It has its problems. When I developed the Data Locator idea at the NHM, we realised that DC didn’t fit that well and ended up using something even simpler (and user oriented) to map all our online collections data into.

Theres also the problem that different museums name things differently and order collections differently. Mapping them was/is tricky, leading to incomplete cross-collection query results, Thats what led me into the Semantic stuff – tools to aid those mappings (Cue arguments on social tagging!).

So, sorry Mike I have to disagree on this one. Museums etc as a sector mucked up bigtime by not building a national ‘unit level’ metadata repository (that itself could perform SEO!). I know MLA are trying, but really not hard enough!

Yeah I agree . . . we use a Google Coop for our site search (but NOT our collection search – although it also can work as a way into our objects of course!). See it at http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/search/ (it is also in our persistent footer)

And we should have a statewide cross-institutional prototype of a combination Google Enterprise + OAI + Opensearch model working in the next 6 months. I might have a beta up before Xmas.

The problem that I’ve found with Google Coop is the inability to do the kind of deep data mining that we do on our (self built) OPAC search. Effectively that data value goes to Google (and doesn’t come back to us).

There is the other problem that I noticed when I was over in the UK, that SEO seems to still be a ‘mystical thing’ that hasn’t been applied properly to quite a lot of museums’ collections . . .

Seb

We’ve just bought the business version of Google custome search, and written a little module that integrates it into our CMS. So you can now visit the Maritime Museum site, search for everything about the ‘Second Dutch War‘ (say) and get back results from our online catalogues, journal articles and general stuff in the CMS. Much better than the old search, where you had to visit the search boxes of the various different sites in turn.