Using LIDO as an Interoperability Tool for the Finnish Museums Sector: A Hands-on Approach to Aggregating Content from the Museum Collection Management Systems to the National Digital Library of Finland

The Finnish National Digital Library (NDL) project combines the digital resources of Finnish libraries, archives and museums to one comprehensive information retrieval (IR) portal called the Public Interface. The NDL Public Interface also contains necessary interfaces for linking the correct web-services to corresponding digital resources, such as image requests etc. The Finnish museum sector currently lacks unified cataloguing rules and the digital collection management systems (CMS) do not share a common standardized metadata format. Since the digital content will be aggregated from the museums’ CMS to the NDL metadata index a solution for handling heterogeneous metadata was needed. We have implemented a national set of instructions called the Finnish LIDO Schema based on LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects). The template has been tested with three collection management systems using different metadata formats and the aggregation of metadata via LIDO to the NDL has been successful. The heterogeneous metadata of different museums is now exported uniformly to the NDL Public Interface and indexed with a single normalization process. This method allows us to present the end-user with uniform data in common fields facilitating easy implementation of IR functionality and services with the possibility of also linking the museum object’s metadata with other digital resources thus allowing us to develop and provide linked data services with resources from three different sectors.