AMICO Executive Committee

Art Museum Information Consortium (AMICO)
Archives & Museum Informatics:
Activities Report
April 1998

Summary

Archives & Museum Informatics devoted 22 days of consulting to AMICO in March. This effort focussed on delivering The AMICO Library in a validated form to RLG, developing and submitting an IMLS proposal, briefing and listening to testbed participants and completing editing of the draft legal framework for AMICO with its General Counsel.

- We worked with Focus Consulting to refine data validation and parsing tools and to test AMICO member contributions to the library. At the end of April we submitted the library (65GB of data) to RLG.
- We obtained funding from the Delmas Foundation for participation in the NSF DLI2 grant run, and applied for an IMLS grant with the University of Indiana, Purdue University, Indiana.
- We attended and spoke at the Coalition for Networked information.
- We organised three working committee meetings, Rights, Technical and Users at the Museums and the Web Conference.
- We finalized incorporation papers with Michael Shapiro, AMICO's General Counsel, for the AMICO and continued to draft membership agreement, the university license and the museum license.
- We distributed materials to university test bed participants, met with them at CNI, and prepared a web site for interaction with the testbed projects.

Detailed Report:

Data Processing & Delivery:

The big effort paid off. During April all AMICO members completed the submission of records for the testbed library. Some left this until the last day or two and still had errors when their data was submitted to RLG, so they will have work to do to clean them up in May. However, we were delighted to have almost 20,000 records and all members participating.

Data parsing routines were awaiting full testing. In May, all parsed data will be returned to members for review and approval.

We received the latest version of the vocabularies from the Getty Information Institute in preparation for vocabulary enhancement research and experiments we will conduct in May and June.

University Testbed:

We hosted a meeting of testbed participants at the CNI meeting and held a very successful session in the program discussing research underway at OCLC and in planning at testbed universities. The OCLC presentation is available on the AMICO members web site.

A web site for university testbed participants was completed and opened in April.

Committees:

We met with all three working committees of AMICO (Rights, Users & Uses, and Technical Operations) in Toronto at the end of April. Each meeting produced positive forward progress and minutes will be posted to the lists in early May.

Legal Matters:

Michael Shapiro finalized the incorporation papers and started them on a round of serial notorization which will end with their being filed, in the District of Columbia, in May. The objective is for AMICO Inc. to exist as an independent non-profit when its board meets in Worcester in early June.

A rights committee meeting discussed the draft membership agreement and licenses and Michael Shapiro took their input into account in drafting the final agreements which will be ready the first week in May.

Fund Raising and Outreach:

We continued discussions with the Mellon Foundation and expect to submit a proposal for a June review.

We received a $10,000 grant from the Delmas Foundation to assist us in planning for a Digital Libraries Initiative grant from NSF due in July.

We submitted an IMLS grant proposal in partnership with the Indiana University Library to make The AMICO Library available to K-12, public libraries, museums and others within the greater Indianapolis metropolitan area.

We decided not to participate in the Consortium for Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) testbed on the Dublin Core metadata model because four AMICO member museums will participate on their own and bring the results back to the group.

Membership:

We met with staff of the Library of Congress which agreed to join AMICO. We have expressions of interest in joining AMICO in hand from numerous other institutions. Membership will be opened in May and the membership committee will recommend new members to the board in June.

Near Future:

We will present AMICO at the closing meeting of the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) in DC in May.

A planning meeting for the NSF DLI 2 grant cycle will be held in late May/early June.

We invited directors of several interested organizations to co-sponsor a meeting on Authenticity of Internet Resources which AMICO will host in the fall. We will invite vendors and providers of watermarking and object identification/registration systems to that meeting and use it as the occasion for AMICO members to decide their collective policies on the marking of authoritative data.

Last modified on  January 11, 2002