Over the last eight years, the Mellon Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT) has supported more than thirty software development projects aimed at helping Mellon’s constituencies (including higher education, research libraries, museums, and arts organizations) to engage more effectively and strategically with the technology they require. More information can be found at the program’s Web site, linked above.

The funding model employed by RIT does not permit the intellectual property generated by its grants to be held closely by the grantees. Under the terms of our grant, as with all RIT grants, all IP generated by the project must be released under open source or open content licensing, permitting it to be taken up and used by any institution that so desires (including vendors).  RIT projects are characterized by a particular model of open source called “community source,” in which institutions rather than individuals collaborate together to build software meeting shared needs, and in which commercial vendors play a vital, sustaining role.

This present project represents the second direct investment by RIT in the museum community, the first having been CollectionSpace, formerly the OpenCollection project, which was funded in December 2007. CollectionSpace is a two-year design and software development project, focused on bringing together institutions (with emphasis on small and mid-sized museums) to develop a next-generation collections management solution. That project leverages and advances the work done by the Museum of the Moving Image between 2005 and 2007 on its open source collections management tool, as well as work from other RIT-funded projects such as the Fluid user experience project.

The CollectionSpace team always envisioned the need for an application module for conservation, but set that agenda aside in anticipation of the present initiative, which will depend for its success on the expertise of highly specialized conservators and scientists. The present project is not directly connected to CollectionSpace, but CollectionSpace staff will participate, and it is anticipated that the application to be designed would fit well as a module in CollectionSpace, just as it should with other collection management systems.