Organisations > museum organisations to do with information
International
- ICOM (International Council of Museums)
- ICOM's main site on the Web
- ICOM-CIDOC (International Committee on Documentation)
- CIDOC 's pages, a comprehensive guide to all its valuable services and publications
- The Virtual Library: Museums
- The Virtual Library of museums is the most complete listing of museums on the Web, and a valuable source of clicks for museums included
UK organisations
- Department for Culture, Media & Sport
- The UK government department responsible for funding museums, libraries and archives.
- MLA: Museums Libraries and Archives (ex Re:Source)
- The UK government agency for museums, libraries and archives. Useful strategy reports including one on ICT for museums. The MLA runs Cornucopia, a potentially useful but currently patchy guide to UK museum collections.
- The 24 Hour Museum
- the gateway to UK museums online.
- UK: MDA (Museum Documentation Association)
- The MDA develops and published SPECTRUM: the UK museum data standard, used in many countries. It is the UK advisory body for all museum documentation affairs.
- UK Museums Association
- Not really to do with museum information, but seems daft not to have it here. People often search this site for jobs, so this is a link.
- National Museum Directors' Conference
- A Netful of Jewels: New Museums in the Learning Age (pdf version) (html version) This influential report from the UK National Museums Directors' Conference set out the stall for funding digitisation for UK museums.
- Museum Computer Group: MCG
- The UK professional and information exchange group - meetings, conferences, useful mailing list
Canada and the USA
- CHIN (Canadian Heritage Information Network)
- CHIN is perhaps the longest established national museum information organisation. Try its excellent collections search facility.
- Virtual Museum of Canada
- Originally springing from CHIN, this is a multi-million dollar initiative in cultural digitisation from the government of Canada.
- MCN (Museum Computer Network)
- The MCN is the American organisation for those interested in all kinds of computing issues in museums.
- The Getty Standards and Digital Resource Management Program Institute
- works to develop standards and practices, tools and guidelines for developing, managing, preserving, and delivering information relating to the visual arts in electronic form.
Australia
- DCA (Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts)
- Comprehensive site relating to the ministry's arts, heritage and libraries responsibilities
- AMOL (Australian Museums On Line) ... in the process of becoming the Collections Australia Network (CAN)
- Wonderful website promoting and helping museums to develop their digital potential.
- Cornucopia
- Less than wonderful website, Cornucopia is supposed to be a guide to collections in UK museums. Great idea, but very patchy in practice.
Commercial
- UK: SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network)
- With startup funding from the UK lottery, Scran is an online learning resource service and educational environment with 300,000 images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media in or relating to Scotland. You have to pay to use the images; licensing deals have been negotiated for Scottish schools and some higher education establishments.
- Fathom.com
- Fathom was first established by Columbia University with a view to turning a profit from online courses and bookselling. The projected market for online learning resources never materialised (so to speak), but the website now contains an archive of the excellent free content that was always part of it.
- AMN (Art Museum Network)
- A media company serving the world's leading art museums - well, most of those in the USA anyway, and some from elsewhere.
- AMICO (Art Museum Image Consortium)
- Founded on the work of the GII's Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, AMICO is a group of about 35American museums that offers a collective license for digitised collections images for use by higher education organisations.
