Abstract
museum-digital (md) is a non-profit initiative aimed at enabling museums to easily and efficiently manage and publish their data collaboratively. Today, over 1000 museums - mostly from Germany, Hungary, and Ukraine - publish their data using museum-digital, whereas over 400 also use it for collection management. As a higher data quality significantly benefits any meaningful publication of museum data it is a central issue in md's the development.
Using a shared data model roughly based on LIDO for all participating museums allowed for the development of a range of strategies and tools to improve data quality will be presented in this paper. Strategies include the definition of shared minimum requirements for the overall recording and publication of records, the use of a shared and centrally curated set of controlled vocabularies and an emphasis on selection lists. Specific tools include the quantification of completeness object records' completeness, deduction of and warnings about likely implausibilities and automated suggestions for improvements. Finally an approach to making these tools as well as further conversion options available to any museums via a public API and web application is discussed.