Museum of London -- Collections Information Integration Module

One of the main issues facing museums when addressing the requirement for making their collections data available publically (both internally and on the web) is to enable a flexible approach to capturing extended descriptive data as part of core collections management processes. Additionally there needs to be greater flexibility in making data (both curatorial and contextual within specific projects) available to be shared/reused with a variety of internal and external services, each of which may have different requirements. The Museum of London has tackled this issue by choosing to implement `The Collections Online Delivery System' (CDS), of which the Collections Information Integration Module (CIIM) is a part. This paper describes the business and workflow changes together with the technical implementation, successes, failures and lessons learned during the current (and ongoing) implementation of the CIIM. The output from the CIIM is already being used to provide a subset of content via terminals in the new `Galleries of Modern London' (opened in spring 2010) and will be rolled out as a web presence (Collections online) by November 2010.