The MDS website claims that their initiative is to provide “the raw material for anyone to work with [the] wealth of knowledge” that is available in museums up and down the country. In practice, MDS is compiling summaries of certain collections to make their contents more easily accessible, whereas for others it is gathering detailed object records which can then be converted into FAIR data. This acronym stands for “findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable” data and essentially means that it is easier for people to re-use this data in their own work, as long as they are authorised to be able to access and use it. For example, this raw, FAIR data can be used for “creating content that is aimed at a public audience” with Art UK intending to use the source material on MDS to create curated content on their own website so that it is more easily accessible for the wider public.
Personally, I think that MDS is a very beneficial service for small museums in particular because it saves them from having to make their collections searchable themselves. Instead, they can link their object records to the MDS repository, where the data will be stored and accessible for users to search and work with. These users include potential partners, including Art UK, who museums might want to share their collections with for external projects, for example, and it saves small museums, which are already underfunded and understaffed, from having to prepare custom exports each time. Additionally, the MDS repository can be used as a last-resort backup for museums in case they lose their data for whatever reason.
Nevertheless, some museums are more reluctant than others to share their object records with MDS. A key reason for this is that many UK museums do not want to give up all their rights by allowing anyone to access and use their data. MDS has circumvented this issue by not being an open-access initiative and, instead, giving each individual museum the power to choose specifically who can access their records. For example, museums can make the records accessible only to their own staff and volunteers by specifically naming these people on their licensing agreement.
Although it will undoubtedly make life easier for small museums, I think that a key drawback of MDS is that its repository, or database, is not designed to hold any image, audio or video files. Instead, object records will include information about these files, and, as long as they have the correct authorisation, users will be able to access them through the links provided to other online sources. This is due to funding constraints and, quite rightly, MDS is prioritising making as many records as possible available over including data-heavy files that are already available elsewhere. However, this lack of funding continues to worry me because several attempts to centralise UK museum data have already failed due to this reason and there is no guarantee that MDS will be able to escape this fate in the long run.
Overall, I think that the Collection Trust’s Museum Data Service is a great, if long-overdue, initiative. It is making it far easier for museums to collaborate with each other and it will also help researchers, and possibly even students, who need access to collections data for their own work. Whilst I ultimately believe that this data should be accessible to all, or at least to everyone working or studying within an academic setting, I still think that it is a great step forward to revolutionising how museums collect and hold data. This is both in terms of it being easier for the museums themselves to organise and maintain their data and improving transparency so that it is easier to track down objects that seem to have gone missing over the years.
