Wellcome Library blog – a quick review

I originally wrote this a while ago, and a whole bunch of new content has been added by what seems like a range of authors, so it's worth checking out.

The Wellcome Library has a quite lovely blog. I like their 'item of the month', the way they're addressing common questions 'where do things come from', the list of latest aquisitions (though it's about as human readable as I feared it might be), a 'call for testing' when they've got newly digitised records up… it's a good example of transparency and the provision of access in practice. It feels a little as if you had a friend who worked there who sent on little tidbits they came across during the work. 

The site says it has (the uber-annoying) Snap Shots but it didn't seem to actually be interfering with my browsing experience when I checked it out today.

There's a Flickr stream too (though they haven't yet nabbed a name, so it's at the not-so-snappy http://www.flickr.com/photos/26127598@N04/) and it hasn't been updated since what looks like a big batch upload in May 2008. Some of the images are lovely, check out the human cancer cells, or neurons in the brain or historically important – such as the first DNA fingerprint.

They've just added Charles Babbage, I wonder if they have anything on Ada Lovelace they could highlight for Ada Lovelace Day.

Happy developers + happy museums = happy punters (my JISC dev8D talk)

This is a rough transcript of my lightning talk 'Happy developers, happy museums' at JISC's dev8D 'developer happiness' days last week. The slides are downloadable or embedded below. The reason I'm posting this is because I'd still love to hear comments, ideas, suggestions, particularly from developers outside the museum sector – there's a contact form on my website, or leave a comment here.

"In this talk I want to show you where museums are in terms of data and hear from you on how we can be more useful.

If you're interested in updates I use my blog to [crap on a bit, ahem] talk about development at work, and also to call for comment on various ideas and prototypes. I'm interested in making the architecture and development process transparent, in being responsive to not only traditional museum visitors as end users, but also to developers. If you think of APIs as a UI for developers, we want ours to be both usable and useful.

I really like museums, I've worked in three museums (or families of museums) now over ten years. I think they can do really good things. Museums should be about delight, serendipity and answers that provoke more questions.

A recent book, 'How does one become a scientist? : survey on the birth of a Vocation' states that '60% of scientists over 30 and 40% of scientists under 30 note claim, without prompting, that the Palais de la Découverte [a science museum in Paris] triggered their vocation'.

Museums can really have an impact on how people think about the world, how they think about the possibilities of their lives. I think museums also have a big responsibility – we should be curating collections for current and future audiences, but also trying to provide access to the collections that aren't on display. We should be committed to accessibility, transparency, curation, respecting and enabling expertise.

So today I'm here because we want to share our stuff – we are already – but we want to share better.

We do a lot of audience research and know a lot about some of our users, including our specialist users, but we don't know so much about how people might use our data, it's a relatively new thing for us. We're used to saying 'here are objects in a case, interpretation in label', we're not used to saying 'here's unmediated access, access through the back door'.

Some of the challenges for museums: technology isn't that much of a challenge for us on the whole, except that there are pockets of excellence, people doing amazing things on small budgets with limited resources, but there are also a lot of old-fashioned monolithic project designs with big overheads that take a long time to deliver. Lots of people mean well but don't know what's possible – I want to spread the news about lightweight, more manageable and responsive ways of developing things that make sense and deliver results.

We have a lot of data, but a lot of it's crap. Some of what we have is wrong. Some of it was written 100 years ago, so it doesn't match how we'd describe things now.

We face big institutional challenges. Some curators – (though it does depend on the museum) – fear loss of control, fear intellectual vandalism, that mistakes in user-generated content published on museum sites will cause people to lose trust in museums. We have fears of getting the IT wrong (because for a while we did). Funding and metrics are a big issue – we are paid by how many people come through our door or come to our websites. If we're doing a mashup, how do we measure the usage of that? Are we going to cost our organisations money if we can't measure visits and charge back to the government? [This is particularly an issue for free museums in the UK, an interesting by-product of funding structures.]

Copyright is a huge issue. We might not even own an object that appears in our collections, we might not own the rights to the image of our object, or to the reproductions of an image. We might not have asked for copyright clearance at the time when an object was donated, and the cost of tracing it might be too high, so we can't use that object online. Until we come up with a reliable model that reduces the risk to an institution of saying 'copyright unknown', we're stuck.

The following are some ways I can think of for dealing with these challenges…
Limited resources – we can't build an interface to meet every need for every user, but we can provide the content that they'd use. Some of the semantic web talks here have discussed a 'thin layer' of application over data, and that's kind of where we want to go as well.

Real examples to reduce institutional fear and to provide real examples of working agile projects. [I didn't mean strictly 'agile' methodology but generally projects that deliver early and often and can respond to the changing technical and social environment]

Finding ways for the sector to reward intelligent failure. Some museums will never ever admit to making a mistake. I've heard over the past few days that universities can be the same. Projects that are hyped up suddenly aren't mentioned, and presumably it's failed, but no-one [from the project] ever talks about why so we don't learn from those mistakes. 'Fail faster, succeed sooner'.
I'd like to hear suggestions from you on how we could deal with those challenges.

What are museums known for? Big buildings, full of stuff; experts; we make visitors come to us; we're known for being fun; or for being boring.

Museum websites traditionally appear to be about where we are, when we're open, what's on, is there a cafe on site. Which is useful, but we can do a lot more.

Traditionally we've done pretty exhibition microsites, which are nice – they provide an experience of the exhibition before or after your visit. They're quite marketing-led, they don't necessarily provide an equivalent experience and they don't really let you engage with the content beyond the fact that you're viewing it.

We're doing lots of collections online projects, some of these have ended up being silos – sometimes to the extent if we want to get data out of them, we have to screen-scrape our own data. These sites often aren't as pretty, they don't always have the same design and usability budgets (if any).

I think we should stick to what we're really good at – understanding the data (collections), understanding how to mediate it, how to interpret it, how to select things that are appropriate for publication, and maybe open it up to other people to do the shiny pretty things. [Sounds almost like I'm advocating doing myself out of a job!]

So we have lots of objects, images, lots of metadata; our collections databases also include people, events, dates, places, businesses and organisations, lots of qualified information around things like dates, they're not necessarily simple fields but that means they can convey a lot more meaning. I've included that because people don't always realise we have information beyond objects and object metadata. This slide [11 below] is an example of one of the challenges – this box of objects might not be catalogued as individual instruments, it might just be catalogued as a 'box of stuff', which doesn't help you find the interesting objects in the box. Lots of good stuff is hidden in this way.

We're slowly getting there. We're opening up access. We're using APIs internally to share data between gallery interactives and the web, we're releasing them as data points, we're using them to provide direct access to collections. At the moment it still tends to be quite mediated access, so you're getting a lot of interpretation and a fewer number of objects because of the resources required to create really nice records and the information around them.

'Read access' is relatively easy, 'write access' is harder because that's when we hit those institutional issues around authority, authorship. Some curators are vaguely horrified that they might have to listen to what the public have to say and actually take some of it back into their collections databases. But they also have to understand that they can't know everything about their collections, and there are some specialist users who will know everything there is to know about a particular widget on a particular kind of train. We'd like to capture that knowledge. [London Transport Museum have had a good go at that.]

Some random URLs of cool stuff happening in museums [http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/, http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/menu.php, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections/, http://objectwiki.sciencemuseum.org.uk/] – it's still very much in small pockets, it's still difficult for museum staff to convince people to take what seems like a leap of faith and try these non-traditional things out.

We're taking our content to where people hang out. We're exploring things like Flickr Commons, asking people to tag and comment. Some museums have been updating collections records with information added by the public as a result. People are geo-tagging photos for us, which means you can do 'then and now' mashups without a big metadata enhancement budget.

I'd like to see an end to silos. We are kinda getting there but there's not a serious commitment to the idea that we need to let things go, that we need to make sure that collections online shareable, that they're interoperable, that they can mesh with other things.

Particularly for an education audience, we want to help researchers help themselves, to help developers help others. What else do we have that people might find useful?

What we can do depends on who you are. I could hope that things like enquiry-based learning, mashups, linked data, semantic web technologies, cross-collections searches, faceted browsing to make complex searches easy would be useful, that the concept of museums as a place where information lives – a happy home for metadata mapped around objects and authority records – are useful for people here but I wouldn't want to put words into your mouths.

There's a lot we can do with the technology, but if we're investing resources we need to make sure that they're useful. I can try things in my own time because it's fun, but if we're going to spend limited resources on interfaces for developers then we need to that it's actually going to help some group of people out there.

The philosophy that I'm working with is 'we've got really cool things, but we can have even cooler things if we can share what we have with everyone else'. "The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else". [This quote turns out to be on the event t-shirts, via CRIG!] So that said… any ideas, comments, suggestions?"

And that, thankfully, is where I stopped blathering on. I'll summarise the discussion and post back when I've checked that people are ok with me blogging their comments.

[If the slide show below has a brown face on a black background, it's the right one – slideshare's embed seems to have had a hiccup. If it's not that, try viewing it online directly.]

[My slide images include the Easter Egg museum in Kolomyya, Ukraine and 'Laughter in Odd Places' event at the Museum of London.]

This is a quick dump of some of the text from an interview I did at the event, cos I managed to cover some stuff I didn't quite articulate in my talk:

[On challenges for museums:] We need to change institutional priorities to acknowledge the size of the online audience and the different levels of engagement that are possible with the online experience. Having talked to people here, museums also need to do a bit of a sell job in letting people know that we've changed and we're not just great big imposing buildings full of stuff.

[What are the most exciting developments in the museum sector, online?] For digital collections, going outside the walls of the museum using geo-location to place objects in their original context is amazing. It means you can overlay the streets of the city with past events and lives. Outsourcing curation and negotiating new models of expertise is exciting. Overcoming the fear of the digital surrogate as a competitor for museum visits and understanding that everything we do builds audiences, whether digital or physical.

Clay Shirky on 'mass internet collaboration' at London's ICA

There are my rough notes from Clay Shirky's talk on 'mass internet collaboration' and the question and answer session afterwards at the ICA on February 4 – I haven't had time to tidy them, so they really are pretty much 'as is', though I have checked my note-taking against my digital voice recorder. I have cheekily highlighted bits I found particularly interesting. I asked a question about museums at the very end, just keep scrolling.

I've put some photos (mostly of slides) up on Flickr.

Introduction – it's a speculative talk, looking at recent events, lessons from the Obama campaign and his early government.

Technology is having profound effect on the social environment. The recession means fairly significant choices this year.

The five word summary of his book 'Here Comes Everybody': group action just got easier. Devices, tools and the applications built on them have provided an antidote to some of the hassle factor when organising groups of people to do something.

What happens when you lower the cost of socialising, whether for amusement or to achieve something?

First example – no pants day. The group Improv Everywhere provided a place and time where people would show up. There was no technology in the event. The event could only happen, make sense, have the effect it had, in the real world. And yet it's the kind of event that couldn't have happened in any other time. To coordinate something like this globally, could only work if event organisers had access to a medium that's global, ubiquitous and social.

'No pants day' only works if a lot of people show up, it has to be a social event. Network technology isn't just another slice of the pie, it's the medium. The technology makes it possible but is not embedded in event itself, just the coordinating mechanism. He's used an intentionally trivial example [to introduce] the 'third sector'.

It's tough to get people to do anything, and there are two mechanisms for doing it. If you ask, can you get more revenue than it costs to do it, then it's the private sector. Or is there significantly high social value? Then it's the state, public sector.

That dichotomy has been a 'universal truth'. But the triviality of something like no pants day means no social cause or revenue. So it falls into the 'social sector'. We now have such low cost abilities to get groups of people doing things together that question is not about profit or social value, but 'would it be fun or interesting?'. The logic of social sector is 'why not do it?'.

Pressure on traditional institutions is growing because presence of social sector means the previous monopoly on group action is being challenged.

New models of production are going to challenge… things considerably more important than whether people are wearing their pants on the subway.

Chris Avenir's study group example. It caused a clash between world views, metaphors – arguments about what Facebook is – is it like a newspaper, or an extension of real world social life. The problem with metaphor is that it flattens whatever is most important about the question being asked. It turns out that Facebook is like Facebook.

It's not a question which of our old behaviours do we layer over this possibility, how do we update academic culture to take account of this. The physical limit imposed by the space where real world study group took place prevented freeriders because they were easy to detect and kick out. 'Small groups defend themselves quite well against freeriders. Larger groups don't'. A network works because it's freerider-tolerant, not freerider-resistant. This is pedagogically problematic in a study group.

Two messages – one to students about progress through discourse, one to outside world saying you get a student filled with knowledge. Facebook caused those two messages to collapse. There's no easy solution to this.

The capability for large-scale geographically unbound learning is something academe can't integrate without changing dramatically, but it's also something they can't forgo. [I'd be interested to know what the UK's Open University feels about this.]

Power to engage is not with the academy, it's with the students. The change being brought to the institution isn't being brought by the people who run the institution, but by the members of the institutions acting as individuals.

Next example – Gnarly Kitty, a student in Bangkok with a personal blog which was suddenly swamped with attention during the Thai coup. "We're not used to seeing things that are in public but not for the public". Change in logic – why not publish it. When the Thai coup happened, the media didn't report it, so this blogger was the first person to get pictures of tanks in Bangkok out of Thailand. Her blog became conduit of news and images from in and outside Thailand. When she went back to talking about phones she'd like, commentators didn't like it. Her response – "This blog is my personal blog where I usually write things concerning my life and things I like. … I'll continue posting about the Coup whenever there are crucial updates that need attention but I will not make any political comment or turn the whole blog into a politic-centric one."

There's no way to square that kind of amateur motivation with what we're used to. Journalism is moving from a profession to an activity. The blogger committed an act of journalism, and it mattered on a global scale. There will be occasionally people like Gnarly Kitty who commit occasional acts of journalism. "Occasional times a billion is a lot".

The infrastructure where journalism operates has changed, not because of choices made by existing journalists, but the environment in which journalistic institutions has changed because of things like this.

Next example – the Obama campaign and win. It's has transformed not just what's possible, it's also changed people's sense of what's possible. In 2006 you could not have found a bookie in the States who would have taken your money on a bet for a black president. The mainstream media couldn't report Obama as a significant possibility because then they would be seen to be shilling for him. There was a sense of 'noble but doomed' in their reporting in 2006/07.

A few things happened to change this. Will-I-AM's video had 16 million views on YouTube by early 2007. "It made Obama seem possible". It shifted perception so people thought 'maybe that could happen'. Because in politics, perception is reality, so that change of making Obama seem possible had the circular effect of making Obama be possible.

The Obama campaign did not commission or vet the video. Will-I-Am did not need permission. Obama is "the first platform candidate". First to send a message to the public that said, this is my message and this is how it's conveyed. They gave implicit permission and the materials were all re-use and re-mix friendly. Sometimes the friendliness was quite explicit – Creative Commons licenced – sometimes it was just that you could see how to do it. It was easy to imagine how to make campaign media from it. Not easy to see how to do that for McCain, partly because his campaign was in terror of loss of control. The McCain campaign's idea of outreach was making copy and paste comments available. People who weren't political professionals were able to participate.

'Sing for change' video – a school teacher had kids sing a song she'd written. "It was a horror" to see people who weren't old enough to vote repeat words in unison that an adult had put into their mouth. Teacher clearly thought she was doing the right thing. The reaction was instant.

You can take down a URL but you can't take back a video that's out. Copies were annotated and remixed by Republican commentators (this was the height of remix in McCain's campaign).

But – no-one blamed Obama. There wasn't the implicit sense that 'if your name is on it, you must control it', if we don't like it it's your fault. Old media rules no longer applied to new media landscape. ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) meetup case. "If it's got our name on it, we have to police it as tightly as if it came from central office".

Those days have passed. The adoption of these tools by people repurposing… [?]

"You can't give up control without that control going somewhere." There's no real way to embrace these tools without embracing a kind of two-way responsibility to the people who make most passionate use of it.

MyBarackObama (myBO) – they didn't use Facebook because Facebook is too satisfying. They didn't want to create a satisfying experience because they wanted to drive their users to do hard work like hold meetings, go out and get votes.

Facebook groups [are practically] 'shout outs for ending world hunger'. It's not clear how the link between joining and the nominal effect is actually happening, but the act of joining is satisfying and means people don't actually take any further action. MyBO was utilitarian about putting people together, forming groups to do things.

When Obama reversed his position on a particular bill, the principal challenge to that behaviour came from MyBO. The ingenious trick was to make the act of joining the group against signing the bill be a vote for the message of the group. Obama was forced to make a public response – he took the flack for it but didn't change his support for the bill.

This holding to account of a politician by their own supporters was a watershed moment. There was a cynicism that this was propaganda, until people saw that his own supporters were willing to call him out in his own forum, and that the Obama people didn't shut it down or try to hide the response.

Will he govern like he campaigned? He ran his candidature as a platform, the user-generated media was significantly value, created useful feedback loops. Because he's engaging the passion of the supporters rather than a 'managerial relationship', he has to respond publicly when they're angry. How much of this is going to carry over into his administration?

change.gov was the site of the transition team
which asked, 'what should our administration be concentrating on?'. You could make a suggestion or vote on other people's suggestion. First issue to the top, and it stayed that way the whole time, was 'please legalise medical marijuana'.

That has been a real comeuppance [for Shirky]. Democratic legitimacy of participation over the internet, lowered barriers to political participation seemed to be a good thing. Yet when he sees this, in the context of economic crisis, wars, etc – how can they think the marijuana thing is what he wants the first day administration to focus on.

[I thought about this later – could some of this be because the mass of ordinary people don't feel capable of making or voting on suggestions for complicated specialist issues like the economy? Was there a long tail of more 'serious', nuanced suggestions focused on pressing economic, foreign policy, social and environmental issues? It'd be interesting to find out.]

Democracies don't just have votes because they allow the group to come to some kind of wisdom of crowds, they also have votes to legitimate the results of a decision. We want to rely on voting to legitimate the outcome, but when we see medical marijuana at the top of change.gov, we can't.

[It took me a while to get this – that votes on change.gov could be regarded as being as real as votes cast in the ballot box, or in a town hall meeting. Before this, I'd assumed everyone thought of internet votes as not being worth the paper they were printed on. Some of it's probably a cultural issue, having grown up with compulsory voting (well, you had to turn up, what you did with your paper before you put it in the box was up to you). Of course it's different in the UK and the US.]

Three options for dealing with this – 1) when we get broad national participation in digital plebiscites, it would be like directing democracy into the veins of the country. He's not willing to legitimate medical marijuana as the choice of the American people, it's clearly just another pressure group.

2) treat it as a PR exercise. But if you cherry pick what you take seriously, you haven't altered the political [landscape?].

3) figure out how to drag this kind of participation into the world of checks and balances. Isometric tension among competing interests. Can't currently say on the internet that are sure that everyone voted and that those votes around counted accurately, then can't yet integrate into democratic processes.

These tools don't gradually spread into a culture, they gradually spread under radar then are cemented in a time of crisis [?]. Some things (the kinds of surveillance) we relied on journalists for have been remanded to camera-phone carrying public.

2009 [will see] considerable integration, adoption, of these tools around the fact that people are groping for new models… and processes? Look back on a time when made decisions considerably more momentous [than medical marijuana?]

How do we open this up to new participation without opening up to dramatic system gaming or significant problems of delegitimisation?

The end!

Questions
Qu: what happens to organisations in this time of change? When you only have a choice of hiring old style command-and-control journalists but want to change.
Ans: depends on organisation. Laws on Obama's desk to sign are published online five days before they're signed, five long days with press hounding you if you're trying to sneak through a 'bridge to nowhere' bill. The risk is that Americans, not having much knowledge of government, won't know where to put the blame if they see a bill they don't like. Pressure should be put back onto Congress but risk is that Obama will be blamed for signing bills people don't like. Lesson is – there's no way to change institutions in a low stakes way.

We hope Obama goes the whole hog and adopts the 'fail fast, learn more' model rather than betting whole farm on single institutional change. Institutions are homeostatic. A lot of it is going to be about process rather than personality.

Qu: should we be setting up a series of codes of practice for deployment of social media in public spaces [good question].
Ans: Essentially yes. The question is, to what degree should lawyers be involved? He's been doing research on internet and generosity, the effect of culture on that. The Invisible College – an attempt in England to internalise scientific practice. 'This is how you write end results, share them, how the conversation should go'. They went after alchemists for failing to be informative when they were wrong, it was ok to be wrong but they wanted them to think about and share what went wrong. It wasn't a government thing but the benefit to England has been extraordinary. Today's event flyer said 'we encourage you to take pictures, etc', but if went to lawyer, got a series of waivers, processes, announcements, etc – would make less progress in slower time to smaller effect. Difference between institutions that encourage photo taking, blogging, etc, and those that don't, should start playing out.

Maybe we don't need to write down code of conduct, just make it a social norm at events with things like back of program. [But does that allow for negotiation of different needs? I have a friend who blogs semi-anonymously and photos at events would blow that for her. I just hate being photographed, and especially being photographed and tagged or otherwise identified – how does that work for me? I guess we're working it out on places like Facebook, where one tag-happy friend has gradually learnt that we'll all freeze her out when she approaches with her camera because no-one wants to spend the next morning un-tagging photos. But I can't un-tag a photo someone else has labelled on Flickr.]

Qu (Danny) – Reagan's war on drugs had significant effect in US, so why does medical marijuana delegitimate change.gov?
Ans – in terms of issue, the war on drugs was catastrophe, would like to see it solved. But in change.gov it's the difference between the number of people who are interested and the degree to which a small group of people is interested. The history of democracy is figuring out how to balance relatively small, well organised groups with interests of large, relatively disorganised groups. I don't trust that in a general poll that result would be in top ten of concerns of American public. The intensity of people who believe in that issue, doesn't translate into 'this is the thing that legitimates the administration spending its time on that issue'.

Digg is rife with system gaming, but it doesn't matter because it's a self-contained media outlet. The benefit of market is that if you don't like Digg you can switch to another service. We can't switch governments. The things we use to legitimate stuff like Digg isn't the same as legitimating an internet plebiscite.

We're at the point where majority of people in highly developed countries have internet, but that doesn't rise to level of serious voting.

Qu: three options on medical marijuana. Healthy communities seem to be comfortable with having 'thousand pound gorilla' moderation – why can't take a leaf out of that (book)?
Ans: the mechanism that works best on internet and open source communities is 'benevolent dictatorship'. Linus Torvalds, even Jimmy Wales. Benevolent dictatorship works in internet environment and not in real world because of the threat of both switching and forking. Switching – benevolent dictatorship is mediated cos if your population doesn't like what you're doing, they can up sticks and move to another project. Or they take entirely of your project and start a completely new version (forking). It's only happened a few times but all benevolent dictators are aware of it.

You can't switch or fork real estate. People who are dissatisfied can't easily move. The things that keep open source projects working can't be trivially ported into real world environment. So everybody who lives in geographic range lives in particular regime – it's a different set of problems. Do-ocracy model (do more, get more benefit than people who just talk about code). The last step is bigger gap than imagined.

Qu: kinds of new models coming out of current crisis? Revolutionary new business models, give us a clue what's next?
Ans: he tries not to use word revolutionary. Linus Torvalds and Jimmy Wales's first message to world about wikipedia and linux were incredibly modest. No claims about altering the world, just 'give it a try'. Claims to revolution are orthogonal, inversely proportional to the likelihood of revolution.

With that caveat, he's watching logic of peer-to-peer networking apply to other things where there's a high degree of centrality and resource that actually exists at the edges. In a recession, most important thing with that characteristic is money. Mutualisation in US, re-mutualisation in Britain.

Prosper.com – peer-to-peer lending. Suddenly have pool of people watching you to make sure doing right thing with whatever you borrowed the money for. People willing to go through that, emotional connection better guarantor than model of risk? But seen how other models of risk have played out. Body shutting that down have missed three huge things within their charter – the SEC is no good at detecting challenges within the status quo, but they're very good at detecting challenges to the status quo.

So to what degree will mutualisation happen? To what degree will the government get in or stay out of the way?

Qu: contrast between marijuana e.g. and myBO FISA bill issue?
Ans: this gets to concerns about change.gov. When campaigning, Obama was answerable to supporters. When president, he's answerable to everyone, including people who aren't part of his community. The FISA telecomms bill was an internal argument that doesn't have national ramifications. Once you govern, you have to govern everybody – that's when legitimation concerns kick in.

Qu: [me, sounding like a complete dork. I hate asking questions in public.] In a post-Smithsonian 2.0, post-Digital Britain world, what messages for holders of cultural content, (e.g. museums, television stations), how we can engage with third, social sector, and generally, what are our responsibilities?

An: it's funny, in US, museums are more privatised. So he thinks less in terms of language of responsibility and more in terms of language of opportunity. Smithsonian on Flickr Commons. They were excited and astonished to see that people were saying 'hey I really like this photo' but also 'this is a mailbox from 1840, here's a link to additional material'. The curation of material, not just appreciation, was broadened and deepened by that [outreach? ]. And yet, of the total holdings of SI, they've only got c6000 images out. This is in part because curatorial imperative is challenged by exactly this. As evidence that this is not worth doing, people point to 'oh, that's a nice picture' comments and say it's insipid, ridiculous. 'Go stand next to someone in a museum sometime!' It's not that people are saying these things, it's just you can (now) hear them, and you're desperate for earplugs because the curators have not had to hear them.

A little like the change.gov analogy – if nothing new were invented new tomorrow, we have all the technology [technological mechanisms] we need to treat holders of cultural content not as just repositories but as conveyers. Of conversation, additional curation, of re-use – the framework is all there. Legal, technological. If I was running one of these institutions, I'd spend more time worrying about the institutional change than the technological platform.

Saw something that might spread – room where group of designers were watching a webcam that showed a user trying to use a system. Meetup make someone who works in the design department watch someone trying to use their system *every day*. Can you imagine if Microsoft did that? 'You can't work here very long without encountering an actual user'. If I wanted to change an institution in the direction of thinking of yourselves as a convenor as well as a repository, I'd work on ways to get the encounter between the public and the professionals to happen. Not in a big conference, but just – for fifteen minutes you have to go to the gallery and you have to talk to somebody about what they just saw. Easy technically, hard institutionally. That institutional transformation is going to be the next big platform. [or ? that's coming]

And that was the end of questions.

At the time, I made a note of Need to Know's old slogan: They've stolen our revolution, we're stealing it back, but now I can't remember why.

'The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web'

Below is a quote from Wired's Chris Anderson on museum, curatorial authority and the long tail, from a Washington Post report, 'Smithsonian Click-n-Drags Itself Forward' on Smithsonian 2.0 ('A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age').

The quote really covers two issues – making failures and mistakes in public and leaving them there, and training external volunteers and experts to curate parts of collections, because no one curator can be authoritative on everything in their remit: "in exchange for a slight diminution of the credentialed voice for a small number of things, you would get far more for a lot of things".

I suspect this is a false dichotomy – there's a place for both internal and external expertise. The Science Museum object wiki doesn't mean the rest of the collection catalogue and interpretation has no value or relevance. The challenge lies in presenting organisation and user-contributed content in the same interface – can those boundaries be removed? Is it wise to try? And what about taking external content back into the catalogue?

This isn't a new conversation for museum technologists, but it's a conversation I'd love to have with curators. I've never been sure how the technologists who get really excited by the possibilities of sharing content online in various ways can go about working with curators to find the best way of managing it so that the public, the collections and the curators benefit.

Anyway, onto Chris Anderson:

The discovery of the "long tail" principle has implications for museums because it means there is vast room at the bottom for everything. Which means, Anderson said, that curators need to get over themselves. Their influence will never be the same.

"The Web is messy, and in that messiness comes something new and interesting and really rich," he said. "The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web. It says, 'We blew it, but we are leaving that mistake out there. We're not perfect, but we get better over time.' "

If you think that notion gives indigestion to an organization like the Smithsonian — full of people who have devoted much of their lifetimes to bringing near-perfect luster to some tiny pearl of truth — you would be correct.

The problem is, "the best curators of any given artifact do not work here, and you do not know them," Anderson told the Smithsonian thought leaders. "Not only that, but you can't find them. They can find you, but you can't find them. The only way to find them is to put stuff out there and let them reveal themselves as being an expert."

Take something like, oh, everything the Smithsonian's got on 1950s Cold War aircraft. Put it out there, Anderson suggested, and say, "If you know something about this, tell us." Focus on the those who sound like they have phenomenal expertise, and invest your time and effort into training these volunteers how to curate. "I'll bet that they would be thrilled, and that they would pay their own money to be given the privilege of seeing this stuff up close. It would be their responsibility to do a good job" in authenticating it and explaining it. "It would be the best free labor that you can imagine."

It didn't go down easily among the thought leaders, who have staked their lives' work on authoritativeness, on avoiding strikethroughs. What about the quality and strength of the knowledge we offer? asked one Smithsonian attendee.

You don't get it, Anderson suggested. "There aren't enough of you. Your skills cannot be invested in enough areas to give that quality."

It's like Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, Anderson said. Some Wikipedia entries certainly are not as perfectly polished as the Britannica. But "most of the things I'm interested in are not in the Britannica. In exchange for a slight diminution of the credentialed voice for a small number of things, you would get far more for a lot of things. Something is better than nothing." And right now at the Smithsonian, what you get, he said, is "great" or "nothing."

"Is it our job to be smart and be the best? Or is it our job to share knowledge?" Anderson asked.

Crowd-sourcing the translation of museum content into sign language?

We've been thinking about crowd-sourcing some British Sign Language (BSL) content for the Science Museum for a while now, particularly as we're running events with BSL interpreters and a new site ('Brought to Life') with some BSL content is due to launch in March. This post is both an attempt to think through some of the issues, and a question open to all – what do you think?

The idea
There are two related options – asking the public to share their translations of English text on the Science Museum websites or galleries into BSL with us, or asking people to contribute new content in BSL. Translations could include content like object captions (to view online or download to portable devices to take into the museum), exhibition information and interpretation, instructions for games like Launchpad – any existing content online or in the galleries.

Why it could be useful
Linda Ellis gave a presentation at the UK Museums Computer Group (MCG) meeting on 'Unheard Stories – Improving access for Deaf visitors' where she pointed out the distinctions between 'deaf' and 'Deaf', including that Deaf people use sign language as their first language and might not know English while deaf people probably become deaf later in life and English is their first language. Linda also said that Deaf people are one of the most excluded groups in our society. Deaf visitors surveyed for the Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service said they wanted: concise written information; information in BSL; to explore exhibits independently; stories about local people and museum objects; events just for Deaf people (and dressing up, apparently).

(More notes on Linda's presentation and a link to her slides are in this earlier post).

I saw a great example of BSL content in museums at the 2009 Jodi Awards. The British Museum worked with the Frank Barnes School and media company Remark on a project where young deaf people produced signed curriculum resources for young deaf people. You can find out more and watch the videos at British Sign Language videos about the Museum.

Video goes mainstream?
One uncertainty is whether possible contributors would be comfortable creating and uploading video. The popularity of products like 'You Tube ready' digital compact cameras and the Flip would suggest that consumers are comfortable with the idea of creating and sharing video online.

The 2008 Horizon Report suggested 'grassroots video' will be adopted in one year or less:

Video is everywhere—and almost any device that can access the Internet can play (and probably capture) it. From user-created clips and machinima to creative mashups to excerpts from news or television shows, video has become a popular medium for personal communication. Editing and distribution can be done easily with affordable tools, lowering the barriers for production. Ubiquitous video capture capabilities have literally put the ability to record events in the hands of almost everyone. Once the exclusive province of highly trained professionals, video content production has gone grassroots.

In terms of understanding the context and perhaps expecting video online, a report The Valley looks towards 2009 in the BBC quotes Jim Patterson, product manager at YouTube, saying:

"This generation of users utilize the web differently and consume video differently. They grew up in an environment where digital, interactive media was ubiquitous. It has shaped how they use the web."

And Mr Patterson said this new video generation has also shaped the very nature of how YouTube is being used.

"Comscore is estimating that YouTube is the second largest search engine," he said.

"To this cohort, YouTube is their search engine. YouTube 'is' the web. Seeking the answer to any question, they prefer that the result be expressed as a video, so they go to YouTube."

That last point – "YouTube is their search engine. YouTube 'is' the web" – is pretty damn important, regardless of any other issues around museum content.

My questions

  • Am I imagining a need that isn't there? Are there enough people with British Sign Language as a first language who are interested in content at the Science Museum to make the project worthwhile? Is BSL content about particular objects or exhibitions something d/Deaf visitors would find useful?
  • Would anyone out there be interested in creating this content?
  • Is there enough acceptance of internet video? Is it easy enough for the public to produce and upload their own videos?

What do you think?

Communicating subtlety and complexity (AKA 'yet another reason why museums should blog')

Interesting thoughts on how blogs could work for politicians in Political information on the web (some quotes below). The same arguments could be made for museums sharing information with the public about acquisitions, curatorial and interpretative decisions, and perhaps even using internal blogs to communicate management decisions with staff.

I'm using 'blog' as a generic term but an intranet page or 'what we thought about when putting together this exhibition' section might work equally well for different contexts. The blog format is a good choice because the technology supports notifications and dissemination of new content, and because the context allows for an informal and discursive writing style.

Regardless of the technology, communication and transparency could be vital for the cultural heritage sector. Tough times lie ahead for UK museums as the effects of the Olympics and the global financial crisis on funding start to kick in. They also face on-going critique for being either too populist or too elitist, too willing to be sucked in by contemporary artists or berated for not buying artists while they were unknown and cheap, for not providing public access to their entire collections and for not commercialising enough content. Engaging with the public directly to explain how they balance these and other factors when making decisions may alleviate the effects of the tabloid culture that drives much popular debate and the cynicism generated by too much spin.

So, to the article:

The web also requires a very different style of engagement. If you are used to communicating through speeches, press releases and media interviews then you develop a certain style that may not work well on the web. Politicians are used to having to reduce (ad absurdium) their arguments on complex issues to five second sound bites. They are used to having their remarks taken out of context or twisted in a world built around readership at any price.

Blogging, by contrast, is conversational, personal, and can sustain a more complex debate. On a regional radio station or speaking to a local hack it may be suicidal to support the closure of a local hospital (for example), but on a blog it is possible to argue for things that superficially or intuitively may not make sense to local people – but that may make good sense when the full implications and subtleties of the situation are made clear. In my experience MPs live amongst very complex and confusing balances of interests, and many yearn to have a richer conversation with their voters about how they are navigating these waters. They'd like to justify the judgements they make but also to inform people and in turn receive informed views back. Most of them – not all, but most, and from across the political spectrum – became MPs to work hard for their constituents, and most do. In light of that, the web could be the answer to their dreams; it's not without risks, but it has the potential to raise the debate and to allow them to extend the conversations they have on the street, in care homes and schools, over a longer period and with a much wider audience.

The other aspect to this, and another important lesson from the recent US elections, is the way that technology can enable volunteer engagement and mobilisation.

So this means that not only can political parties engage with voters through good use of the web, they can turn supporters into activists, and coordinate their activity. IT-enablement could positively transform (and rejuvenate) political activity just as it has so many other walks of life.

However, of course I have to point out that there's no point trying to blog like that unless there's a commitment to communication and transparency from the highest level down, and an organisational structure that provides adequate resources for content creation and active audience engagement.

UKOLN's one-stop shop 'Cultural Heritage' site

I've been a bad blogger lately (though I do have some good excuses*), so make up for it here's an interesting new resource from UKOLN – their Cultural Heritage site provides a single point of access to 'a variety of resources on a range of issues of particular relevance to the cultural heritage sector'.

Topics currently include 'collection description, digital preservation, metadata, social networking services, supporting the user experience and Web 2.0'. Usefully, the site includes IntroBytes – short briefing documents aimed at supporting use of networked technologies and services in the cultural heritage sector and an Events listing. Most sections seem to have RSS feeds, so you can subscribe and get updates when new content or events are added.

* Excuses include: (offline) holidays, Virgin broadband being idiots, changing jobs (I moved from the Museum of London to an entirely front-end role at the Science Museum) and I've also just started a part-time MSc in Human-Centred Systems at City University's School of Informatics.

Open data, the BBC, and 'the virality and interconnectedness of the web'

Not surprisingly for an article titled 'The BBC can be an open source for all of UK plc', there's a particular focus on possible commercial applications or start-ups building services around BBC content or code, but it's also a good overview of current discussions and of the possibilities that opening up cultural heritage content for re-use and re-mixing might provide.

The article acknowledges the 'complex rights issues' around the digitisation of some content, and I suspect this one of the main issues that's preventing the museum sector opening up more of its data, but it's not the only one.

How do we move forward? Can we develop a UK-specific licence that allows for concerns about the viability of commercial picture library services and for objects without clear copyright and reproduction rights statements? Should we develop and lobby for the use of new metrics that make off-site visits and engagement with content count? Do we still need to convince our organisations that it's worth doing this, and worth putting resources behind?

How do we strike a balance between the need for caution that prevents the reputation or finances of an organisation being put at risk and the desire for action? Will the list of reasons why we're not doing it grow before it shrinks?

On to the article, as the BBC's work in this area may provide some answers:

The [BBC's] director general Mark Thompson has directed the corporation to think beyond proprietary rights management to a new era of interoperability that offers consumers wider choice, control and benefits from "network effects" – the virality and interconnectedness of the web.

Steve Bowbrick, recently commissioned to initiate a public debate about openness at the corporation, thinks empowerment could be as important as the traditional Reithian mantra, "Educate, inform and entertain."

"The broadcast era is finished," he says. "The BBC needs to provide web tools and a new generation of methods and resources that will boost [its] capital, but that will also use the BBC as a platform for promoting the individuals, organisations and businesses that make up UK plc."

This post is very much me 'thinking out loud' – I'd love to hear your comments, particularly on why we're not yet and how we can start to expose museum collections and information to the 'virality [vitality?] and interconnectedness of the web'.

London Transport Museum's Flickr scavenger hunt

I haven't looked at the whole site yet but I loved the idea so I wanted to post it while you could still vote (until 20 July 2008):

London Transport Museum is hosting a Flickr scavenger hunt on Sunday 6th July in Covent Garden as part of the events for the London Festival of Architecture 2008. Focusing on the transport network's quirky design features, in a race against time teams of photographers will have to unlock a series of cryptic clues in order to snap roundels, station murals and much more. Have you got what it takes to get all the shots and make it back to the Museum? Prizes for the first team back (with the most correct answers), and – voted by the public – the best team and the best picture uploaded on Flickr.

We're all suckers for museums

A lovely post on 'Why Museums Are Important to Me' that also contains a reminder of the need to consciously communicate properly with those outside the sector:

When you work in a museum you sometimes forget what it's like NOT to work in a museum. Museums can be very absorbing little worlds, because they have such odd functions and corners and people in them.

Museums might not offer the best working conditions in the world (especially if you work in a profession that's usually better paid), but there are good reasons why most people who work in museums love their jobs.