TRAIL 2.1: Exploring the RDM landscape in museums and collections

Sustainable management and exchange of data from object collections in museums, universities, cultural heritage authorities and research institutions according to the FAIR and CARE principles is challenged by the multitude of discipline-specific ap-proaches to metadata, authority data, ontologies, interfaces and services. These range from local, very individual, partly commercial and highly specialised solutions to very generic, internationally recognised standards.

These approaches address different phases of the data lifecycle, from recording and inventorying objects and resources in collections (collect, describe), via creating and preserving digital representations (preserve) to forms of providing and linking interop-erable metadata and digitised material for different reuse scenarios (e.g. research, online portals, apps, exhibitions, creative art works, citizen science, long-term preser-vation) (discover, integrate, publish).

Some data formats for indexing and providing object data (e.g. EDM, LIDO, EAD, MAB, Darwin Core) have become established in recent years, not least due to their manda-tory use for ingestion in national and international portals. These formats meet subject- and material-specific requirements in different ways and to different degrees. To pro-vide a solid foundation for the measures in TA2 on the standardisation, networking, interoperability and publication of research data from collection contexts, existing ap-proaches will be recorded, structured and catalogued in this TRAIL through a systematic environment analysis.

One outcome of the TRAIL, in terms of content and strategy, will be to specify technical, scientific and organisational best practices and deficits and to summarise them in a white paper. This information on approaches will be semantically and technically pro-cessed in such a way that it will be searchable in various online catalogues.