Open Source Museum Apps

Museum apps are becoming more and more common around the world. Very few apps, however, are available as open source. Considering the public funding of most museums, it might be interesting to discuss whether our apps should be released to the public more often.

I know of three museum app codebases released with an open source license. Would love to find more examples – let me know in the comments!

Museum Victoria (Australia) released the code of their app Field Guide to Victorian Fauna in 2011.

Presentation at Museums and the Web 2012
Code
License used: MIT

Indianapolis Museum of Art (USA) released the code of their audio guide framework (iOS app, web app and authoring tool) TAP into Museums in 2012.

Code
License: LGPL

Kultur- og naturreise (Norway) released the code of their app project KNappen in 2013. About the release (in Norwegian).

Code
License: BSD

I hope that these are not the only cases and would love to add more to this list!

Update 1: The Swedish National Heritage Board released the code to their cultural heritage repository SOCH (Swedish Open Cultural Heritage) in 2013 and their android app Kringla in 2010.

Code
License: not specified

Update 2: the IMA (together with the Art Institute of Chicago) has also worked on a suite of tools for publishing online catalogues: OSCI Toolkit. Code on Github, license GPL.

Europeana releases all its projects as open source, including the iOS app Open Culture. Code on Github, license EUPL.

Comments

10 svar till ”Open Source Museum Apps”

David

2014-02-06

We’re not a museum but we do have access to the collections of hundreds of museums. Some of which were included in the Open Culture app. Like all our products the app code and underlying framework is open, https://github.com/europeana/openculture/wiki

The MUSE framework allows for plugging in other APIs than ours so if you don’t want to use our API plug-in your own and mash-up with other APIs!

Cheers,
David Haskiya

Europeana

Svara
1. Aron Ambrosiani
  
  2014-02-06
  
  Thanks for the input David! Didn’t know that Europeana used open source as well.
  
  Svara
Jakob

2014-02-06

Not museum as such but the danish Kulturarvstyrelsen (now replaced by a united called Kulturstyrelsen) made this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.codeunited.kulturarv&hl=da . Code here: http://codeunited.dk/#Kulturarv

Svara
1. Aron Ambrosiani
  
  2014-02-11
  
  Thanks! Will add it to the list.
  
  Svara
Seb Chan

2014-02-07

Cooper Hewitt releases as much of its codebase as it can on Github – https://github.com/cooperhewitt

Svara
1. Aron Ambrosiani
  
  2014-02-11
  
  Thanks! Releasing the entire collection database is pretty impressive. I do enjoy the experimental/iterative approach of your projects – hopefully that won’t have to change when the museum opens to the public.
  
  Svara
  1. Seb Chan
    
    2014-02-12
    
    The plan is to continue to iterate. We’re building a platform for the entire place and the reopening will be very much v1.0 with the intention of v1.1 shortly afterwards.
    
    Small pieces loosely joined – with most pieces open sourced on our Github account.
    
    Svara
bryan kennedy

2014-02-10

When you say ”App” do you mean mobile phone or tablet application developed for iOS or Android, only? I’m always a bit befuddled at how people break these down and use that term.

Regardless, there’s a great list of open source museum code here:
https://github.com/MuseCompNet/muse-tech-central

We’re quick to merge pull requests for new links.

Svara
1. Aron Ambrosiani
  
  2014-02-11
  
  Awesome! This is exactly what I was looking for.
  
  I meant ”app” as in native mobile app, yes, basically because a colleague of mine needed examples in that category. But of course other code releases are interesting too.
  
  Svara
  1. bryan kennedy
    
    2014-02-11
    
    Cool, I’m always curious how people define that term, especially in the museum/cultural world.
    
    Svara

Open Source Museum Apps

Comments

10 svar till ”Open Source Museum Apps”

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