SoVLMA: A Community-Building Tool for Museums and Archives

By:
Dr. Amy Smith
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The VLMA is an application for creating, sharing and annotating distributed collections, such as the online contents of museums and archives. It includes a lightbox service that enables comparison and manipulation of visual information, and manages metadata in a manner that respects its origins in diverse collections. Through the use of semantic web technology, it enables individuals to create, annotate and share custom collections from distributed online resources. VLMA seeks to bridge the gap between discrete pockets of information, to help researchers make and present contextual and other connections among the contents of museums and archives. SoVLMA proposes to develop and extend the VLMA (Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives), an application for building, annotating and sharing distributed museum and archival Internet data and data resources, to provide a community-building tool to assist data providers such as museums and educational institutions in syndicating their data for use with VLMA using web2.0 techniques, through the following enhancements: (a) RSS as ingestion format for VLMA objects; (b) RDF-enabled annotation; (c) Improved collection sharing techniques.


Keywords: VLMA, SoVLMA, Museums and Archives, RDF, Annotation, RSS, Collection Sharing
Stream: Learning Technologies: What They Do and How They Work
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English
Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Dr. Amy Smith

Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Reading
Reading, Berkshire, UK

Amy C. Smith is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archeology at the University of Reading. She is interested in Greek and Roman art, particularly in the spheres of politics, myth, and religion. Her work on personifications comprises several articles and a forthcoming book. She has authored other articles pertaining to Greek art and architecture, as well as a volume of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (for the Reading Museum Service / Ure Museum). Her curatorial work has included a redesign of the Ure Museum (in 2005), development the Ure Museum Database, an co-creation of the Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives. Dr. Smith was educated at Dartmouth College (BA 1988) and Yale University (MA 1993, MPhil 1994, PhD 1997) as well as the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the American Academy in Rome, and the American Numismatic Society. Before her appointment at Reading she lectured at Tufts University, Boston College, and the Massachusetts College of Art. She has also worked as an editor (Perseus Project; American Journal of Archaeology) and as curatorial assistant at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Ref: LS7P0112