The Drexel Digital Museum Project Revisited

This demonstration will describe the update of an established historic costume collection website in collaboration with CollectiveAccess, an open source tool for managing and archiving digital assets. The Drexel Historic Costume Collection (DHCC, is a teaching collection used for research by students and faculty of Drexel University and the fashion community. The Collection, containing 10,000+ items, represents over 200 years of historic costume and textile design. It offers artifacts to study not only Fashion Design and Costume History, but Sociology, Anthropology, Design and American History as well.

The Drexel Digital Museum Project (digimuse) was conceived to increase access to and to conserve the DHCC holdings. The online database, http://digimuse.cis.drexel.edu,   includes QuickTime panoramas and quality details of a garment’s construction and embellishment. Digital galleries of past exhibitions and links to other fashion collection websites enhance the value of the website as a research tool.

The best practices standards for archival image capture of the Museum Online California and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) have been implemented to insure long term preservation and high caliber metadata curation. OAI-PMH and Dublin Core schema elements have been combined and enriched with characteristics particular to fashion/historic costume to create an application profile for historic costume.

Implementation was realized by employing graduate students from the College of Information Science and Technology. The two year turnover of students required regular training of new students. The inconsistent programming quality created somewhat of a “Frankensystem” in the code. The interface is also in need of a makeover.

After reviewing various options we decided to work with CollectiveAccess (CA), an open source tool for institutional strategy, and for elaborating and managing projects involving intellectual property, asset management and archiving, digital imaging and licensing, publishing and standards. (http://www.collectiveaccess.org )  CA offers free web-browser based tools for a variety of types of collections in the museum community. Working with the CA team, we are configuring this cataloguing tool to provide an application profile to best serve the needs of historic costume/fashion and support the OAI/PMH metadata standards we have already implemented.

A significant feature of digimuse is the continued development of controlled vocabulary for fashion terminology. Our current system provides a category classification hierarchy, headed by the ICOM classification of body coverings, and descending to contemporary fashion terms.  CA will allow us access a variety of additional data sources and to readily add source notes and rules for adding new terms to the existing hierarchy. It will be offered as a template in the CA configuration library.

Maintaining a contemporary online archive can be an expensive endeavor in both human and monetary resources. By choosing system design solutions that incorporate emerging image and data standards from the museum and library communities, we hope to help converge standards and continue to create an online collection and tool for scholarship that is extendable, portable, and accessible to a wide range of audiences. CollectiveAccess is providing us with the best tools, at the right price, to enable our vision.