Project Description CollectionSpace is a collaboration that brings together a variety of cultural and academic institutions with the common goal of developing and deploying an open-source, web-based software application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information. This report includes an update on the project team's activities for January 2009. The next update will be released Friday, March 6th. Updates are emailed to the Announcements list <http://lists.collectionspace.org/mailman/listinfo/announcements_lists.c ollectionspace.org> and posted to the project wiki <http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/February+2009+S tatus+Update> the first Friday of every month. Accomplishments - January 2009 Administration The CollectionSpace project team held an all-hands meeting in New York City on January 15th and 16th. All project team members from Moving Image, UC Berkeley, University of Toronto, and University of Cambridge attended, and a great deal of work was accomplished. The team would like to welcome its newest member, Sanjay Dalal. Sanjay has over 15 years of experience in the design, development and deployment of innovative enterprise distributed systems. Until recently, he was with a Silicon Valley startup, Streametics, which provided brand protection solutions to high-tech and pharmaceutical industries. Previously, he was at BEA Systems (now Oracle) for over seven years, where his roles included senior architect, engineering manager, and senior engineer in development of WebLogic/AquaLogic products. Sanjay is an inventor of 6 patents in the areas of distributed software systems. Community CollectionSpace project team members Erin Yu and Anastasia Cheetham were invited to speak at the 2009 Visual Resources Association conference in Toronto in March. The VRA's members are particularly interested to learn about how the software will accommodate metadata standards such as Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) <http://www.vrafoundation.org/ccoweb/index.htm> and VRA Core 4.0 <http://www.vraweb.org/projects/vracore4/> . Design + Functionality The design team released several wireframes to the community for feedback, and received some excellent critiques. With these in mind, the team has moved on to analyzing the user experience of the smaller moving parts that make up each collections management procedure. Additional calls to the user community for feedback will be forthcoming. The wireframes are still available online <http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=aXQZYAWbasyjQaHaehNkig_3d_3d> for those wishing to add their comments. The functional team has created expanded definitions and criteria for the functionality planned for phase one of the project (through May 2010). These definitions, which are based on the Spectrum documentation standard, are available on the project wiki <http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Functional+Requ irements> . Development The services team, led by the developers at the University of California, Berkeley, has created an extensive service description repository, available on the project wiki <http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Service+Descrip tion+Repository> . The Cambridge team has started coding the application configuration layer, as an aid to the continuing development of its thinking. The team has chosen and embedded third-party libraries (Rhino and Digester) to do much of the work, and is now considering, with the community, options regarding extensibility. The application developers in Toronto continued their work on the user interface-to-application architecture, and began work on a prototype of the object entry wireframes using DHTML, JavaScript, and the Fluid Renderer. Goals - February 2009 Community At the end of February, the project's steering committee will attend The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research in Information Technology Program's annual retreat. The retreat is always an excellent opportunity for the project's leadership to meet with the members of other project teams, and work through the issues of managing and sustaining large-scale technology projects in the cultural heritage and academic communities. Design + Functionality The design team will continue its close analysis of the object entry procedure, creating use cases and wireframes around field input types. These use cases will lead to storyboard development, and eventually to the storycards used by the UI developers to create the front-end interface. The functional team will continue its work defining the base-line functionality for the software's first phase of development, and will continue to solicit the user community for use cases. Development The services team will add several new layers to the service repository. With the service description repository framework in place, a broad but shallow analysis of all planned services will be completed. This will be followed by a deeper analysis of those services that support the Object Entry procedure for the software's first release. The application team will continue its work on the core configuration, leading to a community conversation about the project's current thinking in March. The UI developers will continue their work on the UI-to-application architecture and the object entry wireframe prototypes, begin analyzing different configuration needs for different types of collections, and begin mapping collections applications behavior to Fluid Infusion components. ___________________________________________ MEGAN FORBES COLLECTIONSPACE PROJECT MANAGER MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE 35 AVE AT 37 ST, ASTORIA, NY 11106 TEL 718.784.4520 DIRECT 718.777.6834 FAX 718.784.4681 MOVINGIMAGE.US