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OCLC Software Targets Museum Information Exchange

The resulting software, COBOAT and OAICatMuseum 1.0, was released as part of the OCLC Research Museum Data Exchange Project, which helped museums from the RLG Partnership define requirements for tools and created or contracted the creation of code. The following museums received the software: the Harvard Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Princeton University Art Museum; and the Yale University Art Gallery.

COBOAT is a metadata publishing tool that Cognitive Applications, Inc. developed to transfer information between databases and different formats. The product lets museums extract standards-based records from Gallery Systems TMS, a leading collection management system in the museum industry, in the Categories for the Descriptions of Works of Art (CDWA) Lite XML data format. Institutions can also use configuration files to adjust COBOAT for extraction from different vendor-based or homegrown database systems or from locally divergent implementations of the same collection management system.

OAICatMuseum 1.0 is an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) data content provider that supports CDWA Lite XML. Developed by OCLC Research, it lets museums share the data extracted with COBOAT using OAI-PMH.

Source: OCLC (www.oclc.org)