Tag: cultural heritage sector

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.

Global, not institutional, repositories FTW

In Some (more) thoughts on repositories, Andy Powell writes about academic repositories of research publications, but I think it's applicable to the cultural heritage sector too. Particularly when he writes on 'fit with the web':

Concentration
Global discipline-based repositories are more successful at attracting content than institutional repositories. … This is no surprise. It's exactly what I'd expect to see. Successful services on the Web tend to be globally concentrated (as that term is defined by Lorcan Dempsey) because social networks tend not to follow regional or organisational boundaries any more.

Web architecture
Take three guiding documents – the Web Architecture itself, REST, and the principles of linked data. Apply liberally to the content you have at hand – repository content in our case. Sit back and relax.

Resource discovery
On the Web, the discovery of textual material is based on full-text indexing and link analysis. In repositories, it is based on metadata and pre-Web forms of citation. One approach works, the other doesn't. (Hint: I no longer believe in metadata as it is currently used in repositories).

The museum sector has already created cross-institutional repositories (broadly defined, I don't care if it's a federated search or a big central pot of content), but are they understood and championed well enough? Are they maintained and integrated into on-going content creation and editing processes? Are their audiences encouraged to personalise and re-use the content?

Sadly also still relevant:

Across the board we are seeing a growing emphasis on the individual, on user-centricity and on personalisation (in its widest sense). … Yet in the repository space we still tend to focus most on institutional wants and needs. I've characterised this in the past in terms of us needing to acknowledge and play to the real-world social networks adopted by researchers. As long as our emphasis remains on the institution we are unlikely to bring much change to individual research practice.

Lots of people working in digital cultural heritage get it – but they're not necessarily the ones at the decision-making levels, and they're not necessarily in on projects from the start to help make the project design user-centred and the content (technically and semantically) interoperable.

FTW, by the way, stands for 'For The Win', defined by Wikipedia as 'Of something which completes a process in a successful manner'.

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.

Museums and the Web 2009: call for participation

MW2009 will be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA from April 15-18, 2009. I've only been to one Museums and the Web conference but I would recommend it – the sessions were really useful, and I met some fantastic people and overall it gave me access to a wider community of digital museum professionals. It's a great chance to share your ideas or showcase your project for a proactive and engaged audience and there's a variety of session formats which means you can find a format to suit you and your content.

You've got until the end of this month for proposals for papers, and until the end of December for demonstration proposals. Proposals are welcome on any topic related to museums creating, facilitating or delivering culture, science and heritage on-line – a full list of themes and much more information is at MW2009 Call for Participation.

[Full disclosure: I'm on the Program Committee.]

Bathcamp report

This is my quick and dirty report from BathCamp, held in Bath last weekend. In summary – it was ace, and I went to sessions on the myth of engagement, how to run an Open Space session, social learning, CakePHP, managing complexity in software, learning Chinese online, the art of espresso, and a Delicious pecha kucha. I've included my notes on some of the sessions I've attended, and some ideas for the future in this post. My #bathcamp photos are here and there's a general pool here.

There was a dinner on Friday night for people who were already in the area, which was a good chance to meet some people who were interested but unable to make the Saturday/Sunday.

The sessions:
The myth of engagement (Jack Martin Leith)
Engagement means it's not a message from the organisation to the audience. 'Buy-in' means you're being sold something. Work with people, don't treat them as audiences or something to speak 'to'. It should be a conversation or a dance. It means letting go of brand so it can belong to users. Flickr are a good example of how to do it – look at the 'you','your x' in their menus.

Engagement should be a code word for: inviting participation, including, involving, joining in with, conversing with, playing with, creating with.

Commands: tell
Messages: sell, test, consult
Conversations: co-create

Shell are really good at engagement, and do lots of research, as do the army (which makes sense, because they'd really need people to be engaged and committed).

Open Space (Jack Martin Leith)
This session was on how to run Open Space events, and on the comparative strengths of barcamps and open spaces.

Open Spaces set the theme as a question.

How you invite people is central. Attention is given to welcomes, orientation on arrival. The space is very important. The facilitator doesn't do anything unless someone tries to spoil the vibe or close the space. Put the principles on the wall to remind everyone. The circle is critical in open space.

If you host a session, you agree to write a report (or get someone else to write it). [I think this is vital – it means the ideas, conversations, learning or connections aren't lost, and can be shared beyond the session.]

People sign up for sessions once proposed sessions have been put up on the wall. This helps with planning, space allocation and coordinating sessions.

Social Learning (Laura Dewis)
Smart profiles [?], informed network of peers.

The system adapts to learner now. There was a slide on the OU (Open University) ecosystem – lots of different applications or sites linked together.

OU story – can tell the story of where you are with your course, how you're coping, others can support you. Study buddies… connecting with others with same interests, recommendation 'other people who've done this course also did…'

Cohere – semantic web. Deep learning.

Wider ecosystem of tools. They don't talk to each others. Identify which make sense in learning/teaching context, how can they talk to each other, build on it.

Ecosystem of content – content partnerships.

Learning profiles can become CVs of a sort, showing what you've actually learnt and are interested in.

There was some discussion about online identities, overlap, professional vs private identities – I'm glad to see this acknowledged. Also discussion on the effect on brand.

Q: How much engagement from academics? A: A lot of buy-in, but also resistance to putting some content online e.g. video on youtube more than written course materials, as it's better intellectual property. Developments that OU do doesn't always get into mainstream education, they can be seen as stuff that OU would do but that traditional universities wouldn't.

According to Brian Kelly, edu-punk is over, edu-pirate is in.

CakePHP, Mike (?)
It's an MVC framework.
Nice pre-defined validation stuff.
[I wonder how cake compares to django? And if the validation fields for things like phone numbers are internationalised?]
Scaffolding – stuff already built into framework. [controllers for table input?]
How configurable is the scaffolding? [e.g. year field on date is really long but you might want to limit the range of years].
You can use basic class methods, helpers, components if not using scaffolding.
[This was one of a few useful demos of various application frameworks, including this Django one I didn't get to]

Complexity in software stuff (Alex)
Why is complexity a problem? In case it's not obvious – maintenance, debugging is harder, cost of new staff learning the software is more expensive, and less complexity makes life easier for developers (most importantly!).

There's a body of knowledge on dealing with the complexity of software. Human experience codified. Looking at different metaphors.

Learning Chinese (Chris Hall)
The potential for learning on the internet is untapped.

Examples of autodidacts – Sophie Germain – French mathematician during 18th C. A hero for his learning. [And a possible modern bluestocking?] She had theories accepted by pretending to be a man until she was famous enough to be accepted regardless. The ability to reach out to others and explore ideas with them is really important – she wrote letters, but now we have the internet to enable autodidacts. [Does this mean autodidacts become socialdidacts? Though I guess the motivation still comes from the individual, even if they can learn with others.]

For Chris, learning Chinese was a muse, a focus or lens for learning about social networking and the potential of internet too.

Some interesting bits on the differences between western and Chinese web sites – more meaningful characters (rather than letters) mean lots of information fits in just two characters, which makes layout easier – consistent length of terms in e.g. navigation items.

Chinese users don't trust search engines, and don't have a culture of using search – they look for lists of links. But this will probably change.

Useful examples of using delicious in a RESTful way with bookmarked dictionary and translation sites.

Then a great example of using Ubiquity with Google's translation API for in-page translation of someone else's web content. Ubiquity makes it easy to use web APIs.

And we learnt that EEE's implementation of the Chinese alphabet is phonetic – the keyboard goes by the sound of the word. I've always wondered how Chinese dictionaries work, and I guess they might use a similar technique.

The Art of Espresso (Sam)
Espressos have an intense flavour, they're not necessarily strong.
Mmm, crema.

You can get good results for reasonable money e.g. £100, but steer clear of anything below £50. The pressure ones (e.g. stove top) are 'really nasty' and not espresso machines (ha!). Pump machines. Semi- vs fully-auto.

Grinders – grind coffee as close to using it as possible. Don't keep coffee in the fridge. You can keep it in vacuum flasks in the dark. Espresso needs an almost powdery grind. Burr grinders are better than blade. Decent grinder c £50.

Sam covered the basic flavours from different regions – South American coffees are nutty, chocolately, quite sweet, African – darker, smokey, stronger (?) – your classic italian espresso
Asian Pacific coffees are citrussy, fruity, sharper.

I was way too excited about this session – I love proper coffee, and was having trouble staying awake so I really appreciated the espresso I had. I even got to have a moment of Australian-in-England coffee snobbery with a guy from Sydney (sorry, England!).

I went from this session into:
Delicious pecha kucha (Mark Ng)
The idea is that you provide your delicious username (e.g. http://delicious.com/miaridge) and a script picks up your ten most recent bookmarks, and you have a certain number of seconds to explain each bookmark to the group. This was a bit scary after a fresh espresso on an empty stomach, but a fun challenge. The range of interests from a small bunch of geeks at one event is remarkable. I ended up having a great conversation about some of the challenges and big ideas in cultural heritage IT with some people in this session.

Later there was pizza and a tub quiz organised by Darren Beale, before we headed off to the pub and finally a burger from Schwartz's and War Games on the projector for the night owls.

On the way up I'd realised how exciting it was to see an idea that came out of discussions at Museums and the Web in Montreal in April become reality in Bath in September. Between changing jobs and being off-line quite a lot in the lead-up, I wasn't able to help out as much as I could have liked, so my thanks to those who actually made the event come together:
Dan Zambonini, Frankie Roberto, Laura Francis, Lisa Price, Mike Ellis, Stephen Pope, Tim Beadle. And my thanks to the sponsors who made sure we had food and drink and were generally very comfortable in the venue. And finally, it wouldn't have worked without the friendly and engaged participants, so thank you everyone! Frankie's put together a list of everyone's twitter accounts to help people keep in contact. Darren's also linked to a bunch of blog posts about bathcamp.

If I'd run a session, I think it would have been a really open conversation on 'what can cultural heritage IT do for you?' – a chance to explain why so many of us are excited about digital heritage, and to hear from others about what they'd like to see museums and other organisations do, what kinds of data they might use, how they might use our content, what excites them and what bores them.

I'd also like to run a session blatantly aimed at picking the brains of some of the very smart people who come to unconferences – ask everyone to pick their favourite museum, exhibition or object, check out the relevant website and coming back to tell us one thing they'd improve about that website.

During the planning process the focus of Bathcamp changed from cultural heritage to a more general event for Bath/Bristol geeks, with some digital heritage ring-ins from further afield. I'm going to a spillover session for BarCampLondon5 and I'll be interested in how that compares.

I'd still really like to see a MuseumCamp or DigitalHeritageCamp – I think it could be a good way of reaching out from the circle of cultural heritage geeks who have the same ideas about the Right Things To Do to engage with the rest of our sector (museums, galleries, libraries, archives, archaeology, even the humanities in general) – the people who would produce content, work with our audiences, sign-off on projects or push new metrics and evaluation models to sector funders. There's also some discussion of this in the comments on Frankie's round-up of bathcamp.

In the spirit of getting things done, I've created a digital heritage ning (ad hoc social network) as a central place where we can talk about organising a digital heritage barcamp – specifically in the UK to start with, but there's no reason why it couldn't be used to share ideas and organise events internationally. You can sign up directly on the ning if you want to be involved – it's open to everyone, and you don't have to be working in digital cultural heritage – an interest in how it can be done well is enough.

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.

Introducing modern bluestocking

[Update, May 2012: I've tweaked this entry so it makes a little more sense.  These other posts from around the same time help put it in context: Some ideas for location-linked cultural heritage projects, Exposing the layers of history in cityscapes, and a more recent approach  '…and they all turn on their computers and say 'yay!" (aka, 'mapping for humanists'). I'm also including below some content rescued from the ning site, written by Joanna:

What do historian Catharine Macauley, scientist Ada Lovelace, and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron have in common? All excelled in fields where women’s contributions were thought to be irrelevant. And they did so in ways that pushed the boundaries of those disciplines and created space for other women to succeed. And, sadly, much of their intellectual contribution and artistic intervention has been forgotten.

Inspired by the achievements and exploits of the original bluestockings, Modern Bluestockings aims to celebrate and record the accomplishments not just of women like Macauley, Lovelace and Cameron, but also of women today whose actions within their intellectual or professional fields are inspiring other women. We want to build up an interactive online resource that records these women’s stories. We want to create a feminist space where we can share, discuss, commemorate, and learn.

So if there is a woman whose writing has inspired your own, whose art has challenged the way you think about the world, or whose intellectual contribution you feel has gone unacknowledged for too long, do join us at http://modernbluestocking.ning.com/, and make sure that her story is recorded. You'll find lots of suggestions and ideas there for sharing content, and plenty of willing participants ready to join the discussion about your favourite bluestocking.

And more explanation from modernbluestocking on freebase:

Celebrating the lives of intellectual women from history…

Wikipedia lists bluestocking as 'an obsolete and disparaging term for an educated, intellectual woman'.  We'd prefer to celebrate intellectual women, often feminist in intent or action, who have pushed the boundaries in their discipline or field in a way that has created space for other women to succeed within those fields.

The original impetus was a discussion at the National Portrait Gallery in London held during the exhibition 'Brilliant Women, 18th Century Bluestockings' (http://www.npg.org.uk/live/wobrilliantwomen1.asp) where it was embarrassingly obvious that people couldn't name young(ish) intellectual women they admired.  We need to find and celebrate the modern bluestockings.  Recording and celebrating the lives of women who've gone before us is another way of doing this.

However, at least one of the morals of this story is 'don't get excited about a project, then change jobs and start a part-time Masters degree.  On the other hand, my PhD proposal was shaped by the ideas expressed here, particularly the idea of mapping as a tool for public history by e.g using geo-located stories to place links to content in the physical location.

While my PhD has drifted away from early scientific women, I still read around the subject and occasionally adding names to modernbluestocking.freebase.com.  If someone's not listed in Wikipedia it's a lot harder to add them, but I've realised that if you want to make a difference to the representation of intellectual women, you need to put content where people look for information – i.e. Wikipedia.

And with the launch of Google's Knowledge Graph, getting history articles into Wikipedia then into Freebase is even more important for the visibility of women's history: "The Knowledge Graph is built using facts and schema from Freebase so everyone who has contributed to Freebase had a part in making this possible. …The Knowledge Graph is built using facts and schema from Freebase soeveryone who has contributed to Freebase had a part in making this possible. (Source: this post to the Freebase list).  I'd go so far as to say that if it's worth writing a scholarly article on an intellectual woman, it's worth re-using  your references to create or improve their Wikipedia entry.]

Anyway. On with the original post…]

I keep meaning to find the time to write a proper post explaining one of the projects I'm working on, but in the absence of time a copy and paste job and a link will have to do…

I've started a project called 'modern bluestocking' that's about celebrating and commemorating intellectual women activists from the past and present while reclaiming and redefining the term 'bluestocking'.  It was inspired by the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, 'Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings'.  (See also the review, Not just a pretty face).

It will be a website of some sort, with a community of contributors and it'll also incorporate links to other resources.

We've started talking about what it might contain and how it might work at modernbluestocking.ning.com (ning died, so it's at modernbluestocking.freebase.com…)

Museum application (something to make for mashed museum day?): collect feminist histories, stories, artefacts, images, locations, etc; support the creation of new or synthesised content with content embedded and referenced from a variety of sources. Grab something, tag it, display them, share them; comment, integrate, annotate others. Create a collection to inspire, record, commemorate, and build on.
What, who, how should this website look? Join and help us figure it out.

Why modernbluestocking? Because knowing where you've come from helps you know where you're going.

Sources could include online exhibition materials from the NPG (tricky interface to pull records from).  How can this be a geek/socially friendly project and still get stuff done?  Run a Modernbluestocking, community and museum hack day app to get stuff built and data collated?  Have list of names, portraits, objects for query. Build a collection of links to existing content on other sites? Role models and heroes from current life or history. Where is relatedness stored? 'Significance' -thorny issue? Personal stories cf other more mainstream content?  Is it like a museum made up of loan objects with new interpretation? How much is attribution of the person who added the link required? Login v not? Vandalism? How do deal with changing location or format of resources? Local copies or links? Eg images. Local don't impact bandwidth, but don't count as visits on originating site. Remote resources might disappear – moved, permissions changed, format change, taken offline, etc, or be replaced with different content. Examine the sources, look at their format, how they could be linked to, how stable they appear to be, whether it's possible to contact the publisher…

Could also be interesting to make explicit, transparent, the processes of validation and canonisation.

'Sector-wide initiatives' at 'UK Museums on the Web Conference 2008'

Session 2, 'Sector-wide initiatives', of the UK Museums on the Web Conference 2008 was chaired by Bridget McKenzie.

In the interests of getting my notes up quickly I'm putting them up pretty much 'as is', so they're still rough around the edges. There are quite a few sections below which need to be updated when the presentations or photos of slides go online. Updated posts should show in your RSS feed but you might need to check your settings.

[I hope Bridget puts some notes from her paper on her blog because I didn't get all of it down.]

The session was introduced as case studies on how cross institutional projects can be organised and delivered. She mentioned resistance to bottom-up or experimental approach, institutional constraints; and building on emerging frames of web.

Does the frame of 'the museum' make sense anymore, particularly on the web? What's our responsibilities when we collaborate? Contextual spaces – chance to share expertise in meaningful ways.

It's easy to revert to ways previous projects have been delivered. Funding plans don't allow for iterative, new and emergent technologies.

Carolyn Royston and Richard Morgan, V&A and NMOLP.
The project is funded by the 'invest to save' program, Treasury.

Aims:
Increase use of the digital collections of the 9 museums (no new website)
No new digitisation or curatorial content.
Encourage creative and critical use of online resources.
[missed one]
Sustainable high-quality online resource for partners.

The reality – it's like herding cats.

They had to address issue of partnership to avoid problems later in project.

Focussed on developing common vision, set of principles on working together, identify things uniquely achievable through partnership, barriers to success, what added value for users.

Three levels of barriers to success – one of working in an inter-museum collaborative way, which was first for those nationals; organisational issues – working inter-departmentally (people are learning or web or whatever people and not used to working together); personal issues – people involved who may not think they are web or learning people.

These things aren't necessary built in to project plan.

Deliverables: web quests, 'creative journeys', federated search, [something I missed], new ways of engaging with audiences.

Web Quests – online learning challenge, flexible learning tool mapped to curriculum. They developed a framework. It supports user research, analysis and synthesis of information. Users learn to use collections in research.

Challenges: creating meaningful collection links; sending people to collections sites knowing that content they'd find there wasn't written for those audiences; provide support for pupils when searching collections. Sustainable content authoring tool and process.

[I wondered if the Web Quest development tools are extendible, and had a chance to ask Carolyn in one of the breaks – she was able to confirm that they were.]

Framework stays on top to support and structure.

Creative journeys:
[see slide]

They're using Drupal. [Cool!]

[I also wondered about the user testing for creative journeys, whether there was evidence that people will do it there and not on their blogs, Zotero, in Word documents or hard drives – Carolyn also had some information on this.]

Museums can push relevant content.

What are the challenges?
How to build and sustain the Creative Journeys (user-generated content) communities, individually and as a partnership?
Challenge to curatorial authority and reputation
Work with messiness and complexity around new ways of communicating and using collections
Copyright and moderation issues

But partners are still having a go – shared risk, shared success.

Federated search
Wasn't part of original implementation plan
[slide on reasons for developing]
Project uses a cross collection search, not a cross collection search project. The distinction can be important.

The technical solution was driven by project objectives [choices were made in that context, not in a constraint-free environment.]

Richard, Technical Solution
The back-end is de-coupled from front end applications
A feed syndicates user actions.

Federated search – a system for creating machine readable search results and syndicating them out.
Real time search or harvester. [IMO, 'real time' should always be in scare quotes for federated searches – sometimes Google creates expectations of instantaneous results that other searches can't deliver, though the difference may only be a matter of seconds.]

Data manipulation isn't the difficult bit

Creative Journeys – more machine readable data

Syndicated user interactions with collections.
Drupal [slide]

Human factor – how to sell to board
Deploy lightweight solutions. RAD. Develop in house, don't need to go to agency.

[I'd love it if the NMOLP should have a blog, or a holding page, or something, where they could share the lessons they've learnt, the research they've done and generally engage with the digital museum community. Generally a lot of these big infrastructure projects would benefit from greater transparency, as scary as this is for traditional organisations like museums. The open source model shows that many eyeballs mean robust applications.]

Jeremy Ottevanger and Europeana/the European Digital Library
[I have to confess I was getting very hungry by this point so you might get more detailed information from Jeremy's blog when he adds his notes.]
Some background on his involvement in it, hopes and concerns.
"cross-domain access to Europe's cultural heritage"
Our content is more valuable together than scattered around.

Partnership, planning and prototyping
Not enough members from the UK, not very many museums.
Launch November this year
Won't build all of planned functionality – user-generated content and stuff planned but not for prototype.

Won't build an API or all levels of multiple linguality (in first release). Interface layer may have 3 or 4 major languages; object metadata (maybe a bit) and original content of digitised documents.

Originals on content contributors site, so traffic ends up there. That's not necessarily clear in the maquette (prototype). [But that knowledge might help address some concerns generally out there about off-site searches]

Search, various modes of browsing, timeline and stuff.

Jeremy wants to hear ideas, concerns, ambitions, etc to take to plenary meeting.

He'd always wanted personal place to play with stuff.

[Similarly to my question above, I've always wondered whether users would rely on a cultural heritage sector site to collate their data? What unique benefits might a user see in this functionality – authority by association? live updates of data? Would they think about data ownership issues or the longevity of their data and the reliability of the service?]

Why are there so few UK museums involved in this? [Based on comments I've heard, it's about no clear benefits, yet another project, no API, no clear user need] Jeremy had some ideas but getting in contact and telling him is the best way to sort it out.

Some benefits include common data standards, a big pool of content that search engines would pay attention to in a way they wouldn't on our individual sites. Sophisticated search. Will be open source. Multi-lingual technology.

Good news:
"API was always in plans".

EDLocal – PNDS. EU projects will be feeding in technologies.

Bad news: API won't be in website prototype. Is EDLocal enough? Sustainability problems.
'Wouldn't need website at all if had API'. Natural history collections are poorly represented.

Is OAI a barrier too far? You should be able to upload from spreadsheet. [You can! But I guess not many people know this – I'm going to talk to the people who coded the PNDS about writing up their 'upload' tool, which is a bit like Flickr's Uploadr but for collections data.]

Questions
Jim O'Donnell: regarding the issue of lack of participation. People often won't implement their own OAI repository so that requirement puts people off.

Dan Zambonini: aggregation fatigue. 'how many more of these things do we have to participate in'. His suggestion: tell museums to build APIs so that projects can use their data, should be other way around. Jeremy responded that that's difficult for smaller museums. [Really good point, and the PNDS/EDL probably has the most benefits for smaller museums; bigger museums have the infrastructure not to need the functionality of the PNDS though they might benefit from cross-sector searching and better data indexing.]

Gordon McKenna commented: EDLocal starts on Wednesday next week, for three years.

George Oates: what's been most surprising in collaboration process? Carolyn: that we've managed to work together. Knowledge sharing.

Notes from 'UK Museums on the Web Conference 2008'

I'm back in London after
UK Museums on the Web Conference 2008 and the mashed museum day.

In the interests of getting my notes up quickly I'm putting them up pretty much 'as is', so they're still rough around the edges. I'll add links to the speaker slides when they are all online. Some photos from the two days are online – a general search for ukmw08 on Flickr will find some. I have some in a set online now, others are still to come, including some photos of slides so I'll update this as I check the text from the slides. These are my notes from the first session.

The keynote speech was given by Tom Loosemore of Ofcom on the Future of Public Service Content.

[For context, Ofcom is the 'independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries' and their recently second review of public service broadcasting, 'The Digital Opportunity', caused a stir in the digital cultural heritage world for its assessment of the extent to which public sector websites delivered on 'public service purposes and characteristics'. You can read the summary or download the full report.]

'How many of you are on the main board of your institution?'

Leadership doesn't have the vision in place to take advantage of the internet.

Sees the internet as platform for public service, [most importantly] enlightenment. He's here today to enlist our help.

We view the internet through lens of expectations from the past, definitely in public service broadcasting – 'let's get our programs on the internet'.

What is value for money?

Would that other sectors did the same soul searching

[On the Ofcom review:] 'You can't really review the web, it's bonkers'

Public service characteristics to create a report card. Of the public service characteristics in the online market (high quality, original, innovative, challenging, engaging, discoverable and accessible), 'challenging' is the hardest.

Museums and cultural sector have amazing potential. What are the barriers between the people here who get it and being able to take that opportunity and redefine public service broadcasting?

It's not skills. Maybe ten years ago, not today. And it's not technology. The crucial missing link is leadership and vision, the lack of recognition by people who govern direction of institutions of the huge potential.

[Which does translate into 'more resources', eventually, but perhaps the missing gap right now is curatorial/interpretative resources? Every online project we do generates more enquiries, stretching these people further, and they don't have time to proactively create content for ad hoc projects as it is, especially as their time tends to be allocated a long time in advance.]

What's behind that reluctance, what can you do to help people on your board understand the opportunities? We can ask 'what business are we in? what's the purpose of our institution?'.

Tate recognise they're not just in the business of getting people to go to the Tate venues, they're in the business of informing people about art. Compare that to the Royal Shakespeare Company which is using its online site purely to get bums on seats.

Next opportunity… how do you take opportunity to digitise your collections and reach a whole new audience? How can you make better use of cultural objects that were previously constrained by physicalty.

What opportunities are native to the internet, can only happen there? How can it help your institution to deliver its purpose?

Recognise that you are in the (public service) media business.

How do you measure enlightenment? You could be changing the way people see the world, etc. but you need to measure it to make a case, to know whether you're succeeding. Metrics really really matter in public service arena.

BBC used to look at page views, but developers gamed the system. Then the metric was 'time online', but it stopped people thinking externally. Metric as proxy for quality.

Value = reach x quality. What kind of experience did they have?

Quality is the really hard part. As defined by BBC: quality is in the eye of the beholder. Did the user have an excellent experience?

BBC measure 'net promoter' – how likely are you to recommend this to a friend or colleague, on a scale of 1 – 10?

[But for our sector, what if you don't have any friends with the same interest in x? Would people extrapolate from their specific page on a Roman buckle to recommend the site generally?]

Throw away the 'soggy British middle' – the 7, 8s (out of ten).

Group them as Promoters (9-10/10), Passive (7-8/10), Detractors (0 – 6/10). The key measure is the difference between how many Promoters and how many Detractors. This was 'fabulously useful' at the BBC. 30% is good benchmark.

They mapped whole BBC portfolio against 'net promoters' % and reach, bubbles show cost.

It's not necessarily about reaching mass audiences. But when producing for niche audiences – they must love it, and it shouldn't cost that much.

He's telling us this because it's the language of funders, of KPIs, this is hard evidence with real people. You might use a different measure of quality but you can't talk about opportunities in abstract, must have numbers behind them.

Suggested the BBC's 15 Web Principles, including 'fall forward, fast'.

A measure of personal success for him would be that in x years when he asked 'who here is on the board of your institution, at least x should put hands up'.

[I really liked this keynote speech as a kick up the arse in case we started to get too complacent about having figured out what matters to us, as museum geeks. It doesn't count unless we can get through our organisations and get that content out to audiences in ways they can use (and re-use).]

In linking the sessions, Ross Parry mused about the legacy of 18th, 19th century ideas of how to build a museum, how would they be different if museums were created today?

Lee Iverson, How does the web connect content? "Semantic Pragmatics"
'Profoundly disagreed' with some of the things Tom was talking about, wants to have a dialogue.
He asked how many know the background to semantic web stuff? Quite a few hands were raised.

Talking about how the web works now and where it's going. Museums have significant opportunity to push things forward, but must understand possibilities and limitations.

Changing classic relationship – museum websites as face of institution to users. Huge opportunity for federating and aggregating content (between museums) – an order of magnitude better.

He's working with 13 museums, with north west native American artefacts. Communities are co-developers, virtually repatriating their (land).

Possibility to connect outside the museum. Powerhouse Museum as an excellent example of why (and how) you should connect.

Becoming connected:
Expose own data from behind presentation layers
Find other data
Integrate – creating a cohesive (situation)
Engage with users

Access to data is core business, curatorial stuff.

RDFa
Pragmatics of standards – get a sense of what it is you're doing [and start, don't try and create the system of everything first], it'll never work. Use existing standards if possible, grab chunks if you can. Never standardise what you minimally need to do to get the utility you need at the moment. Then extend, layers, version 2. A standard is an agreement between a minimum of two people [and doesn't have to be more complicated than that].

"Just do it" – make agreements, get it to work, then engage in the standardisation process.

Relationship between this and semantic web? Semantic web as 'data web'. Competing definitions.

Slide on Tim Berners-Lee on the semantic web in 1999.

Why hasn't it appeared? It's vapourware, you can't make effective standards for it.

Syntax – capability of being interpreted. Semantic – ability to interpret, and to connect interpretations.

Finding data – how much easier would it be if we could just grab the data we want directly from where we want it?

Key is relating what you're doing to what they're doing.

XML vs RDF
Semantic web built on RDF, it's designed for representing metadata. It's substantially different to XML. Lots of reaction against RDF has been reaction against XML encoding, syntactic resistance.

RDF is designed to be manipulated as data, XML is about annotating text. In XML, syntax is the thing, with RDF the data is the thing.

Grab entire XML doc before you can figure out how to smoosh then together. RDF works by reference, you can just build on it.

RDFa. A way of embedding RDF content directly in XHTML, relies on same strategies as microformats. Will be ignored by presentation oriented systems but readable by RDF parsers.

[RDF triples vs machine tags? RDF vs microformats? How RDF-like is OAI PMH?]

You can talk about things you don't have a representation for e.g. people.

Ignore the term 'ontology' – it's just a way of talking about a vocabulary.

Four steps for widespread adoption:
Promote practical applications
Develop applications now
[and the slide was gone and I missed the last two steps!]

There was also some stuff on limitations of lightweight approaches, and hermetically sealed museum data, user experiences. Also a bit on 'give away structured data' but with a good awareness of the need to keep some data private – object location and value, for example.

Ross – we've had the media context and technical context, now for the sector context.

Paul Marty, Engaging Audiences by connecting to collections online.
Vital connections…

What does it mean to say x% of your collection is online? For whom is it useful?

How to engage audiences around your collections? Not just presenting information.

Goes beyond providing access to data. Research shows audiences want engagement. Surveyed 1200 museum visitors about their requirements. [I would love to see the research] Virtuous circle between museum visits and website visits.

Build on interest, give experience that grabs people.

Romans in Sussex website – multiple museums offering collections for multiple audiences. Re-presenting same content in different ways on the fly.

Audiences
Don't just give general public a list of stuff. Give them a way to engage.

"Engaging a community around a collection is harder than providing access to data about a collection"

Photo of the week – says "What do you know about this photo? Please share your thoughts with us" But no link or instructions on how to do it. But at least they're trying…

Discussion – Tom, Lee and Paul.

"Why do you digitise collections before had need in mind?" [Because the driver is internal, not external, needs, would be the generous answer; because they could get funding to do it would be my ungenerous answer].

Tom on RDF – how seriously engaged with it to build audiences, tell stories.

BBC licence terms – couldn't re-use data for commercial purposes/at all.

Leadership need to understand opportunities because otherwise they won't support geek stuff.

Qu: terms of engagement – how is it defined?

Paul – US has made same mistakes re digitisation of collections and websites that don't have reusable data.

Participants must be involved in process from the beginning, need input at start from intended users on how it can engage them.

Fiona: why not use existing resources, go to existing sites with established audiences?

Lee: how did YouTube succeed – people were brought by embedded content. [This issue of using 'wrappers' around your content to help it go viral by being embeddable elsewhere was raised in another session too.]

Tom: letting go is how you win, but it's a profound challenge to institutions and their desire to maintain authority.

'The Machine That Changed the World' online

I think I'm posting this as much to tell you about it as to remind myself to watch it!

The Machine That Changed the World is the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced, but since its release in 1992, it's become virtually extinct. …

It's a whirlwind tour of computing before the Web, with brilliant archival footage and interviews with key players — several of whom passed away since the filming.

In other news, the mashed museum day is tomorrow, and the UK Museums on the Web conference is the day afterwards – see you there, maybe! I've been flat out so I've no idea what I'll work on tomorrow – I have lots of ideas but haven't had a chance to do any preparation.