A museum goes meta: Initiating enterprise content management at the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Abstract

In the 21st century, cultural heritage organisations' reliance on digital content has grown exponentially. The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is hard at work building practical capacity for the full range of digital media created by its staff. Recently, with the support of grant funding, Mia developed new conceptual models and a new metadata specification that is driven by standards, which it is actively sharing with the field. This paper will describe Mia's enterprise content management project, its efforts to improve digital content management in order both to maximise the resources being channelled into content creation and to provide the deep level of engagement with museum collections that digital resources can deliver. It will explain the project outputs: a metadata specification, a new open source digital asset management system and a federated search interface, and will share some lessons learned along the way.