The Meta Art Museum: Towards the Promise of an Open Collaboration Platform 
Jeff Steward, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Jenna Fleming, Museum of Fine Arts, USA
Scott Shunk, MIT, USA
With many collections available online, art museums face new opportunities in digital collaboration, service and scholarship. In this paper, we will provide an overview of one project to integrate images and data from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with Visualizing Cultures’ scholarly materials to create rich collaborative content on focused topics in Japanese history. While the technical approach is expected to evolve, it serves as a model for a relatively simple and “hands-off” method of collection integration that is easily maintained and easily extended, allowing the Museum to provide content for multiple online projects without significant extra investment. This paper will also discuss lessons learned and future opportunities for art museum collection integration, including the emerging standard of CDWA Lite.
Professional Forum: Towards the Meta-Museum [Professional Forum]
Keywords: metadata, collections, collaboration, art museum, databases
