This project, the Museums and the Online Archive of California Project (MOAC), will investigate one of the most serious problems facing knowledge seekers everywhere, the geographic distribution and limited access to the collections of unique materials -- primary sources for research in all areas of our cultural heritage -- that are held in libraries, museums, and archives around the world.  We propose to solve this problem by creating a prototype "virtual museum archive" that integrates standardized "finding aids" for museum and library special collections into a single source, thus providing access to collections held by archives, museums, and libraries throughout the state of California.

        We will create this prototype within an existing online union database of finding aids, the Online Archive of California (OAC), which is being developed as a primary resource for the public, schools, and universities, enabling cross-disciplinary education and research. The OAC employs Encoded Archival Description (EAD), the standard for archival finding aids (in the form of an SGML/XML DTD) supported by the Society of American Archivists and maintained by the Library of Congress. MOAC will develop the first museum implementation of EAD in order to facilitate the integration of museum collections information into the state-wide OAC and to evaluate the EAD for providing collection-level access in the museum community.

        The MOAC prototype within the OAC will be comprised of EAD finding aids for 29 collections, including 73,099 item records and images. 8 California museums (the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the Oakland Museum of California, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCR/California Museum of Photography, Japanese American National Museum, Stanford University Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History) will join the University of California, California Digital Library and Bancroft Library in developing the testbed. This wealth of collections-related  knowledge contained in art, history, cultural, and anthropology museums in California will enrich OAC as a resource for research and education. MOAC's EAD finding aids will provide the detailed description necessary to search and navigate both collection-level and item-level information on the WWW.

        The MOAC prototype will be used as a testbed for the museum implementation of EAD, and, as such, it will be one of the first large-scale collaborative projects to attempt to bridge the gap between museums, archives, and libraries by providing standardized access to their collections in the same union database. The MOAC Project will attempt to achieve a number of goals through the creation and testing of its prototype. By successfully developing its EAD implementation guidelines within the context of the existing OAC Guidelines, the project will make it possible for the OAC expand to include more museums and more museum collections in the future. The project will also attempt to create a model for other library and museum collaborative access standards development projects. Another project goal will be to use the MOAC testbed to demonstrate that use of the EAD standard can help museums achieve maximum economy in the creation and preservation of digital information, as well as interoperability and durability of that information. The project will design its workflow so that it can be accommodated to many different types of institutions, both those that are technologically rich and those that are not. The project will test and compare both centralized and de-centralized models for both creating data and providing access to networked resources. The MOAC project will extend previous standards development work carried out in the library and museum communities for synergetic collaboration.

        MOAC has already achieved some progress toward our goals: 3 new collection finding aids have been contributed to the OAC, including 2400 images; the MOAC Technical Specifications for implementing EAD with museum collections has been drafted; and MOAC has been presented at the California Association of Museums, Art Libraries Society, and American Association of Museums conferences. 


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