Version 4.5 of CollectionSpace, an open source collections management system, was released on July 20, 2017. Research IT maintains installations of CollectionSpace for several museums on campus, spanning a variety of disciplines including art, botany, and anthropology. Development of the software is shepherded by LYRASIS, and is dependent on contributions from a world-wide community of software developers, hosting providers, and museum domain experts.
Highlights of this release include:
- Domain profiles for anthropology and botanical garden collections. These pre-configured sets of fields and vocabularies simplify the creation of CollectionSpace installations that are tailored to specific communities of practice. Both of these new profiles are based on configurations originally developed by Research IT in collaboration with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the UC Botanical Garden, with modifications made based on feedback from the larger community.
- Numerous minor user interface updates. Changes include more detailed search results, the capability for users to run batch jobs, and displaying additional information about authority terms used in records. Like the new domain profiles, these features also began as customizations developed at Berkeley to meet the needs of campus museums.
- API changes to support a new user interface, currently being developed for release in version 5.0. These include support for token-based authentication, support for sending and receiving data records in JSON format, and support for CORS requests.
CollectionSpace 4.5 incorporates many Berkeley-developed enhancements, making these customizations available to users outside of Berkeley, while also allowing them to be supported by LYRASIS and developers at other institutions. This mutual benefit arises from open source code, and the continuing close collaboration between UC Berkeley, LYRASIS, and the entire CollectionSpace community.