platform for collections management systems for the BNHM consortium. CollectionSpace is the community source development project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that IST and the UC Berkeley campus have been participating in for several years. It supports a set of core activities that are at the heart of professional practice for those who manage collections and the information that is generated over the lifecycle of collection ownership and care. The BNHM-IST collaboration is also supported by an IT grant from the university Campus Technology Council (CTC).
When the museum directors came to the CTC to provide a status report on and to receive feedback about these activities, their appreciation and enthusiasm were palpable. The presentation was very well received by the CTC and they strongly supported funding for this project. DS hosted a brown bag lunch today with CollectionSpace as the topic. It was so well attended that 200C barely contained the crowd. This project exemplifies the highest level of collaboration and shows the value that campus can achieve when IST domain experts work closely with our community.
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Regards,
Michael.
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Dr. Michael R Mundrane
Deputy Chief Information Officer
University of California, Berkeley