A lightweight set of Django applications for managing and exporting collection assets, such as museum object records and their associated metadata.
The idea behind Ennigaldi is to provide a standards-compliant, open-source data model for cultural collection assets. The main goal is to have full compatibility with the Object Information Group in Spectrum 4.0 as well as the VRA Core 4 XML representation. A long-term aim is to build, on top of this, simple procedure registers for management actions upon these objects.
The name Ennigaldi comes from a late Babylonian priestess said to have organized the world's earliest museum.
The project aims to implement some of the functionality currently found in other proprietary or open-source software, while prioritizing the following aspects:
- Full standards compliance: the data model can be exported to various standard representations with minimal loss of information.
- Single setup and configuration: unlike other systems, which rely on complex interactions among a hodgepodge of software, requiring script-based installation and a dedicated virtual machine, we are looking to keep everything under a single piece of software and database to afford the systems administrator full control over the install and configuration process.
- Pluggable structure: by leveraging the flexibility of Django, the project can be customized and extended in various ways; for example, the built-in accession number generator can be replaced with a different rule, or skipped altogether.
Ennigaldi is currently in early development stage, but already provides a minimally functional implementation of:
- Object register entry, including a single title, basic information, dimensions and inscriptions.
- Automatic accession number generation following the Re-org standard promoted by the École du Patrimoine Africain.
- Output of a simple HTML detail page for each object, modeled after the SICG system created by the Brazilian national heritage institute, IPHAN.
The following features are required before Ennigaldi can be considered suitable for alpha release:
- Complete the Object Production and Description groups (Spectrum) implementation.
- Provide a web-based interface for starting accession batches, which currently must be done in the Python shell.
- Provide some sort of digital asset implementation for the objects, at the very least the ability to add a set of photographs with the proper metadata.
- Provide simple user registration and management, including versioning, possibly with Django-reversion.
Further improvements in the future might include:
- Spectrum Procedure support.
- Internationalization of the interface and of content.
- Geolocation support by means of PostGIS.
- API to integrate with various related systems, such as Tainacan or Mapas culturais.