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Open source collection management system, useful studies of Alfresco & Nuxeo

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Description

CollectionSpace is a collaborative effort driven by museum and higher education professionals. Our goals are two-fold:
1. Work together as a community to develop a well designed, cost effective, high quality software application that museums and related heritage organizations can use to manage their collections and share information about those collections online and
2. Re-define the ways in which collections information is collected, managed, preserved, leveraged, and published.

The goal is to provide a platform for a collections management system that
a) delivers the core collections management functions needed by a variety of institutions,
b) is an enabler for the emerging and dynamic set of new technology challenges and opportunities facing the cultural heritage community, and
c) is an effective and affordable alternative to vendor offerings.

Partners

An active developer community is working to enhance and improve CollectionSpace with each new release.

This effort is led by

  • the Museum of the Moving Image (PM is Megan Forbes)

Partners

  • University of California, Berkeley, Information Services and Technology
  • and University of Cambridge, Center for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET)

Additional development resources are provided by:

  • OCAD University
  • The Fluid Project
  • (former) University of Toronto

Our implementer (deployment) community includes:

  • Museum of the Moving Image (historical artifacts and memorabilia)
  • Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (UC Berkeley)
  • The University and Jepson Herbaria (UC Berkeley) (biodiversity and life sciences)
  • History of Art Visual Arts Resources Collection (UC Berkeley) (visual resources)
  • Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK, National Gallery of Denmark)
  • Walker Art Center (performing arts)
  • Miami-Dade County, Department of Cultural Affairs, Art in Public Places, Digital Collection Initiative.

CollectionSpace is made possible by the visionary support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Project Status, Jira

  • freely distributed under the Educational Community License (ECL), Version 2.0
  • open jira work tracker. Eg open blockers for 1.11
    • components:
      App:Configuration
      application
      Build+Release Management
      deployment - PAHMA
      deployment - UCJEPS
      design
      Documentation
      Functionality
      Functionality: Reporting
      IT/Server
      S:Account
      S:Acquisition
      S:Application_Key
      S:Audit Trail Service
      S:Authentication
      S:Authorization+Policy
      S:Batch Processing
      S:Build tool
      S:CollectionObject
      S:Configuration
      S:Contact
      S:Date and Time
      S:Dimension
      S:ID
      S:Import
      S:Installer
      S:Intake
      S:Loan
      S:LoanIn
      S:LoanOut
      S:Location
      S:Media
      S:Movement
      S:Multi-Tenancy Support
      S:Multivalue
      S:Notification/Messaging
      S:Nuxeo
      S:Object Exit
      S:Organization
      S:Person
      S:Place Authority
      S:Query
      S:Relation
      S:Reporting
      S:Resource
      S:Search Indexer
      S:Taxonomy
      S:Testing
      S:Vocabulary
      S:Workflow/Business Rules Management/Rule Repository
      SCM
      Services - deployment
      Services - general
      Services - Java Client Library
      Services - refactor
      Testing and Test plans
      Triage
      UI
      UI:Authorities
      UI:Configuration
      UI:Dates
      UI:Hierarchies
      UI:Objects
      UI:Procedures
      UI:Relationships
      UI:RepeatableFields
      UI:RolesPermissions
      UI:Search
      UI:Sidebar
      UI:UserAdmin
      wiki/JIRA
    • issues:
      Open 1099 25%
      In Progress 23 1%
      Reopened 21  
      Resolved 1375 32%
      Closed 1801 42%
      TOTAL ~4200  
  • (version Jun 2011 was a month late)
  • 18 responsibles (developers, BA, PM..)

Communication, Confluence

Notes by Vladimir

  • it's now over 3 years in development, maybe 30 p/y invested (TODO verify with Mellon?)
  • Strongly SOA-oriented (everything is a service, heavy componentization). Candidate services
  • uses Nuxeo for data repository but only in a peripheral sort of way. Decided not to use Nuxeo as the core of the system since "it'll force us to organize components in their way"
  • Impressions from demo:
    • unpleasant delay of a couple of seconds for EACH page
    • No HTML caching (happens a second time on the same page)
    • DB saving is also slow
  • overall impressions
    • a good example how to organize a project (confluence, jira, steps and dependencies...)
    • a bad example of over-emphasizing SOA
    • the result is not impressive: system is too slow and not feature-rich

Complementary Projects

Project News

28 Oct 2011 Architecture Update for new Nuxeo version

The CollectionSpace team is pleased to announce a major upgrade of the CollectionSpace Services Architecture in conjunction with the integration of the highly anticipated release of version 5.5 of the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (scheduled for release in mid-November 2011).
The Nuxeo Enterprise Platform provides repository and content management services as a key component of the CollectionSpace framework. In the past year, Nuxeo have changed their recommended default configuration from the JBoss platform to a leaner stack based just upon Apache and Tomcat. Accordingly, and to realize similar benefits in CollectionSpace, the development team has been working to reconfigure the services stack to follow this leaner model. It is important to note that due to the design of the CollectionSpace framework, these critical changes will not affect the services APIs in any way. Our REST model abstracts our functionality, as intended, and insulates the rest of the system from the changes we are making at the Services Architecture level. In addition, these foundation-level changes will not impact the repository configuration, database model, import scripts, reports, etc.
In addition to the architectural improvements, the development team have worked with the Nuxeo developers on some key improvements to the Nuxeo platform and version 5.5 of the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform will enable significant new functionality. These improvements, together with the major effort made by the CollectionSpace core development team, will bring significant benefits to CollectionSpace including:

  • a reduced memory footprint which will improve performance by making more memory available for database, caching and other memory-intensive tasks
  • a simplified (and smaller) tarball for distribution
  • a reduction in the skills required to tune and administer CollectionSpace
  • a simplified programming environment for ongoing services development
  • powerful new search facilities added to the repository abstractions

The CollectionSpace development schedule has been aligned with the Nuxeo development schedule for several years now. The mid-November Nuxeo release date, however, is coming at a time when we had originally planned to roll-out a major new version of CollectionSpace. As a result of the scheduling clash, the Services Architecture work, the significance of the Nuxeo upgrade and the time required to integrate it into CollectionSpace, we have decided to delay the release of CollectionSpace v2.0 until after the Nuxeo upgrade is completed. We anticipate a release date for CollectionSpace v2.0 in mid-December 2011. A follow-up announcement will be posted to this list with additional details in the coming weeks.

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