Atlanta, GA - March 20, 2014 - LYRASIS, the organizational home of CollectionSpace, has hired Angela Spinazze as the CollectionSpace Program Director. CollectionSpace is an open source, web-based collection information management system (CMS) for museums and other collecting organizations. It was developed by a network of North American and European partner organizations led by Museum of the Moving Image (MMI) in New York, which originated the project, and the University of California, Berkeley. LYRASIS became the organizational home for CollectionSpace in January 2014, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
As Program Director, Ms. Spinazze will work closely with the CollectionSpace Leadership Committee and the wider museum community to nurture a dynamic ecosystem that welcomes a variety of users from diverse practice communities, and that supports active participation in defining functional requirements and technical contributions. In addition, she will lead day-to-day operations of the CollectionSpace organizational home, including community outreach, staff and financial management, planning, governance, and coordination with other LYRASIS programs. Ms. Spinazze will begin her new role as CollectionSpace Program Director on March 25, 2014.
Ms. Spinazze has been an advocate for the integration of information technologies in museums starting with her first job at The Art Institute of Chicago where she was a core team member on the design, development, and deployment of a collections management system supporting the taking of a physical inventory of the collections. In her previous role as Senior Project Advisor and Domain Expert for CollectionSpace, Ms. Spinazze ran the community design workshops that informed the initial set of functional requirements (2008), and served as advisor and workshop facilitator for "Cultivating Shared Software Solutions Among Communities of Practice", the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant awarded to CollectionSpace in 2010.
Ms. Spinazze holds a Master of Arts degree in 19th-20th Century Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Ms. Spinazze has published articles on digitization, information technology in the cultural heritage field and metadata and information management standards.
"We are looking forward to Angela joining the CollectionSpace team and helping grow and sustain the CollectionSpace community and application to meet the needs of museums, historical societies, and other collection-holding organizations. Her wealth of knowledge about how museums and other cultural heritage institutions work as well as her first-hand experience with CollectionSpace will be an invaluable tool as we move forward," stated Robin Dale, Senior Director of Digital Services at LYRASIS.
For more information about CollectionSpace, please visit www.collectionspace.org or contact CollectionSpace@lyrasis.org.
About LYRASIS
LYRASIS partners with member libraries and cultural heritage organizations to create, access and manage information with an emphasis on digital content, while building and sustaining collaboration, enhancing operations and technology, and increasing buying power. LYRASIS is the organizational home for CollectionSpace. For more information, www.lyrasis.org.
