This is partly an experiment in live-blogging a conversation that's mostly happening on twitter – in trying to bridge the divide between conversation that anyone can jump into, and a sometimes intimidating comment box on an individual blog; and partly a chance to be brave about doing my thinking in public and posing a question before I've worked out my own answer…
I've been thinking about the question 'if physical museums were never invented, how would we have invented digital museums?' for a while (I was going to talk about this at GLAM-WIKI but decided not to subject people to a rambling thought piece exploring the question). By this I don't mean a museum without objects, rather 'what if museums weren't conceived as central venues?'. Today, in the spirit of avoiding a tricky bit of PHP I have to deal with on my day off, I tweeted: "Museums on the web, social media, apps – stories in your everyday life; visiting physical museum – special treat, experience space, objects?". By understanding how the physical museum has shaped our thinking, can we come up with models that make the most of the strengths, and minimise the weaknesses, of digital and physical museums? How and where can people experience museum collections, objects, stories, knowledge? How would the phenomenology of a digital museum, a digital object, be experienced?
And what is a 'museum' anyway, if it's not represented by a building? In another twitter conversation, I realised my definition is something like: museums are for collections of things and the knowledge around them.
Then a bit of explanation: "Previous tweet is part of me thinking re role of digital in museums; how to reconcile internal focus on physical with reach of digital etc" (the second part has a lot to do with a new gallery opening today at work, and casting my mind back to the opening of Who Am I? and Antenna in June).
Denver Art Museum's Koven J. Smith has been discussing similar questions: 'What things do museums do *exclusively* because of tradition? If you were building a museum from scratch, what would you do differently?'. My response was "a museum invented now would be conversational and authoritative – here's this thing, and here's why it's cool".
Other questions: Did the existence of the earlier model muddy our thinking? How can we make online, mobile or app visitors as visible (and as important) as physical visitors? (I never want to see another email talking about 'real [i.e. physical] and online' visitors).
So, what do you think? And if you've come here from twitter, I'd be so thrilled if you bridged the divided and commented! I'll also update with quotes from tweets but that'll probably be slower than commenting directly.
Anyway, I can see lots of comments coming in from twitter so I'm going to hit 'publish post' now…
[Update – as it turns out, 'live blogging' has mostly turned into me updating the post with clarifications, and continuing discussion in the comments. I find myself reluctant to re-contextualise people's tweets in a post, but maybe I'm just too sensitive about accidentally co-opting other people's voices/content. If you want to share something on twitter rather than in a comment, I'm @mia_out.]
Re-visiting the results of the survey I ran about issues facing museum technologists has inspired me to gather together some great pieces I've read on museum projects moving away from detailed up-front briefs and specifications toward iterative and/or agile development.
"the process by which this game was developed was in itself very different for us. … Rather than an explicit and ‘completed’ brief be given to Digital Eskimo, the game developed using an iterative and agile methodology, begun by a process that they call ‘considered design‘. This brought together stakeholders and potential users all the way through the development process with ‘real working prototypes’ being delivered along the way – something which is pretty common for how websites and web applications are made, but is still unfortunately not common practice for exhibition development."
I'd also recommend the presentation 'Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Website Development' given at the 2010 Museum Computer Network Conference by Dana Mitroff Silvers and Alon Salant for examples of how user stories were used to identify requirements and prioritise development, and for an insight into how games can be used to get everyone working in an agile way. If their presentation inspires you, you can find games you can play with people to help everyone understand various agile, scrum and other project management techniques and approaches at tastycupcakes.com.
I'm really excited by these examples, as I'm probably not alone in worrying about the mis-match between industry-standard technology project management methods and museum processes. In a 'lunchtime manifesto' written in early 2009, I hoped the sector would be able to 'figure out agile project structures that funders and bid writers can also understand and buy into' – maybe we're finally at that point.
And from outside the museum sector, a view on why up-front briefs don't work for projects that where user experience design is important. Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path writes:
"1. The nature of the user experience problems are typically too complex and nuanced to be articulated explicitly in a brief. Because of that, good user experience work requires ongoing collaboration with the client. Ideally, client and agency basically work as one big team.
2. Unlike the marketing communications that ad agencies develop, user experience solutions will need to live on, and evolve, within the clients’ business. If you haven’t deeply involved the client throughout your process, there is a high likelihood that the client will be unable to maintain whatever you produce."
Finally, a challenge to the perfectionism of museums. Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress fame), writes in '1.0 Is the Loneliest Number': 'if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long'. Ok, so that might be a bit difficult for museums to cope with, but what if it was ok to release your beta websites to the public? Mullenweg makes a strong case for iterating in public:
"Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.
…
By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.
You think your business is different, that you’re only going to have one shot at press and everything needs to be perfect for when Techcrunch brings the world to your door. But if you only have one shot at getting an audience, you’re doing it wrong."
* The Merholz article above is great because you can play a fun game with the paragraph below – in your museum, what job titles would you put in place of 'art director' and 'copywriter'? Answers in a comment, if you dare! I think it feels particularly relevant because of the number of survey responses that suggested museums still aren't very good at applying the expertise of their museum technologists.
"One thing I haven’t yet touched on is the legacy ad agency practice where the art director and copywriter are the voices that matter, and the rest of the team exists to serve their bidding. This might be fine in communications work, but in user experience, where utility is king, this means that the people who best understand user engagement are often the least empowered to do anything about it, while those who have little true understanding of the medium are put in charge. In user experience, design teams need to recognize that great ideas can come from anywhere, and are not just the purview of a creative director."
In August 2010 I asked museum technologists to take a survey designed to help me understand and communicate the challenges faced by other museum technologists (as reported in 'What would you change about your workplace? A survey for museum technologists', and as promised, I'm sharing the results (a little later than intended, but various galleries and my dissertation have been keeping me busy).
There were 79 responses in total, (49 complete responses, the rest were partial). According to SurveyGizmo's reporting the survey had responses from 10 countries. The vast majority were from the UK (36%) and the US (49%), possibly reflecting the UK and US focus of the email lists where I publicised the survey. Respondents were based in a wide range of art, history, science, local authority/government, university and specialist museums (in almost any combination you can think of) and had a variety of roles, including content, technical, project managers and managerial titles. As reported originally, for the purposes of the survey I defined 'museum technologist' as someone who has expertise and/or significant experience in the museum sector and with the application or development of new technologies.
My thanks to the people who took the time to respond – I hope there's some value for you in this sampling of the challenges and joys of digital work in museums. I'd love to hear from you if you use the results, either in a comment or via email.
Question 1: As a museum technologist, what are the three most frustrating things about your job?
First response box:
An institutional culture that values curatorial opinion over the expertise of technologists
Bad management
Becoming impossible to do new work AND maintain existing sites.
Bureaucracy
Central ICT department not being supportive
Colleagues who think of things digital as somehow separate and of lesser importance
Committees
Convincing administration of the value of new technology
Difficulty accessing social networking sites/FTP/etc through Council systems
Funding (lack of)
Going over the same ground again and again
I spend a lot of time doing non-tech work, or helping people with basic IT issues
IT department not implementing effective change management and training.
IT dept walls
IT infrastructure – restrictions and problems
Image rights
Institutional IT provision
Justifying new technologies
Lack of Resources (People)
Lack of clear copyright procedure hampers the greatest ideas
Lack of committment reuslting in long drawn out meetings that never go anywhere
Lack of communication
Lack of decision making from senior management at early stages in the project
Lack of interest in updating technology
Lack of planning
Lack of power to influence major decision making
Lack of resources for web tools/infrastructure
Lack of understanding of what we (as technologists) are trying to achieve
Lack of updated skills in co-workers
Lukewarm funding
Overcoming bureaucracy and overly cautious policy to try new technologies in a timely manner
Pace of sign off
People assuming I know everything about every technology
Senior managment attitudes
Trying to encourage change for the greater good
Unreasonable objectives
Varying age of equipment
Working within IT limitations
Working within existing budgets
bureaucratic oversight
clarity & simplicity of goals
data migration
dfdf
fear of change
getting buy in from people who don't understand the technology
imprecise demands
insufficient staff resources
lack of communication between team members
lack of vision
lengh of time from concept to implementation (it is too long)
mmmm
no $$ for training
not being included early enough in planning processes
not enough time
reactionary IT managers
too many stakeholders and a very conservative attitude to sign off
unrealistic expectations
Getting the management of the museum to take the web seriously and use it themselves to try to understand it
The decentralized culture of our Museum. Each department is doing their own thing, which makes it difficult to access needs, plan for improvements, allocate resources and staff efficiently.
The little understanding colleagues have of the challenges faced (e.g. building a professional website is doable in 1 week with a 300€ budget)
Lack of understanding of digital audiences, trends, issues and technologies by those commissioning digital projects (I call it 'and then it needs a website' syndrome
The organizational structure of the museum. The IT Department should be for networking, desktop support and infrastructure but instead they end up being the ones who call the shots about applications and systems.
Integrating our technologies and ideas into the museum's IT infrastructure e.g. wireless hubs, installing software, updating software etc.
Second response box:
"shiny new toy" syndrom
Assortment of operating systems
Bureaucracy
Changing priorites
Enforcing efficient use of storage space (delete your DUPES!)
Excessive review cycles
Gaining buy-in from overworked staff who need to contribute to tech project
Getting curators to take the web seriously and want to use it
Having other people re-invent things I invented 10 years ago
Institutional IT provision
Institutional blindness to the outside world (i.e., "nobody actually trusts Wikipedia")
Interdepartmental Workflow
Internal "Ownership" of information
Justifying the expense/time of trialling and sharing new ideas
Lack of Finance
Lack of appreciation for the amount of work involved
Lack of funding
Lack of medium/long term visions
Lack of shared museum assets (inter and intra)
Lack of understanding of digital media by senior executives
Lack of understanding of my role at more senior levels and by my peers
Non-existent budgets
Ph.D syndrome.
Some staff negativity about integrating new technologies
Stodgy curators
Tempering desire with reality
Time to just 'play' with new technologies
Too many egos
Too many people involved
Too many tasks seen as top-priority without enough support to get them done.
Understaffed and underfunded
Unwillingness to try small cheap ideas (on the understanding that if they don't work you stop)
Upper management not grasping value of online outreach
Working in isolation
board and execs who are focused on shiny objects, not mission
dealing with the ramifications of technology decisions made by non-technical employees
entrenched views on how things should be done
funding and management structures that lead to short term, siloed thinking
inability to ack quickly and be flexible (cumbesome review process ties up projects)
inablility of coworker to understand projects
institutional resources
lack of staff time or positions alotted to technology (two minds are better than one)
mmm
no say over even how our web page is designed
not enough money
poor instructions
sparse training
tendency for time to get sucked into general office work
unprofessionalism
unreasonable expectations
unwillingness to fund projects
Lack of understanding in the wider museum of the work that we do and the potentials of technologies in learning.
People in museum administration often know less about technologies than their counterpart in the private sector.
Lack of training offered on national scale for those who are beyond beginner level with technology but not an expert
Not having admin rights to my computer and not being allowed to connect my own laptop to the work network
The expectation of a high-impact web presence without making the appropriate content available (in time)
Never knowing what others departments are doing, but still being expected to "fix" whatever when it goes down.
The little commitment others (even people asked/hired to do so) have towards social media, even after tons of workshops.
Turf wars – different staff not working toward a consensus; arguments are recycled and nothing is ever finalized
redundancy–for example, entering metadata for an image from an external source and entering it into our DAM
Funding is spread unevenly. New galleries might come with big pots of money but it's much harder to fund work on existing sites and sections.
Lack of IT understanding by other staff in the museum and in some cases a negative attitude to putting stuff online
Third response box:
"non-profit" pay and no insurance
Always defending my position to condescending curators
Assortment of learning curves among staff
Balancing the demands of day to day tasks with the desire to expand IT use
Bending commercial products to our own needs.
Communication barriers
Conflicting messages about the purpose of online – is it to generate income or provide access?
Cross departmental walls
Cultural stigmatism
Curators/educators living in the dark ages!
Difficulty finding funding/support for less visible tech projects (content architecture, etc.)
Division between web/curatorial/education/etc.
Everyone is scared
Explaining complex systems to co-workers with limited tech background
Getting "sign off"
Hard to sell technology (APIs, etc) to staff who just want their event on the homepage.
Institutional IT provision
Keeping up with web science/standards
Lack of by in by senior management
Lack of change management at institutions
Lack of communication
Lack of professional development
Lack of support
Little allowance to "try out" tech tools/software/web
No time to experiment and try out new things
Projects never finished
Reliance on external consultants
Secret stakeholders appearing late in the production cycle
Software provider lack of focus on end users and Web
That every bit of the organisation has to be involved in every project
Too much dependence on content producers, e.g. curators, gallery authors, education staff
Trying to get other colleagues involved in technology!
Willingness of colleague tech adoption
capacity of organizations to take leaps of faith
dealing with art historians
defining projects in terms of ROI
frequent interruptions during thought-intensive work
lack of adminstrative support in the way of $$
lack of forward planning
misunderstanding of implications
mmm
not enough focus on early prototyping before the tech comes in
not enough staff
not enough staff and too many things to do…
not enough time
passive/aggressive behavior
resistance to new technologies on the basis of their perceived danger/risk
strong aversion to risk-taking, which hampers innovation
supporting software that was incorrectly chose (e.g. retrofitting a CMS to act as a DAMS)
user incompetence
wide range knowledgement needed
Magical thinking about technology: somehow hoping projects will be cheap and cutting edge with few resources devoted to them
There's a web/multimedia team, but all the exhibition design is outsourced, so it's difficult to mount integrated digital projects (that work both online and onsite)
disconnects between depts in larger museums, that make it hard to get all those who could contribute to and benefit from digital projects really engaged
Irrational fear of open source; irrational fears concerning access to collection information and even low-res images.
The fact that doing "online stuff" means you have to solve every problem related to technology ("My iPhone doesn't synch my music, help!")
Convincing staff to use project results (this is true for some staff in key positions. Other staff happy to use the results)
my department uses a DAM system, but others outside my department won't use it but want access to the content archived there
Question 2: List any solutions for each of the problems you listed above
First response box:
$$ for training would be easy to get
Better IT training and also digital awareness training for all staff
Better investment
Better organisational understanding of the importance of project management
Better qualified staff – training
Circumnavigating IT when they sya can't do and supporting it all ourselves.
Cloud based
Creative use of budgets – taking parts from several budgets to make a whole
Education
Fewer and smaller
Focusing on the benefits of the new technology when presenting changes to staff
Good management
Greater funding support for equipment
Hiring further staff
IT managers who are less about security and NO and more about innovation
Improve communication by removing large egos
Keeping to meeting agendas and ensuring people involved are enthusiastic about the project
Long term strategy agreed at top levels to ringfence time and money for non-project based work
Lots of demonstrations
Make responsibilities of depts clearer
Meetings, Meetings, Meetings
More independence from IT
More staff!
Much clearer policy on approach to copyright, possibly by museums supporting one another
New, professionally trained management
Sack the lot of them and start again
Strict procedures and continuously stressing how things work and how they don't.
The acknowledgement at senior levels of competence and experience further down the scale
Training in Project Management
Upgrade technology to a consistent level
Willingness to learn
come up with your own
educate administration, show them how other museums are taking advantage, find funding
fundraising
no foreseeable increase in staffing, so no luck here
none in sight
planning
solutions that we have found or solutions we wish for? The questions is confusing.
steel myself to do it once more in a way that means they can't forget it
umm..if I had a solution I'd be rich :)
Adjust the expectations by explaining the process more in depth and always provide more conservative time estimates, and times that by 150%
We are now submitting a business case to our IT department for us to have access to these sites. Hopefully this will be widened in the future as Council's become more aware of the essential part technology plays in museums.
reallocation of institutional resources to recognise changing technological and social environment
Having highly-placed technologists who are trusted by the museum involved in projects at an early state can help significantly to teach the institution the value of technological expertise.
Advocate your work to anyone who will listen, get involved in projects from the beginning – and try not to let technology lead, only support good ideas
Rethinking contracting policies–especially for Web 2.0 services that are free–and approval processes
Look to private sector technology vendors for workflow and project management techniques and tools or hire consultants (voices from outside are often heard louder than those inside).
Second response box:
$$ we are given we do not always get
Allowing staff to make their own decisions
Cost effective training or events or 'buddying up' to share expertise and experiences
Crossover training
Don't tell, stay away from committees until you have something (good) to show
Encouraging positive comment and activity from outside
Establish an agreed level of autonomy and freedom for web projects
Fix to IT issues that take up so much of my time!
Fundraising specifically for technology as an ongoing need–not just project by project
Involvement of Technologists before design
More educated staff about abilities and weaknesses of technology
More funding and resources for projects
More rewarding work environment
More tech-savvy upper management (happened recently)
More training being offered via bodies such as Museums Galleries Scotland
More trust in teams
New, professionally developed board
Outside normzl dept relationships
Priorities either need coherent justification or to be realigned.
Reassigning permissions
Recruit more staff and do more work in house
Remove large egos
Request more specificity and detail
Speaking to people to explain the complexity and time necessary for project?
Streamlining Project Management
The creation of roles at a senior level with understanding of technology
Training for staff
Trying to get a pot on our web page for e-learning which displays and advocates our work.
agreement on acceptable standards for public facing databases
occasionally half-successful compartmentalization of time spent on specialized and general work
question assumptions
shoot the current managers
sponsorships
strong compromise with staff training
technology being an embedded part of the work, like education
would require a wholesale change in Museum culture – not likely to happen quickly
institution-wide training in Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc AND in newer more interesting tools for presentations (eg Prezi), data visualisation (ManyEyes, Wordle) etc
Increase levels of digital literacy through out organisation and sector by training, workshops and promotion
Write in the importance of technology projects to accomplishing the mission in strategic planning and grant documents and form interdepartmental teams of people to address technology issues and raise technology's profile and comfort level within the institutional culture.
make sure to 'copyright' my own inventions and publicise them before anyone else needs to re-invent them
Show them that colleagues in their field are using the same technology, once they're willing to listen, show how the results will help them, then make participation as easy as possible for them.
If, for every bit of unfounded, unresearched opinion, the technologist can counter with facts about how people actually behave in the world outside the museum, over (large stretches of) time this problem can be gradually allayed.
Presenting the case for how technology can do certain things really well and how it is best find the better fit than to force technology to be what it isn't
Our institution could benefit from professional training on effective communication, but it's not in the budget.
Organising lunches and other team activities to continuously explain and inspire people about new and social media
Third response box:
(Sadly) winning awards
Admin-down promotion of tech initiative adoption
Agreement on stakeholders and sign off processes up front – and sticking to that
Be very strict with project deadlines!
Better communications from the top
Developing a Museum Service strategy for everyone to use IT – like V&A have!
Education
Ensuring that people at senior levels support digital projects
Go and do. Prototype to prove point
Good management
Hired more competent users or remove technically-involved tasks from users
I think we need new ways of demonstrating value other than £s or people through the door
Identify internal skills before commissioning outside consultants
Improved communications – more vision
Informal brown-bag lunches where ideas are pitched and potential explained.
Inventiveness!
Longer timelines, adequate staffing levels
Look for oppurtunity to learn more and implement new systems that help with the day to day work
Make it as easy as possible to use the results
Museums need to start thinking more like libraries
No idea how we can make LA central ICt departments more helpful
Outsource all IT relating to web projects
Professional development for staff
Remove large, scary egos
Smile, help them, and complain in silence.
Some inovative young blood in these roles
Technologists in upper management
Try something small as a pilot to reveal realistic benefits and pitfalls
act of God
bringing techies into the development process earlier in a new exhibit etc.
ditto
effective allocation of scarce resources
rewriting job descriptions to incorporate tech initiatives into everyday tasks
specialization
there is no solution for art historians except possibly to keep them out of museums and galleries
time-shifting certain kinds of work to early morning or evening, outside regular hours
Trying to find public outputs of infrastructure-related technology can help with this problem. The way some museums have begun using collections APIs as, in essence, a PR tool, is a good example of this approach.
Selected responses to Question 3: Any comments on this survey or on the issues raised?
Some comments were about the survey itself (and one comment asked not to be quoted, so I've played it safe and not included it) and didn't seem relevant here.
Would like to know what other museum staff feel, but am guessing response may be very similar
There is still some trepidation and lack of understanding of what it is exactly that digital technology can play in display, interpretation and education programming. Though there are strong peer networks around digital technology, somehow this doesn't get carried over into further advocacy in the sector in general. In my learning department there is some resistance to the idea of technology being used as a means in itself working across audiences, and it instead has to be tied in to other education officers programmes. The lack of space to experiment and really have some time to develop and explore is also sadly missed as we are understaffed and overstretched.
Not enough time, money or staff is true of most museum work, but particularly frustrating when looking at the tools used by the private sector. This imbalance may be part of the source of unreasonable expectations – we've all seen fantastic games and websites and expect that level of quality, but museums have 1/1000th of the budget of a video game studio.
The interdepartmental nature of many tech projects has challenged us to define under whose purview these projects should be managed.
In my organisation I find the lack of awareness and also lack of desire to do things online difficult to comprehend in this day and age. It is not universal, fortunately the Head of Service gets it but other managers don't. I'm fed up hearing 'if its online they won't visit' and I'm afraid I've given up trying to convince them, instead I tend to just work with the people who can see that putting stuff online can encourage visitors and enhance visits for visitors.
Being a federal institution, we receive funds for physical infrastructure, but rarely for technical infrastructure. I would say fear around copyright of digitized collections is a barrier as well.
Until the culture of an institution of my size changes at the top, it will continue to be a challenge to get anything through in a timely manner.
Funding and resources (staff, time, etc.) are the main roadblock to taking full advantage of the technology that's out there.
There needs to be a way to build a proper team within the museum structure and make silos of information available.
I think the frustrations I raised are exactly the reason why some of us are in the museum sector – for the challenge.
We are fortunate in that we have a very forward-looking Board of Trustees, a visionary CEO and a tech team that truly loves what they do. But we – like any non-profit – are always limited by money and time. We've got loads of great ideas and great talent – we just need the means and the time to be able to bring them to fruition! We have actually rewritten job descriptions to make certain things part of people's everyday workflow and that has helped. Our CEO has also made our technological initiatives (our IVC studios, our online presence, our virtual museum….) part of our strategic plan. So we are extremely fortunate in those respects!
I am a content creator, rather than a technie, but as my role is digital, everyone assumes I understand every code language and technological IT issue that there is. And I don't.
why is it that those who are not involved in our work have so much to say about how we do our work down to the last detail
One of the largest problems faced by IT staff in museums is the need to push the envelop of technology while working within very limited budgets. There is always a desire to build the newest and best, but a reluctance to staff and budget for the upkeep and eventual use and maintenance of the new systems. That said, working for a museum environment offers more variety and interesting projects than any for-profit job could ever provide.
Phar Lap was a famous race horse. After he died (in film-worthy suspicious circumstances), bits of Phar Lap ended up in three different museums – his skin is at Melbourne Museum, his skeleton is at Te Papa in Wellington, NZ, and his heart is in Canberra at the National Museum of Australia.
I've always been fascinated by the way the public respond to Phar Lap – when I worked at Museum Victoria, the outreach team would regularly get emails written to Phar Lap by people who had seen the film or somehow come across his story. (I was also never quite sure why they thought emailing a dead horse would work). So when I first heard that Phar Lap was on Facebook, I was curious to see which museum would have 'claimed' Phar Lap. Does possession of the most charismatic object (the hide) make it easier for Melbourne Museum to step up as the presence of Phar Lap on social media, or were they just the first to be in that space? The issues around 'ownership' and right to speak for an iconic object like Phar Lap make a brilliant case study for how museums represent their collections online.
Of the three museums that own bits of the dead horse, which gets to publish the canonical digital record about Phar Lap? I hope the question sounds silly enough to highlight the challenges and opportunities in translating physical models to the digital realm. Of course each museum can publish a record (specifically, mint a URI) about Phar Lap (and I hope they do) but none of the museums could prevent the others from publishing (and hopefully they wouldn't want to).
Or as the various blog posts said, "many agents can assert an identity for an object, with those identities together forming a distributed and diverse commentary on the human past", and museums need to play their part: "a common identifier promoted by and discoverable at the holding institution will ease the process of recognizing that two or more identifiers refer to the 'same thing'".
Of course it's not that simple, and if you're interested in the questions the museum sector (by which I hopefully don't only mean me) is grappling with, the museums and the machine-processable web page on Permanent IDs has links to discussions on the MCG list, and I've wrestled a bit with how URIs might look at the Science Museum/NMSI (and I need to go back and review the comments left by various generous people). I'd love to know what other museums are planning, and what consumers of the data might need, so that we can come up with a robust common model for museum URIs.
And to reward you for getting this far, here is a picture of Phar Lap on Facebook as his skin and bones are about to be re-united:
To support the ambitious targets for increasing the number of item records in Culture Grid, we thought know would be a good time to review the venerable old application profile we use for importing metadata into the Grid. I've added a discussion page reviewing options at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/w/page/Culture-Grid-Profile.
We really want the community to be involved in helping ensure that whatever profile (or profiles) we support will meet the needs of users – not only for getting things into the grid but also for getting things out in a format that is useful to them. Although the paper focusses mainly on XML representations of metadata, we're also interested in your views on whether non-XML representations (e.g RDF or JSON) need to be supported.
So whether you work in a museum or are an external developer who'd like to use museum data, I'd encourage you to think about the four options Neil outlines, and to comment, ask questions, share sample data, vote for your favourite option, whatever, on the Culture Grid Profile page. One of the options is to develop a new model – definitely more time-consuming, but a great opportunity to make your needs known.
As an indication of the type of content that's available through the Culture Grid, I've copied this text from some of their aboutpages: "It contains over 1 million records from over 50 UK collections, covering a huge range of topics and periods. Records mostly refer to images but also text, audio and video resources and are mostly about museum objects with library, archive and other kinds of collections also included." So, that's:
"information about items in collections (referencing the images, video, audio or other material you offer online about the things in your collections)
information about collections as a whole (their scope, significance and access details)
information about collecting organisations (contact and access details)"
There's a lot of cultural heritage and tech jargon involved on the Culture Grid Profile discussion page – don't hold back on asking for clarifications where needed. I'm certainly not an expert on the various schemas and it's a very long time since I helped work out the Exploring 20th Century London extensions for the original PNDS, but I've given it a go.
If you've read this far, you might also be interested in the first ever Culture Grid Hack Day in Newcastle Upon Tyne on December 3, 2010.
This week I launched a survey designed to help me understand and communicate the challenges faced by other museum technologists.
It's research for a chapter in a forthcoming book on museums on the web and social media in the first instance, but I'd left the terms and conditions fairly open as I wanted to be able to share and/or re-use the data in future – I wasn't sure if this would put people off, but I figured it was better to be upfront than to end up with great data I couldn't share.
Someone wrote to me to ask what the questions were – they didn't feel qualified to take it themselves but couldn't see all the questions without starting the survey. I figure it'll also help with the bounce rate if I share them, so here you go:
1. As a museum technologist, what are the three most frustrating things about your job?
For this survey, I'm defining 'museum technologist' as someone who has expertise and/or significant experience in the museum sector and with the application or development of new technologies.
2. List any solutions for each of the problems you listed above
3. Any comments on this survey or on the issues raised?
4. What's your main job role? (if you don't mind it potentially being quoted)
5. Please enter your institution name and/or type (e.g. art gallery, history museum, local authority museum, science centre). (if you don't mind it potentially being quoted)
It's pretty simple – 'what are the three most frustrating things about your job' is the main question, the rest are aimed at providing just enough additional information to provide pointers to the effects of different factors. I didn't want to ask people for so much information that they'd be identifiable as I felt that might make people hold back. I thought about saying 'things other than lack of resources/time/money' as they're pretty much a given and they're not unique to the museum sector, but I figured they're also too important too ignore.
For further context, when I posted it to the MCG and MCN lists I said:
I'm particularly interested in opportunities and problems that arise when (new) technologies meet (old) museums. … Your answers will help build a body of evidence that could help make a case for improvements in the way museums understand the issues and expertise around using technology to engage audiences, or at least help us understand what the solutions might be. And at the very least you get to vent a bit!
I'm speaking at Open Tech 2010 (book your ticket now, only £5!) and it feels like the situation (and the mood) in the UK has changed since I first wrote my proposal and I'm not sure it suits anymore. So I wanted to throw a few questions open to you to help me re-focus on the things that matter now:
what do you value about museums and technology, particularly the web, social media, open data?
what do you want to know from someone working behind the scenes in museum technology?
what suggestions would you make if you were able to talk to museums?
what aren't museums asking our audiences (including our geek audiences) that we should be asking?
what's your favourite biscuit (or cookie)?
The title, by the way, is a play on 'ask a curator', an online event of some sort where you can ask whatever you've always wanted to ask a curator by using the hash tag #askacurator on twitter (or possibly also by commenting on a museum's blog, Facebook wall, twitter account, etc).
I’m particularly interested in finding the balance between a solution we can achieve in the medium-term and something that works with standards as much as possible.
It’s nearly time for the Museums and the Web 2010 conference, where questions like this might be addressed in one of the unconference sessions so I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This is very much a work in progress, and in fact I suspect it's not even the latest version, but hopefully at least it's more useful up here than on my hard drive, even in a very draft-ish state.
February, 2010.
This is a thoughts-in-development piece on how the Science Museum/NMSI could provide re-usable, interoperable, structured machine-readable data for use as linked data or APIs.
I'm including here things that we generally have enough information about for it to make sense for us to link them. I'll talk about ways to link to the rest of the world below.
Objects – we have lots of these. Yay! Each record is about a specific accessioned object. As you can see from the diagram above, objects can be related to everything else (and to each other, in various ways). An object might be as big and iconic as Robert Stephenson's Rocket or as small as a spark plug.
Types of objects – a more generic view. It allows us to solve two problems – our collections don't cover everything we want to talk about, and we have lots and lots of certain types of objects. So a page on spark plugs is a user-friendly layer of content about spark plugs for general readers and provides links to all 8000 spark plugs in the collection (I totally made that number up).
It lets us discuss topics that our collections don't cover comprehensively, and to create a user-friendly layer between the detail of our collection (8000 spark plugs) and general information about spark plugs.
[If you're not familiar with museum collections – coverage varies according to what was collectable or collected – our collections may represent fashions in history of collecting more than an ideal uber-collection. Unlike, say, an art gallery, not every single item in our collection is a precious and unique diamond – for the general user, it might be enough to know what we have some information about dental forceps and a picture of one – but for the specialist researcher, browsing our collection of 300 of them might be the highlight of their week. (Maybe).]
Places – in our collections databases, we can look at the place an object was made, used, designed, destroyed, collected, restored, redesigned, invented, etc, etc. People and events also have various possible relationships to places.
People/organisations – ideally, we'd like to Wikipedia for every person and place, but not everyone we refer to in our collections has Wikipedia notability.
Images – we also have lots of related images, which are a major asset but work better in relation to other things (like objects) than as concepts on their own.
Other hooks in our content include dates and materials – these might be particularly useful for facetted browsing or mashups made with our data, but don't particularly make sense as concepts on their own. We also produce contemporary science news through our (re-opening in June) Antenna gallery, and marking this up with hNews seems a no-brainer. Working out how to link to the original news stories, whether in Nature, the BBC, whatever, would be good – something we can build into the publishing platform (WordPress MU) to make it nice and easy for our content authors would be even better.
Linking concepts and microsites, creating a canonical object home
I'm proposing a model that should allow us to make the most of all the data we've got online already as well as designing around concepts.
[see notes below for some background]
As well as 'objects' as a basic concept, museums come with a handy set of stable concepts built into our collections management systems. Sometimes these are called 'subject authorities'. They cover things like people and organisations, places, events and the relationships between them. We often build various interpretative narrative layers on top of them – themes, topics, stories, whatever.
If we build permanent URIs around those concepts, we can link to them from the existing microsites. We can also wrap metadata around the elements already on the pages of those microsites so that the data is meaningfully machine-accessible in situ.
As an example, we'd have http://sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/1956-152 as the 'home page' for the Pilot ACE computer in our collection. This page would contain the basic 'tombstone' information – when, where, what, etc, and link to every known instance of the object in other sites, as below. These other sites might be exhibitions, subject-specialist sites, cross-institution collections. Often they'll contain information written specifically for that site, particularly tailored for its scope and audiences.
This object is represented in various microsites. The image below shows up we might mark up those sites with links to our Science Museum concepts:
The object home page could also link to the Pilot Ace page on Ingenious and on our Centenary site, and they could link back to the object home. They could also link to our Alan Turing page, National Physical Laboratory page, etc.
It'd be great if we could link to other content about that object – this BBC article on Pilot ACE is a pointer to more content.
Vocabularies
This is one of the places I get stuck… Do we go general or specific? There's lots of stuff out there for visual resources but that doesn't describe our collections well. There's some discussion of this on various pages here, including Authority Lists, Implementation formats, and RDFa (the names get out of control fairly quickly!).
Notes on URIs
Some of our accession numbers are going to make things difficult because they contain '/'.
On Wednesday [you can tell how long ago I started this because that was February 24] I went to the second London Linked Data meetup, held during dev8D.
For a while I've been wondering what we (Science Museum/NMSI) could do with linked data, but it's also taken a while for the issues to bubble up.
The first two issues are data standards and vocabulary. As the saying goes, 'the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from'. http://museum-api.pbworks.com/Implementation-formats and http://museum-api.pbworks.com/RDFa bear witness to the difficulties of… finding out what developers prefer to work with (if they care at all), finding out what other museums can output to try and get some critical mass going…
The third is machine-readable interface design. Tom Scott [Apis and APIs] advocates building APIs so that you're linking people to the concepts that matter to them, and making your website your API. I think this is the right way to go, but it's made trickier by the fact that we're not a greenfield site – we've got exhibition microsites that are over ten years old. We're gradually migrating all that data into a central repository, but it'd be good if we could make the data already online in those sites re-usable too.
Other earlier notes… When designing the Cosmic Collections API last year, I'd considered building it into the 'human-facing' website architecture, so that a device could request XML or JSON versions of the pages alongside the (X)HTML pages. In the end I went for a standalone API as an interim solution. The Cosmic Collections competition was designed in part to answer some of my questions about the formats preferred by developers.
Comments on the Science Museum linked data wiki page
This made me realise I've also completely missed out 'exhibitions' as a concept – we do cover this for current exhibitions to an extent, but there's a lot of information hidden in the choices made for previous exhibitions that could be useful. It also contributes to really making the object home the definitive resource.
And another comment – can you tell I should be doing something else today? It's all about constructive procrastination.
Richard Morgan from across the road at the V&A commented (http://twitter.com/rmorg/status/10831225400), 'linked data vocabularies tricky for me too. For V&A I'm tending towards just geo, foaf and dbpedia – more about links than data' which I think is a useful perspective. There is a level at which the precise application of term lists matters, but if it means we spend the next ten years trying to get it perfect rather than doing something now, I'd rather we did something now. The two aren't mutually exclusive technically, but pragmatically I only have limited time/brain space in which to get something done.
Mia, hi… I think you'll need to model both real-world objects and web documents as part of this. So, for example… for any particular artefact, say the lunar lander, you have the thing itself (a real-world object which is assigned one URI) and the description of that thing (a Web document which is assigned a different URI).
To get from the 'object' URI to the 'description' URI requires an HTTP 303 redirect response (unless you choose to use hash URIs).
The 'description' URI can offer multiple representations, e.g. HTML with embedded RDFa and RDF/XML.
I like your list of "URIs and concepts we could model" and the idea of how the web page about an object in the collection can be linked to relevant people, places, images etc.
There's a lot of scope for this approach to help people to explore the collection from different perspectives and via different dimensions.
Vocabularies: this is an area where it makes sense to re-use existing work where possible, but if there is nothing out there that fits your purpose, don't be afraid to invent a new specialist vocabulary of your own. It's easy (and normal practice) to 'mix and match' terms from multiple vocabularies/ontologies as required.
Thanks for your really useful comments, Bill. I've been horribly busy preparing for a conference next week but will respond properly when my feet are back on the ground!
Try to keep in mind that an important reason for publishing the museums artifacts, whether real or digital, is to enable data about them to be "meshed" with other data (from the museum and from elsewhere) and republished, possibly in unanticipated ways, and the "mashed" applications that are created from those datasets. So the answer to whether you are doing it "correctly" will depend on the feedback you get!
The most important thing for you to do is ensure that you make it easy for your community of users to provide you with feedback, wiki a wiki or whatever. Make sure this is obvious and easy, AND that you adapt as they provide that feedback!
You might consider using OpenVocab http://open.vocab.org/ as a means for your community to add new terms.
There's already a great authoritative reference for places: GeoNames Ontology http://www.geonames.org/ontology/ "over 6.2 million geonames toponyms now have a unique URL with a corresponding RDF web service"
I think we can add a point that a RESTful web services (esp. based on simple common standards like Atom) can be useful for bridging between more "Plain Web" design approaches and linked data approaches. Here's a<a href='http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/?p=497'> paper</a> I gave at the Computer Applications in Archaeology conference about this issue.
OK. Try this again, since HTML doesn't work in the comments.
Great discussion of the linked data issues.
I think we can add a point that a RESTful web services (esp. based on simple common standards like Atom) can be useful for bridging between more "Plain Web" design approaches and linked data approaches. Here's a(http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/?p=497) I gave at the Computer Applications in Archaeology conference about this issue.
These thoughts are my own "take homes" from the discussion, rather than any sense of the meeting's overall conclusions.
What data do museums have?
Database content, mostly fielded and designed mainly for collections management support. Textual materials, much of it in a non-accessible "grey literature" format. Images.
The database content is typically (reasonably) self-consistent within a given environment. Thus we have known properties (from the field name) with usable string values. The challenge from a Linked Data perspective is the cost-effective generation of URLs from the string values currently held, e.g. for people and places, given that different museums will have different vocabularies to control their content.
Who wants to use this data?
The public, who are typically interested in classes of objects (rather than individual objects), or in objects with certain properties (e.g. coming from a place of interest to them). Educators, or more specifically people who create resources for educators to use. Students, if relevant objects could be easily accessed as "follow up" to formal learning materials.
Notes on 7 July 2010 meetup (part 2) How do we improve the data?
There is nothing to stop every museum publishing URLs, and whatever associated Linked Data they have to hand, for each object in their own collection, and thereby giving them a "hook" onto which others can hang added-value information and assertions of their own. They should treat this task as an urgent priority.
Where possible, convert string values in data to URLs, ideally widely-used (not just local) ones. Could use e.g. geonames.org for place names, or dbpedia for object class names. Interest in Portsmouth's historical gazetteer for "old" place names.
There is a clear need for a sector-specific ontology which represents the properties found, i.e. the types of information recorded in museum databases. This will act as the "predicate" in Linked Data triples/assertions. It could be based on an existing agreement about these semantics, e.g. CIDOC CRM or LIDO.
Axis-based data such as geographical co-ordinates or dates/date ranges could be treated as purely numerical data, or "pixellated" by assigning a URL which imposes a certain level of precision (e.g. year for dates). Or both approaches could be adopted.
What's the museum take on Linked Data?
Simple assertions are not enough; we care about the attribution of those assertions (i.e. who is making the assertion). We also want a framework which allows the expression of uncertainty and doubt.
We are not particularly bothered about the specific format (RDF/XML, RDFa, JSON, Topic Maps) in which Linked Data is published, but we would like to be able to "do the job once" and have done with it.
Thanks for the minutes Richard – seems like it was a really interesting discussion – shame I couldn't be there – particularly as we've been working with the author of CIDOC to start mapping our data! Look forward to the next meeting. Josh
I been wondering about identifiers, pref. UUID types this sort of fits in where you have [insert museum-y discussion of the exceptions] in your doc. given we have loads of object numbers full of illegal characters (for both file systems and URIs) I thought the concept of MuseumID may be very helpful as we moved toward linked data.. http://museumid.net/about
I've been meaning to finish this for ages so I could post it, but then I realised it's more use in public in imperfect form than in private, so here goes – my thoughts on linked data, APIs and the Science Museum on the 'Museums and the machine-processable web' wiki. I'm still trying to find time to finish documenting my thoughts, and I've already had several useful comments that mean I'll need to update it, but I'd love to hear your thoughts, comments, etc.
Find out who won our Cosmic Collections competition.
Cosmic Champions
Last October, we launched a competition to release hundreds of stories from the Cosmos & Culture exhibition on to the web. We invited astronomy enthusiasts, designers and web developers to create their own websites with our objects – and the results are now in.
There were two competitions, to create websites for adults and for the 11-16 age group. We didn’t get enough entries in the second group to award a prize, but the quality of the entries in the adult group was so high that we’ve decided to award an extra prize for that.
Overall winner (£1000 prize)
Simon Willison and Natalie Down Entry at http://cosmos.natimon.com/ The judges felt that Simon and Natalie’s entry made the best use of our collections data, as it allows users to browse objects by people, places and celestial body, making links between them. Judge Chris Lintott describes it as 'having a wikipedia-like quality of sucking the user in for just one more click'.
Runner-up (£750 prize)
Ryan Ludwig Entry at http://www.serostar.com/cosmic/ The judges were really impressed with the visual appeal of Ryan’s entry, particularly the image gallery with thumbnails and zoom function.
The judges also commended Ray Shah’s entry (http://collection.thinkdesign.com/), particularly the function for users to add their own data.
What happens next?
We’ll be working with our winners to incorporate the best aspects of their entries into a finished product. We will be launching it on the Science Museum’s website in February, so watch this space!
Notes
1) The competition judges were:
Christian Heilmann A geek and hacker at heart, Christian Heilmann has been a professional web developer for about eleven years. He has been nominated "standards champion of the year 2008" by .net magazine in the UK and he currently sports the fashionable job title "International Developer Evangelist" spending his time speaking and training people on systems provided by Yahoo and other web companies that want to make this web thing work well for everybody.
Chris Lintott Chris Lintott is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. His research looks at the analysis of star formation, including being principal investigator for the Galaxy Zoo project. He is also co-presenter on the Sky at Night program alongside Sir Patrick Moore.
2) Entries to the competition were assessed under the following categories:
Use of collections data
Creativity
Accessibility
User experience
Ease of deployment and maintenance
3) The Cosmos & Culture exhibition is supported by the Patrons of the Science Museum with additional support from the Science & Technology Facilities Council, STFC.
