The Culture Grid is the UK aggregator for museum, library and archive metadata, run through the Collections Trust (CT). It currently hosts 3 million records from collections all over the UK and acts as one of the main points of aggregation into Europeana for English-language content.
After consultation to identify demand for the Culture Grid as a service and to develop options for funding it on an ongoing basis, CT have now set out a 3-part plan in partnership with Knowledge Integration, the developers of the platform and associated tools.
As of the 30th April, the Culture Grid was closed to new accessions. The service website will be archived (http://www.culturegrid.org.uk). The API and index will remain accessible so that applications and services which use sector data from the Culture Grid will continue to function for the foreseeable future (and the dataset will continue to be available for hacks and other development events). Europeana contributions will be via a 'dark' aggregator which we will continue to host.
UK organisations wishing to contribute data to Europeana will be able to do so using the aggregator which was developed alongside the Europeana Connection Kit (ECK) last year. The aggregator accepts data in the format (a profile of LIDO) produced by the ECK, which has been or is in the process of being integrated into most SPECTRUM Partner software platforms. It allows you to select records, associate them with permissions and batch-submit them for ingest into Europeana via the 'dark' aggregator. For further information about the ECK, see CT's blog post (http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/home/eck).
As part of our future planning, CT would like to invite a community discussion about the value of and support for metadata aggregation. A great deal has been learnt in the first wave of aggregation-based projects, and it would be interesting to know whether there is an appetite in the UK/MCG network for developing these platforms as a community.
Some of the biggest challenges in sustaining an aggregation platform are resourcing quality-assurance and end-user support, and it ought to be possible to develop a self-supporting community around aggregation and online collections search to help overcome these challenges.
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