Notes from 'The Welsh Dimension' at MCG's Spring Conference

There are my notes from 'The Welsh Dimension: Issues facing the museum sector in Wales' by Lesley-Ann Kerr at the MCG Spring meeting. Lesley-Ann's slides are online. Her presentation was about the issues facing the sector in Wales and the challenges of working in a small country. It helped contextualise some of the later papers, particularly the importance of bilingual sites and online collections.

There's some background to my notes about the conference in a previous post. Any of my comments are in [square brackets] below.

Background to Welsh context:
The landscape: literal and metaphorical; lots of Wales is rural, with a dispersed population, and poor south-north transport infrastructure – this has practical implications. There are variations in the coverage of local authority areas.

Online collections are important for providing access to key collections online and background about them for people in remote areas.

Language: there's a Welsh Language Act; they are required to offer bilingual services, some people use Welsh as first language. 25% of population is Welsh speaking.

This presents challenges in: translation costs; display (twice the text; do you display both on one page or on separate pages online/on screen, and how do you deal with text on panels nicely?); online databases (e.g. standard terminologies are difficult enough in one language); support for Welsh character set (e.g. requires Unicode); characters can be corrupted in document conversion; all planning must take bilingual challenges into account; maintenance issues – content must be in both languages, Welsh language versions can get out of step.

Use tools to translate searches; pick up keywords in both languages and present results appropriately. Switching between languages must be easy, particularly for learners when they reach limits of their Welsh.

Cultural identity: it's about more than just language; there's a sense of place. Socially, the question 'where are you from' comes before the question 'what do you do'. Providing services to a dispersed population can help provide cohesive sense of identity. The role of online collections is again important.

"What are we doing"
'Spotlight on museums' – a comprehensive survey.

'Quantifying Diversity' across museums, libraries and archives; equality strands around collections, staff, users.

Museum strategy for Wales – it comes from and is for museums – government policy will come from that [great! that seems like the right way around]. It provides a strategic way forward for museums in Wales but is about evolution rather then revolution.

One Wales (coalition agreement in government) includes commitment for an online People's Collection. They'll work with existing partners; will be using some cutting edge tech, some social networking stuff; looking not just at organisations with content and at developing new content but at involving users too. They'll be looking at Canadian and Australian sites [what is it with countries with dispersed populations and good collective digitisation programs?].

Notes from 'New Media Interpretation in the National Waterfront Museum' at MCG's Spring Conference

These are my notes from the presentation 'New Media Interpretation in the National Waterfront Museum' by Steph Mastoris at the MCG Spring Conference. There's some background to my notes about the conference in a previous post. Any comments in [square brackets] are mine.

I've put up lots of photos and some video from lunchtime tour of the interactives at the NWM.

Some background about the National Waterfront Museum (NWM):
The aim of the museum is to talk about the industrialisation of Wales. Its precursors were the Welsh Industrial Maritime Museum and the Swansea Maritime and Industrial Museum – in some ways these were unsuccessful museums.

The focus is on the human experience of industrialisation rather than the technology; it's a celebration of the impact rather than the technology itself.

Interpretation was intended to be delivered through new media right from the start. Objects are jumping off points for interpretation.

Displays are in zones; but using open-ended concepts rather than themes or chronological order. They are kaleidoscopic rather than comprehensive. Both a criticism and a strength of approach is that you end up with a fragmented view of a subject, though you can pick it up throughout the gallery. It's not for specialists, but for population who've never given industrialisation a second thought. It's audience-led, and not afraid to be populist.

Types of new media in the National Waterfront Museum:
The new media ranges from traditional looping films with personal testimony or oral history to audience-initiated stuff. Way-finders have visitor-activated mapping and constantly changing displays, and there are completely visitor-centred (activated?) displays. The 'People' interactive displays move from a map to a digital reconstruction of town, to a digital reconstruction of a house, then to embedded images of artefacts (also visible in the cases) then optionally onto detail that contextualises the artefacts. Visitors can manipulate stuff on screen, initiate oral histories and move onto items that are in collections but not on display.

Visitor reactions, 30 months into the project:
The response has been 'amazingly good'; they've exceeded their targets for visitor numbers in both the first and second years (and avoided the second year slump). The museum was designed around free access, with three entrances that encourage people to pop in and out. He suspects they are getting lots of short-term visitation as well as a lot of the 'classic one-and-a half hour' visits. It helps that they have an extremely active and community focused events program – their aim is to 'turn the main hall into the village hall of Swansea'.

Their visitors mirror the Welsh population in terms of age; not as much on social grade but they're doing better than other Welsh museums. They're fulfilling their populist agenda as best as they can.

The digital divide by age starts to become apparent when you look at 'enjoyment'. Older groups are having difficulties with something; the interactive computer parts are least popular for 55+ group. they like the traditional galleries more. They're addressing this with proactive gallery staff and by adding value to other aspects. Other museums thinking about interactives have to address this as the sector moves towards a new media approach.

The delights and problems of being a new media museum:
Buildings: you will need to pay attention to the critical path of power, plant and equipment (all it takes is one thing to go wrong in the chain – e.g. something ('some plastic bags, fifteen condoms and a dead dog') blocking the water supply that cools the building); physical access for servicing IT components (e.g. changing bulbs in projectors); the effect of the building design on new media display performance (e.g. sunlight on screens or projections).

Costs: energy costs, consumables (e.g. projector bulbs are a huge cost per year), support contracts, product renewal. They spend nearly £30,000 a year on projector bulbs!

People: technical team (restructure the organisation around a dynamic highly-skilled technical team); contractors; gallery authors (act as interpretative consultants and mediate between curators and designers and audiences).

Attitudes: display down-time (5% of displays are down at any one time; it's a moving target, just one of those things. Technology is fragile – it's a big change from when museums only had static cases); staff flexibility and the creativity to deal with these new challenges; corporate perceptions of wealth (lots of money coming in but it's all being spent), managing expectations (people think IT can do anything easily).

Display renewals [slide]:
Inter-relationship between collections and display, conservation. 'sacrificial artefacts' – not accessioned.
You can have a small impact from large expenditure.
Inter-referenced displays – what if a way finder points visitors to something that isn't currently on display?
How do you maintain technical cutting edge when things designed in 2002/03 are still on display; new technologies are fragile, become more robust in later versions. But as more common also more boring.
What is the next big thing? They're planning time to look at what's upcoming.

Notes from 'Catch the Wind: Digital Preservation and the Real World' at MCG's Spring Conference

These are my notes from Nick Poole's presentation 'Catch the Wind: Digital Preservation and the Real World' at the MCG Spring Conference. There's some background to my notes about the conference in a previous post. If I've made any comments below they're in [square brackets].

Nick's slides for 'Catch the Wind: Digital Preservation and the Real World' are online.

The MDA is now the Collections Trust. Their belief is that "everybody everywhere should have the right to access and benefit from cultural collections". Their work includes standards, professional development and public programmes wherever collections are kept and cared for and they have a remit across collections management, including documentation, digitisation and digital preservation.

We need to think about capturing and preserving digital surrogates, etc, or we'll end up with a 'digital dark age'.

We need a convergence of standards and practice in museums, libraries and archives, and to develop a community of professional practice.

Nick was interested to know if whether any museums are actively doing digital preservation. It turns out lots have some elements of digital preservation but it's not deeply embedded in the organisation. Nick sent a question to the Museums Computer Group (MCG) list: see the list archives for December 2007, or slide 6.

If you're not doing digital preservation, why not? And how do you decide whether and what is worth preserving? How do you preserve pieces of information or digital assets in their context needed for them to make sense?

Today is partly about the results of the enquiry begun with that email.

We know what we should be doing [slide 9, CHIN slide on workflow for 'Digital Preservation for Museums'.]

We know why we should be doing it:

The preservation and re-use of digital data and information forms both the cornerstone of future economic growth and development, and the foundation
for the future of memory.

From "Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship" by Seamus Ross – the 'common-sense bible about digital preservation'.

And there are lots of programs and diagrams (slides 11 – 15).

So if we know why and how we should be doing it, why aren't we doing it?

It's not necessarily about technology or money – is it about the culture in museums?
There's no funding imperative; project-funded digitisation seldom provides for (or requires) the kind of long-term embedded work that digital preservation requires.

It depends on the integration of workflows and systems which is still rare in museums. Some digital preservation principles fit more intuitively with an archival point of view than an object/artefact point of view.

Is it possibly also because museums aren't part of the scholarly/academic publishing loop which is giving rise to large scale digital preservation initiatives? e.g. Open Content Alliance.

We also don't have an expectation about the retrievability of non-object museum information that we do about collection information. [Too true, it doesn't seem to be valued the same way.]

We should learn from libraries and archives. We could mandate 'good enough' standards so digital assets can be migrated into stable environments in the future. There's so much going on that we'll never be able to draw a line in the sand and say 'standards happen now'. We need to tweak the way we work now, not introduce a whole new project.

A proposed national solution: could we aggregate 'just enough' metadata at a central point and preserve it there? But would organisations become disenfranchised from their own information, lose expertise in the curatorship of digital content, and would it blur the distinction between active and dormant records?

If not a national solution, then it must be local: but would it actually happen without statute, obligation or funding? Possibly through networks of people who support each other in digitisation work, but there are economic issues in developing infrastructure and expertise.

Museums seem oddly distant from current initiatives (e.g. Digital Preservation Coalition, Digital Curation Centre), and lack methodologies and tools that are specific to museum information. Do we need to develop collective approaches for digital preservation?

He hasn't got answers, just more questions.

We must start finding answers or the value of what we're doing right now will be lost in ten years time.

Questions
Mike: there was a slide 'is this stuff worth preserving' – but that question wasn't answered – is there lots of stuff we should and can just chuck away? Nick: the archival world view is more like that.

Alan [?]: born digital stuff like websites is difficult to 'index and scope'. The V&A website is divorced from libraries and archives – internal databases don't link to website [to capture non-collections records?]. What are the units of information or assets within a website? It's impossible to define boundaries and therefore to catalogue and preserve… How do we capture this content? Nick: web archiving solutions are already out there but do museums have the money for it?

John: to what extent could digital repositories be out-sourced? Nick: look at examples like the Archaeology Data Service. But for whatever reason, we're not following those models.

David: preservation was in NOF Digitise in business plan but … didn't happen. He doesn't think archives are ahead in preservation services. Museums use of collections management systems is different to academia using repositories – there's an interesting distinction between long-term archiving and day to day work.

Ian [?] – re-run what we've done with [digitising] object collections but think about information collections too [?]. Nick: there's a development path there in existing CollMS, possibly with hosted CollMS, We don't need entirely new systems, we already have digital asset management systems (DAMS), web software, CollMS.

[This reminds me about recent discussions we've had internally about putting older object captions and information records on our OAI repository – this might be a step towards a 'good enough' step towards digital preservation.]

The (UK) Museums Computer Group – can you tell us what you think of MCG?

The Museums Computer Group is interested in canvassing a wide range of views. If you're not a member but work in a relevant field, we'd be interested to hear about why you're not a member, and of course if you're a member we'd love to hear about how we can help you and your organisations.

Message from the MCG committee (of which I'm a member) below.

As our next 25 years of Museums Computer Group activity begins, we're looking to the future, and what sort of shape you – the membership – would like the MCG to take.

To get your views, we've set up an online survey on http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk.

As the sector opens up to new ways to meet audiences, new ways to allow access to searchers, and new horizons like the semantic web, the MCG committee think it's time to open up our plans to all our members for comment.

If you think about it, the way people work together, think together and spark ideas off each other is changing rapidly right now. Many of us are on Facebook or LinkedIn – what sort of opportunities might networks like these bring MCG? How can we truly make the group represent the excitement and feel of the 21st century digital world?

Do you think we should still be publishing printed newsletters, or is the web a better place to find the published expertise and thinking of a respected professional organisation? Should MCG continue to plan regular meetings for members around the UK? Does our conventional committee structure really represent the sector and serve the membership?

We'd like you to tell us what you think about these issues, and anything else you feel would be constructive and helpful. It would be great if you could visit the MCG website (http://www.museumscomputergoup.org.uk)
and click the survey link on the homepage.

If you'd rather not fill in online forms, send an email directly to MCG Chair, Debbie Richards – DRichards@leics.gov.uk.

We'll be reporting survey results to the membership at the Spring 08 MCG meeting, which is on 23rd April at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea (http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/meetings/1-2008.shtml)
and on the MCG website.

Bookings are now being taken for the meeting and please do book soon as spaces are filling up fast.

With best wishes,

The Committee of the Museums Computer Group