The significant outcomes and ongoing plans show:

  • Integration across art, archives, library and historic homes collections fosters rich conversations and creates opportunities for imagining new interpretation.
  • The internal cataloging teams’ understanding and commitment to creating relationships across all aspects of the collection has been motivating.
  • Adopting effective technical capabilities and standards-based data formats incrementally, and concentrating on curating the data to increase value and integration, allows this medium-sized institution to grow its capabilities and limit technical “dead ends.”

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum  ("the O'Keeffe") has developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library and historic home collections. If you’ve ever sat in on a discussion between a curator and an archivist, then you understand the breadth and richness of stories hidden in collections. Exploring rich relationships reveals a wealth of contexts, perspectives, events, and places. This MuseumNext Digital Collections talk explores how the Museum envisions the future of its publishing and collections-based storytelling.

By leveraging data from various collections, Collections Online  is a vital shared resource supporting a range of uses. Based on principles of linked data and standardized vocabularies, it anchors a range of uses and other digital products. It's main goals are:

  • Enable people to explore Georgia O'Keeffe's life and art via many dimensions.
  • Establish a relationship-driven, linked data resource that streamlines internal and external discovery and use of the wealth of materials and information available.
  • Position the institution to foster external collaborations with other institutions, helping to innovate in telling artist stories and offering rich research potential.
  • Provide integrated data and content resources that support publishing, exhibitions and future projects.

As a small, single artist institution with a high public and research profile, an effective and sustainable approach to its digital collections and information is critical. Much has been learned about the key factors that lead to success, and how this can be adopted in other institutions.

This presentation summarizes key aspects of this work, to help other institutions think about what is involved, factors for success, and how to build both internal commitment and strong relationships with supporting organizations and institutions.