April 2008 – Page 2 – Open Objects

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.]

Notes from 'User-Generated Content' session at MW2008

These are my notes from the User-generated content session at Museums and the Web, Montreal, 2008. All mistakes are mine, any corrections are welcome, my comments are in [square brackets] below.

The papers presented were The Art of Storytelling: Enriching Art Museum Exhibits and Education through visitor narratives by Matthew Fisher, Alexandra Sastre, Beth Twiss-Garrity; The Living Museum: Supporting the Creation of Quality User-Generated Content by Allison Farber, Paul Radensky and Getting 'In Your Face': Strategies for Encouraging Creativity, Engagement and Investment When the Museum is Offline by Martin Lajoie, Gillian McIntyre, Ian Rubenzahl, Colin Wiginton.

The "Art of Storytelling" project at the Delaware Art Museum.
The paper covered visitor-contributed content (VCC), the key factors to success, and the motivations behind allowing visitors to contribute. The paper goes into more of the theoretical foundations.

The key findings of the Art of Storytelling project evaluation:

What's the value to the visitor who contributes? It engages visitors in thinking critically and creatively about and in response to art.
What's the value to the museum? They get feedback and to engage new audiences
What's the value to the other visitors? There is some confusion, but also it can be inspiring, enriching, and encourage others to participate.

It's not appropriate or appealing for all collections, but it's hard to predict which in advance.

[When looking at models of participation:] Allow the motivated to contribute, allow the rest to benefit; don't penalise for non-participation.

Simplicity – remove barriers to entry (engage first, login last if at all).

Promote in traditional and non traditional venues; have a clear invitation to participate.

Motivating factors included curatorial encouragement (have curators there encouraging people), juried selections, stipends for selected storytellers.

What's in it for the audience? They get 15 minutes next to an Andy Warhol. Establish an audience for your visitor-contributors – affiliation with an institution is valued, even if comes with caveats. [Theirs is an art museum – does that work for all audiences, or for all types of content?]

Don't try and create communities beyond the your collections (because others with bigger budgets are after the same eyeballs).

They gave lots of examples from a summary of evaluation of other projects (but the slides were hard to see):
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston – thinking through art. Active looking skills.
The Wolfsonian Institute in Miami – Artful Citizenship Project.
Guggenheim – Learning Through Art.
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum – Round by Halsey Burgund.
Denver Art museum – Frederic Remington exhibit, Hamilton building programming.
Philadelphia area art museums; art, literacy, museums.

They then provided some background information about the Art of Storytelling at the Delaware Art Museum – story telling kiosks in the museum.

Their 'a-ha' moment was realising that the experience was more transformational for the original story tellers (i.e. the adults) than the audience. Transcend traditional ideas re lack of authority.

In conclusion, visitor-contributed content programs are valuable to the original contributors and museums get valuable insight into audiences, but it's an open question as to whether they're valuable for other visitors.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage, supporting the creation of quality user-generated content in the "Living Museum".
The project started as outreach project for Jewish communities without local museum.

The process: students visit a local museum, learn a bit about how museums are structured in terms of display of objects and organisation. The students choose an artefact to represent Jewish heritage at home, then write labels at school. They then organise artefacts into galleries, create gallery title and text panels, then create in-school and online exhibitions. Students research artefacts and tell their own stories. They include measurements because you can't get a sense of scale on the internet. One piece of text tells story of artefact and the other tells significance of artefact to family.

[They aren't promoting it until they feel the site is ready – a familiar story!]

They run seminars with teachers to help them submit quality content, but they still get objects unrelated to Jewish heritage, text with spelling and grammar errors, incomplete labels, unclear photos, factual errors.

The goals included: educational – a connection to Jewish heritage, parental involvements, museology, improve writing and research skills; institutional – high quality images so people can see what they're looking at; privacy of students; motivation of students.

Teachers say students are motivated to get stuff right because it's going online.

Unlike other user-generated content sites, the content is pre-reviewed, as the project has very specific educational goals. They control who creates content on the website (anyone can use but only teachers from Jewish schools can post content) and check that kids can't be identified. They are trying not to expose the kids and their personal stories to comment or modification by other users.

They are going to implement a spell checker.

How can they help users to contribute quality content? Convey expectations, consider needs of both kinds of users, offer support, concentrate on process and product of exhibition creation, review submitted content and offer recommendations.

"In Your Face", Art Gallery of Ontario
In Your Face: The People's Portrait Project.
While the Art Gallery of Ontario building was under construction, they were interested in rethinking the way the organisation worked, and how to keep people connected to the institution.

They got the idea from UK's National Portrait Gallery BP prize, but they didn't want a contest.

They advertised on back of the national paper for a few weeks as they had free space. They wrote a copyright statement that people had to sign, specified a size, and said they would hang every piece that came in. They received 17,000 portraits.

First they got lots of entries from rural areas, then the rest of Canada and the world. There was an extraordinary variety in portraits, and also in the parcels. They also arrived with stories.

It was a one way thing – people knew they weren't going to get the portraits back. It mattered to them to get them exhibited in the AGO.

There was more diversity in portraits and in the people who came to see them than usually seen in the gallery. People paid money to see the portraits as they were 'after the gate'. It was lots of work for staff on top of their normal job cos it turned out to be huge, but gave them (the staff) energy. It also made their audiences real for the staff and helped make the institution inclusive.

Contemporary artists from their collection also sent in portraits, but their names weren't shown so it was all egalitarian.

They also created a Flickr group (but weren't able to get that projected in the gallery). It now has 10,000 portraits in it.

They had a parallel project – Collection X. It was an online project where visitors could make their own exhibition. Collect, connect and create. 'Open source museum' [- the online paper goes into more detail, including the use of RSS.]

Partly [?] as a result of the project, guiding principles developed for institution include relevance, responsiveness, creativity, transparency, diversity and forum.

Questions asked:
How do you balance museum's agenda with visitor expectations? Is it possible to assert control and foster programming that is open-ended? How do we think about expertise, quality and standards? How do we integrate and manage creativity in ways that are dynamic and long-term? Is curatorial expertise or audience experience paramount? Some things curators are uneasy about. Dynamism also means some volatility – how does that work?

Lessons learned:
Take risks, experiment and be willing to make mistakes
Museums can function as catalysts for creativity [my emphasis, this was the meme that ran through the whole session, for me]
A critical mass of creativity asserts its own kind of aesthetic
There is value in integrating user-generated content that is actual as well as virtual
Museum and the public can function as producers and consumers of culture to create a shared sense of ownership
The public will be invested if programming is authentic and they feel respected.

Notes from 'Object-Orientated Democracies: Contradictions, Challenges And Opportunities' in 'Theoretical Frameworks' session, MW2008

These are my notes from the first paper, 'Object-Orientated Democracies: Contradictions, Challenges And Opportunities' in the Theoretical Frameworks session chaired by Darren Peacock at Museums and the Web 2008. I'll post the others later because the 'real world' is calling me to a 30th now.

I didn't blog these at the time because I wanted to read the papers properly before talking about them. I probably still need a bit longer to digest them, but the longer I leave it the more vague my memory will get and the less likely I am to revisit the papers, so please excuse (and contact me to correct!) any mistakes or misinterpretations. I'm not going to summarise the papers because you can go read them for yourself at the links below (one of the truly fantastic things about the Museums and the Web conferences, IMO), I'm just pulling out the bits that pinged in my brain for whatever reason. My comments on what was said are in [square brackets] below.

The papers were Object-centred democracies: contradictions, challenges and opportunities by Fiona Cameron, Who has the responsibility for saying what we see? mashing up Museum and Visitor voices, on-site and online by Peter Samis and The API as Curator by Aaron Straup Cope.

Darren introduced the session theme as 'the interplay between theory and practice'.

Fiona Cameron, Object-orientated democracies.

Museums use currently collections to produce stable, ordered, certain meanings. Curators are the gateway to a qualified interpretation of the object. [Classification and ordering as a wish-fulfilment exercise in 'objective', scientific recording, regardless of social or cultural context?]

However, the 'networked' (online, digital?) object overturns hierarchical museum classifications and closed museum-specific interpretive paradigms.

Online objects taking 'active role in social networks and political agendas'. [Objects re-appropriated in role as cultural signifiers by the communities they came from – cool!]

'Heritage significance is where the museum meets pop culture.'

Collection information becomes fluid when released into network, flow, subject to interactions with other resources and ideas.

From the paper: "Clearly, the more technology facilitates a networked social structure and individual cultural expression, as seen most recently with Web 2.0, the more difficult it becomes for museums to produce universal or consensual meanings for their collections."

[Why would museums want to (claim to) produce universal meanings anyway? One of the exciting possibilities of linking from each of our online objects to its instance in various museum projects is the potential to expose the multiplicity of interpretations and narrative contexts produced around any single object, even within the same museum. Also, projects like 'Reassessing What We Collect' are an acknowledgement that a 'universal' reading is in fact problematic.]

Bruno La Tour: object-orientated democracies. "For too long, objects have been wrongly portrayed as matters of fact."

Objects as mediators in assertion of associations, not just cultural symbols. How are competing readings inscribed in collections documentation context?

Collections wikis – how interactions between museum and public culture might inform new collection spaces.

Test cases for 'Reconceptualising Heritage Collections' – politically charged objects – coin and wedding dress. Wiki and real time discussion with curators, Palestinian Australians, Jewish readings of the same objects – many different readings.

Placing objects in open/public wiki was seen as problematic – assault on Palestinian culture. Role of museums in this… protection, 'apolitical gatekeeper', governance?

Collections as complex systems. [Complexity as problem to be smoothed out in recording.]

Objects derive meaning and significance from a large number of elements, multi/inter/disciplinary or from outside the museum walls. [Too much on that slide to read!]

Curators as expert groups within proposed systems; group boundaries are permeable. Static museum categories become more ambiguous as objects are interpreted in unexpected, interesting ways. Role in mapping social world around a collections item. Equilibrium vs chaos?

"Objects are able to perform at a higher level of complexity."

Issues re: museum authority and expertise, tensions between hierarchical structures and flexible networks, sustainable documentation practice, manage complexity.

[I think one of the reasons I liked this so much on a personal level is that it has a lot of parallels to the thinking I had to do about recording structures for post-processual archaeology at Çatalhöyük Archaeological Project – relational archaeological databases as traditionally conceived don't support the recording of ambiguity, uncertainty, plurality, multiplicity or of interpretative context.

I also like the sense of possibilities in a system that at first might seem to undermine curatorial or organisational authority – "Objects are able to perform at a higher level of complexity". The role of museums, and the ways curators work, might change, but both museums and curators are still valued.]

Nielson on 'should your website have concise or in-depth content?'

Long pages with all the text, or shorter pages with links to extended texts – this question often comes up in discussions about our websites. It's the kind of question that can be difficult to answer by looking at the stats for existing sites because raw numbers mask all kinds of factors, and so far we haven't had the time or resources to explore this with our different audiences.

In Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy Jakob Nielsen says:

If you want many readers, focus on short and scannable content. This is a good strategy for advertising-driven sites or sites that sell impulse buys.

If you want people who really need a solution, focus on comprehensive coverage. This is a good strategy if you sell highly targeted solutions to complicated problems.

…

But the very best content strategy is one that mirrors the users' mixed diet. There's no reason to limit yourself to only one content type. It's possible to have short overviews for the majority of users and to supplement them with in-depth coverage and white papers for those few users who need to know more.

Of course, the two user types are often the same person — the one who's usually in a hurry, but is sometimes in thorough-research mode. In fact, our studies of B2B users show that business users often aren't very familiar with the complex products or services they're buying and need simple overviews to orient themselves before they begin more in-depth research.

Hypertext to the Rescue
On the Web, you can offer both short and long treatments within a single hyperspace. Start with overviews and short, simplified pages. Then link to long, in-depth coverage on other pages.

With this approach, you can serve both types of users (or the same user in different stages of the buying process).

The more value you offer users each minute they're on your site, the more likely they are to use your site and the longer they're likely to stay. This is why it's so important to optimize your content strategy for your users' needs.

So how do we adapt commercial models for a cultural heritage context? Could business-to-business users who start by familiarising or orienting themselves before beginning more in-depth research be analogous to the 'meaning making modes' for museum visitors – browsers and followers, searchers or researchers – identified by consultants Morris, Hargreaves, McIntyre?

Is a 'read more' link on shorter pages helpful or disruptive of the visitors' experience? Can the shorter text be written to suit browsers and followers and the 'read more' link crafted to tempt the searchers?

I wish I could give the answer in the next paragraph, but I don't know it myself.

Museums and Clayton's audience participation

A comment Seb left on Nate's blog post about "master" metadata got me thinking about cognitive dissonance and whether museums who say they're open to public participation and content really act as if they are. Are we providing a Clayton's call for audience participation?

If what you do – raise the barrier to participation so high that hardly anyone is going to bother commenting or tagging – speaks louder than what you say – 'sure, we'd love to hear what you have to say' – which one do you think wins?

To pick an example I've seen recently (and this is not meant to be a criticism of them or their team because I have no idea what the reasons were) the London Transport Museum have put 'all Museum objects and stories on display in the new Museum' on their collections website, which is fantastic. If you look at a collection item, the page says, "Share a story with us – comment on this image", which sounds really open and inviting.

But, if you want to comment, they ask for a lot of information about you first – check this random example.

So, ok. There are lots of possible reasons for this. UK museums have to deal with the Data Protection Act, which might complicate things, and their interpretation of the DPA might mean they ask for more information rather than less and add that scary tick box.

Or maybe they think the requirement to give this information won't deter their audience. I'd imagine that London Transport Museum's specialist audiences won't be put off by a registration form – some of their users are literally trainspotters and at risk of believing a stereotype, if they can bear the kind of weather that requires anoraks, they're probably not put off by a form.

Or maybe they're trying to control spam (though email addresses are no barrier to spam, and it's easy to use Akismet or moderation to trap spam); or maybe it's a halfway house between letting go and keeping control; or maybe they're tweaking the form in response to usage and will lower the barriers if they're not getting many comments.

Or maybe it's because the user-generated content captured this way goes directly into their collection management system and they want to record some idea of the provenance of the data. From a post to the UK Museums Computer Group list:

We have just launched the London Transport Online Museum. Users can view
every object, gallery and label text on display in our new museum in Covent Garden.

Following on from the current discussion thread we have incorporated into this new site, the facility for users to leave us memories / stories on all objects on display. Rather than a Wiki submission these stories are made directly on the website and will be fed back into our collection management system. These submissions can be viewed by all users as soon as they have passed through moderation process.

We will closely monitor how many responses we get and feedback to the group.

Please have a look, and maybe even leave us a memory?

[My emphasis in bold]

Moving on from the example of the London Transport Museum…

Whether the gap between their stated intentions and the apparent barriers to accepting user-generated content is the result of internal ambivalence about or resistance to user-generated content, concern about spam or 'bad data', or a belief that their specialist audiences will persist despite the barriers doesn't really make a difference; ultimately the intentionality matters less than the effect.

By raising the barrier to participation, aren't they ensuring that the casual audience remains exactly that – interested, but not fully engaged?

And as Seb pointed out, "Remembering that even tagging on the PHM collection – 15million views in 2007, 5 thousand tags . . . – and that is without requiring ANY form of login."

It also reminds me of what Peter Samis said at Museums and the Web in Montreal about engaging with museum visitors digitally: "We opened the door to let visitors in… then we left the room".

(If you're curious, the title is a reference to an Australian saying: Clayton's was "the drink you have when you're not having a drink", as as Wikipedia has it 'a compromise which satisfies no-one'. 'Ersatz' might be another word for it.)

Explaining the semantic web: by analogy and by example

Explaining by analogy: Miko Coffey summarises the semantic web as:

Web 1.0 is like buying a can of Campbell's Soup
Web 2.0 is like making homemade soup and inviting your soup-loving friends over
The semantic web is like having a dinner party, knowing that Tom is allergic to gluten, Sally is away til next Thursday and Bob is vegetarian.

And she's got a great image in the same post to help explain it.

To extend the analogy, it's also as if the semantic web could understand that when your American aunt's soup recipe says 'cilantro', you'd look for 'coriander' in shops in Australia or the UK.

Explaining by doing: this review 'Why I Migrated Over to Twine (And Other Social Services Bit the Dust)' of Twine gives lots of great examples of how semantic web stuff can help us:

So for example when Stanley Kubrick is mentioned in the bookmarklet fields, or in the document you upload, or in the email you send into Twine — the system will analyze and identify him as a person (not as a mere keyword). This is called entity extraction and is applied to all text on Twine.

Under the hood, a person is defined in a larger ontology in relation to other things. Here’s an example of a very small portion of my own graph within Twine:

Some may not find the point of this clear. So to explain: Just as HTML enables computers to display data — this extra semantic information markup (RDF, OWL, etc.) enables computers to understand what the data is they’re displaying. And moreover, to understand what things are in relation to other things.

Example Search
For an example, when we search for “Stanley Kubrick” on regular search engines, the words “Stanley” and “Kubrick” are usually regarded as mere keywords: a series of letters that the search engine then tries to find pages with those series of letters. But in the world of semantic web, the engines know “Stanley Kubrick” is a person. This results in a lot less irrelevant items from the search’s results….

If you weren’t already aware, the systems I just described above are the basic semantic web concept: Encapsulating data in a new layer of machine processable information to help us search, find and organize the overwhelming and ever-growing sea of pictures, videos, text and whatever else we’re creating.

I think these are both useful when explaining the benefits of the semantic web to non-geeks and may help overcome some of the fear of the unknown (or fear of investment in the pointless buzzword) we might encounter. If we believe in the semantic web, it's up to us to explain it properly to other people it's going to effect.

I also discovered a good post by Mike on the 'Innovation Manifesto'.

It's a wonderful, wonderful web

First, the news that Google are starting to crawl the deep or invisible web via html forms on a sample of 'high quality' sites (via The Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives blog):

This experiment is part of Google's broader effort to increase its coverage of the web. In fact, HTML forms have long been thought to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines. The terms Deep Web, Hidden Web, or Invisible Web have been used collectively to refer to such content that has so far been invisible to search engine users. By crawling using HTML forms (and abiding by robots.txt), we are able to lead search engine users to documents that would otherwise not be easily found in search engines, and provide webmasters and users alike with a better and more comprehensive search experience.

You're probably already well indexed if you have a browsable interface that leads to every single one of your collection records and images and whatever; but if you've got any content that was hidden behind a search form (and I know we have some in older sites), this could give it much greater visibility.

Secondly, Mike Ellis has done a sterling job synthesising some of the official, backchannel and informal conversations about the semantic web at MW2008 and adding his own perspective on his blog.

Talking about Flickr's 20 gazillion tags:

To take an example: at the individual tag level, the flaws of misspellings and inaccuracies are annoying and troublesome, but at a meta level these inaccuracies are ironed out; flattened by sheer mass: a kind of bell-curve peak of correctness. At the same time, inferences can be drawn from the connections and proximity of tags. If the word “cat” appears consistently – in millions and millions of data items – next to the word “kitten” then the system can start to make some assumptions about the related meaning of those words. Out of the apparent chaos of the folksonomy – the lack of formal vocabulary, the anti-taxonomy – comes a higher-level order. Seb put it the other way round by talking about the “shanty towns” of museum data: “examine order and you see chaos”.

The total “value” of the data, in other words, really is way, way greater than the sum of the parts.

So far, so ace. We've been excited about using the implicit links created between data as people consciously record information with tags, or unconsciously with their paths between data to create those 'small ontologies, loosely joined'; the possibilities of multilingual tagging, etc, before. Tags are cool.

But the applications of this could go further:

I got thinking about how this can all be applied to the Semantic Web. It increasingly strikes me that the distributed nature of the machine processable, API-accessible web carries many similar hallmarks. Each of those distributed systems – the Yahoo! Content Analysis API, the Google postcode lookup, Open Calais – are essentially dumb systems. But hook them together; start to patch the entire thing into a distributed framework, and things take on an entirely different complexion.

…

Here’s what I’m starting to gnaw at: maybe it’s here. Maybe if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck (as per the recent Becta report by Emma Tonkin at UKOLN) then it really is a duck. Maybe the machine-processable web that we see in mashups, API’s, RSS, microformats – the so-called “lightweight” stuff that I’m forever writing about – maybe that’s all we need. Like the widely accepted notion of scale and we-ness in the social and tagged web, perhaps these dumb synapses when put together are enough to give us the collective intelligence – the Semantic Web – that we have talked and written about for so long.

I'd say those capital letters in 'Semantic Web' might scare some of the hardcore SW crowd, but that's ok, isn't it? Semantics (sorry) aside, we're all working towards the same goal – the machine-processable web.

And in the meantime, if we can put our data out there so others can tag it, and so that we're exposing our internal 'tags' (even if they have fancier names in our collections management systems), we're moving in the right direction.

(Now I've got Black's "Wonderful Life" stuck in my head, doh. Luckily it's the cover version without the cheesy synths).

Right, now I'm off to the Museum in Docklands to talk about MultiMimsy database extractions and repositories. Rock.