Let's talk! Towards automated integration of the digital collections and library catalogs of the RMAH

As a result of recent digitization efforts, the RMAH has a solid digital infrastructure today. The objects in its collections are catalogued in MuseumPlus, made available online on Carmentis, and harvested by services such as Europeana. The documents in the museum's libraries are catalogued in Aleph, published through its OPAC and harvested by services such as Unicat. In the current framework both systems and datasets exist completely independently. However, they fundamentally overlap, not only on the general conceptual (thematic) level but all the way the individual object level. Moreover, documenting the collections is a core aspect of the scientific work done by the researchers of the museum, but this information is not maintained in a central system today. Hence, the museum wishes to move towards a more integrated infrastructure and develop a user-interface that links its objects with bibliographic references as well as with full-text documents. This will obviously improve the quality and usability of this information for research. As the underlying systems are compliant with international standards of interoperability, the question is not the technical feasibility of data-integration as such, but the degree of data-unity most effectively achieved. A range of scenario's are being investigated: the creation of hard links between related records in separate management systems; the use of a shared thesaurus for linking related content; connecting datasets by mapping metadata and aggregation by a service provider; the implementation of linked open data and semantic technology; or any combination of them.