Project meeting (March 15, 2010)

Attending: Dick Moe, Andrew Doran, Lam Voong, Chris Hoffman
Lam described the work she had done with Susan to take a small set of accession records in SMaSCH, map a subset of fields to the CollectionSpace object schema, and pass a data file to Susan for loading.  Some person records were also loaded into the Person authority as were a small number of organization records into an enumeration.  This work helped surface some questions about committees, organizations and collectors.
Chris wants to take the preliminary mapping performed here and talk about it with the BNHM-IST Collections data working group so we can move closer to our goal of making some common decisions about data fields in order to facilitate data sharing and aggregation (e.g., via TAPIR and IPT). 
Lam noted there are fields in SMaSCH that probably don't exist in CollectionSpace.  Two things are going on here.  First, CollectionSpace schema are being developed as we speak. If there is something we think needs to be in the core scheme, we can bring it up.  Second, we are starting to learn how to customize a deployment of CollectionSpace, per domain needs and/or per institutional needs. It is certainly the case that some Herbaria fields will become part of a customized schema for natural history collections and/or botanical collections and/or the University & Jepson Herbaria's institution-specific schema.
Next Chris has developed a high level tool for estimating the size and complexity of a CollectionSpace migration.  In about 30 minutes, we filled out about half of the spreadsheet.  Chris will type that up and send back to Andrew and Dick to have them fill out the rest.