Tag: cultural heritage sector

Some ideas for location-linked cultural heritage projects

I loved the Fire Eagle presentation I saw at the WSG Findability event [my write-up] because it got me all excited again about ideas for projects that take cultural heritage outside the walls of the museum, and more importantly, it made some of those projects seem feasible.

There's also been a lot of talk about APIs into museum data recently and hopefully the time has come for this idea. It'd be ace if it was possible to bring museum data into the everyday experience of people who would be interested in the things we know about but would never think to have 'a museum experience'.

For example, you could be on your way to the pub in Stoke Newington, and your phone could let you know that you were passing one of Daniel Defoe's hang outs, or the school where Mary Wollstonecraft taught, or that you were passing a 'Neolithic working area for axe-making' and that you could see examples of the Neolithic axes in the Museum of London or Defoe's headstone in Hackney Museum.

That's a personal example, and those are some of my interests – Defoe wrote one of my favourite books (A Journal of the Plague Year), and I've been thinking about a project about 'modern bluestockings' that will collate information about early feminists like Wollstonecroft (contact me for more information) – but ideally you could tailor the information you receive to your interests, whether it's football, music, fashion, history, literature or soap stars in Melbourne, Mumbai or Malmo. If I can get some content sources with good geo-data I might play with this at the museum hack day.

I'm still thinking about functionality, but a notification might look something like "did you know that [person/event blah] [lived/did blah/happened] around here? Find out more now/later [email me a link]; add this to your map for sharing/viewing later".

I've always been fascinated with the idea of making the invisible and intangible layers of history linked to any one location visible again. Millions of lives, ordinary or notable, have been lived in London (and in your city); imagine waiting at your local bus stop and having access to the countless stories and events that happened around you over the centuries. Wikinear is a great example, but it's currently limited to content on Wikipedia, and this content has to pass a 'notability' test that doesn't reflect local concepts of notability or 'interestingness'. Wikipedia isn't interested in the finds associated with an archaeological dig that happened at the end of your road in the 1970s, but with a bit of tinkering (or a nudge to me to find the time to make a better programmatic interface) you could get that information from the LAARC catalogue.

The nice thing about local data is that there are lots of people making content; the not nice thing about local data is that it's scattered all over the web, in all kinds of formats with all kinds of 'trustability', from museums/libraries/archives, to local councils to local enthusiasts and the occasional raving lunatic. If an application developer or content editor can't find information from trusted sources that fits the format required for their application, they'll use whatever they can find on other encyclopaedic repositories, hack federated searches, or they'll screen-scrape our data and generate their own set of entities (authority records) and object records. But what happens if a museum updates and republishes an incorrect record – will that change be reflected in various ad hoc data solutions? Surely it's better to acknowledge and play with this new information environment – better for our data and better for our audiences.

Preparing the data and/or the interface is not necessarily a project that should be specific to any one museum – it's the kind of project that would work well if it drew on resources from across the cultural heritage sector (assuming we all made our geo-located object data and authority records available and easily queryable; whether with a commonly agreed core schema or our own schemas that others could map between).

Location-linked data isn't only about official cultural heritage data; it could be used to display, preserve and commemorate histories that aren't 'notable' or 'historic' enough for recording officially, whether that's grime pirate radio stations in East London high-rise roofs or the sites of Turkish social clubs that are now new apartment buildings. Museums might not generate that data, but we could look at how it fits with user-generated content and with our collecting policies.

Or getting away from traditional cultural heritage, I'd love to know when I'm passing over the site of one of London's lost rivers, or a location that's mentioned in a film, novel or song.

[Updated December 2008 to add – as QR tags get more mainstream, they could provide a versatile and cheap way to provide links to online content, or 250 characters of information. That's more information than the average Blue Plaque.]

Notes from 'The API as Curator' and on why museums should hire programmers

These are my notes from the third paper 'The API as Curator' by Aaron Straup Cope in the Theoretical Frameworks session chaired by Darren Peacock at Museums and the Web 2008. The slides for The API as Curator are online.

I've also included below some further notes on why, how, whether museums should hire programmers, as this was a big meme at the conference and Aaron's paper made a compelling case for geeks in art, arty geeks and geeky artists.

You might have noticed it's taken me a while to catch up on some of my notes from this conference, and the longer I leave it the harder it gets. As always, any mistakes are mine, any comments corrections are welcome, and the comments in [square brackets] below are mine.

The other session papers were Object-centred democracies: contradictions, challenges and opportunities by Fiona Cameron and Who has the responsibility for saying what we see? mashing up Museum and Visitor voices, on-site and online by Peter Samis; all the conference papers and notes I've blogged have been tagged with 'MW2008'.

Aaron Cope: The API as curator.

The paper started with some quotes as 'mood music' for the paper.

Institutions are opening up, giving back to the communitiy and watching what people build.

It's about (computer stuff as) plumbing, about making plumbing not scary. If you're talking about the web, sooner or later you're going to need to talk about computer programming.

Programmers need to be more than just an accessory – they should be in-house and full-time and a priority. It boils down to money. You don't all need to be computer scientists, but it should be part of it so that you can build things.

Experts and consumers – there's a long tradition of collaboration in the art community, for example printmaking. Printers know about all the minutiae (the technical details) but/so the artists don't have to.

Teach computer stuff/programming so that people in the arts world are not simply consumers.

Threadless (the t-shirt site) as an example. Anyone can submit a design, they're voted on in forum, then the top designs are printed. It makes lots of money. It's printmaking by any other name. Is it art?

"Synthetic performances" Joseph Beuys in Second Life…

It's nice not to be beholden to nerds… [I guess a lot of people think that about their IT department. Poor us. We all come in peace!]

Pure programming and the "acid bath of the internet".

Interestingness on Flickr – a programmer works on it, but it's not a product – (it's an expression of their ideas). Programming is not a disposable thing, it's not as simple as a toaster. But is it art? [Yes! well, it can be sometimes, if a language spoken well and a concept executed elegantly can be art.]

API and Artspeak – Aaron's example (a bit on slide 15 and some general mappy goodness).

Build on top of APIs. Open up new ways to explore collection. Let users map their path around your museum to see the objects they want to see.

Their experience at Flickr is that people will build those things (if you make it possible). [Yay! So let's make it possible.]

There's always space for collaboration.

APIs as the nubby bits on Lego. [Lego is the metaphor of the conference!]

Flickr Places – gazetteer browsing.

[Good image on slide 22]: interpretation vs intent, awesome (x) vs time (y). You need programmers on staff, you need to pay them [please], you don't want them to be transient if you want to increase smoothness of graph between steps of awesomeness. Go for the smallest possible release cycles. Small steps towards awesome.

Questions for the Theoretical Frameworks session
Qu from the Science Museum Minnesota: how to hire programmers in museums – how to attract them? when salaries are crap.
Aaron – teach it in schools and go to computer science departments. People do stuff for more than just money.

Qu on archiving UGC and other stuff generated in these web 2.0 projects… Peter Samis – WordPress archives things. [So just use the tools that already exist]

Aaron – build it and they will come. Also, redefine programming.

There's a good summary of this session by Nate at MW2008 – Theoretical Frameworks.

And here's a tragically excited dump from my mind written at the time: "Yes to all that! Now how do we fund it, and convince funders that big top-down projects are less likely to work than incremental and iterative builds? Further, what if programmers and curators and educators had time to explore, collaborate, push each other in a creative space? If you look at the total spend on agencies and external contractors, it must be possible to make a case for funding in-house programmers – but silos of project-based funding make it difficult to consolidate those costs, at least in the UK."

Continuing the discussion about the benefits of an in-house developer team, post-Museums and the Web, Bryan Kennedy wrote a guest post on Museum 2.0 about Museums and the Web in Montreal that touched on the issue:

More museums should be building these programming skills in internal teams that grow expertise from project to project. Far too many museums small and large rely on outside companies for almost all of their technical development on the web. By and large the most innovation at Museums and the Web came from teams of people who have built expertise into the core operations of their institution.

I fundamentally believe that at least in the museum world there isn't much danger of the technology folks unseating the curators of the world from their positions of power. I'm more interested in building skilled teams within museums so that the intelligent content people aren't beholden to external media companies but rather their internal programmers who feel like they are part of the team and understand the overall mission of the museum as well as how to pull UTF-8 data out of a MySQL database.

I left the following comment at the time, and I'm being lazy* and pasting here to save re-writing my thoughts:

Good round-up! The point about having permanent in-house developers is really important and I was glad to see it discussed so much at MW2008.

It's particularly on my mind at the moment because yesterday I gave a presentation (on publishing from collections databases and the possibilities of repositories or feeds of data) to a group mostly comprised of collections managers, and I was asked afterwards if this public accessibility meant "the death of the curator". I've gathered the impression that some curators think IT projects impose their grand visions of the new world, plunder their data, and leave the curators feeling slightly shell-shocked and unloved.

One way to engage with curatorial teams (and educators and marketers and whoever) and work around these fears and valuable critiques is to have permanent programmers on staff who demonstrably value and respect museum expertise and collections just as much as curators, and who are willing to respond to the concerns raised during digital projects.

There's a really good discussion in the comments on Bryan's post. I'm sure this is only a sample of the discussion, but it's a bit difficult to track down across the blogosphere/twitterverse/whatever and I want to get this posted some time this century.

* But good programmers are lazy, right?

Notes from 'Who has the responsibility for saying what we see?' in the 'Theoretical Frameworks' session, MW2008

These are my notes from the second paper, 'Who has the responsibility for saying what we see? mashing up Museum and Visitor voices, on-site and online' by Peter Samis in the Theoretical Frameworks session chaired by Darren Peacock at Museums and the Web 2008.

The other session papers were Object-centred democracies: contradictions, challenges and opportunities by Fiona Cameron and The API as Curator by Aaron Straup Cope; all the conference papers and notes I've blogged have been tagged with 'MW2008'.

It's taken me a while to catch up on some of my notes – real life has a way of demanding attention sometimes. Any mistakes are mine, any comments corrections are welcome, and the comments in [square brackets] below are mine.

Peter Samis spoke about the work of SFMOMA with Olafur Eliasson. His slides are here.

How our perception changes how we see the world…

"Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world if there’s not an individual person making use of that object… I of course don’t think my work is about my work. I think my work is about you." (Olafur Eliasson, 2007)

Samis gave an overview of the exhibitions "Take your time: Olafur Eliasson" and "Your tempo" presented at SFMOMA.

The "your" in the titles demands a proactive and subjective approach; stepping into installations rather than looking at paintings. The viewer is integral to the fulfilment of a works potential.

Do these rules apply to all [museum] objects? These are the questions…

They aimed to encourage visitors in contemplation of their own experience.

Visitors who came to blog viewed 75% of pages. Comments were left by 2% of blog visitors.

There was a greater in interest in seeing how others responded than in contributing to the conversation. Comments were a 'mixed bag'.

The comments helped with understanding visitor motivations in narratives… there's a visual 'Velcro effect' – some artworks stay with people – the more visceral the experience of various artworks, the greater the corresponding number of comments.

[Though I wondered if it's an unproblematic and direct relationship? People might have a relationship with the art work that doesn't drive them to comment; that requires more reflection to formulate a response; or that might occur at an emotional rather than intellectual level.]

Visitors also take opportunity to critique the exhibition/objects and curatorial choices when asked to comment.

What are the criteria of values for comments? By whose standards? And who within the institution reads the blog?

How do you know if you've succeeded? Depends on goals.

"We opened the door to let visitors in… then we left the room. They were the only ones left in the room." – the museum opens up to the public then steps out of the dialogue. [Slide 20]

[I have quoted this in conversation so many times since the conference. I think it's an astute and powerful summary of the unintended effect of participatory websites that aren't integrated into the museum's working practices. We say we want to know what our visitors think, and then we walk away while they're still talking. This image is great because it's so visceral – everyone realises how rude that is.]

Typology/examples of museum blogs over time… based on whether they open to comments, and whether they act like docents/visitors assistants and have conversations with the public in front of the artworks.

If we really engage with our visitors, will we release the "pent up comments"?
A NY Times migraine blog post had 294 reflective, articulate, considered, impassioned comments on the first day.

[What are your audiences' pent up questions? How do you find the right questions? Is it as simple as just asking our audiences, and even if it isn't, isn't that the easiest place to start? If we can crack the art of asking the right questions to elicit responses, we're in a better position.]

Nina Simon's hierarchy of social participation. Museums need to participate to get to higher levels of co-creative, collaborative process. "Community producer" – enlist others, get
cross fertilisation.

Even staff should want to return to your blogs and learn from them.

[Who are the comments that people leave addressed to? Do we tell them or do we just expect them to comment into empty space? Is that part of the reason for low participation rates? What's the relationship between participation and engagement? But also because people aren't participating in the forum you provide, doesn't mean they're not participating somewhere else… or engaging with it in other forums, conversations in the pubs, etc not everything is captured online even if the seed is online and in your institution. ]

MultiMimsy database extractions and the possibilities for OAI-based collections repositories

I've uploaded my presentation slides from a talk for the UK MultiMimsy Users group in Docklands last month to MultiMimsy database extractions and the possibilities for OAI-based collections repositories at the Museum of London.

The first part discusses how to get from a set of data in a collections management system to a final published website, looking at the design process and technical considerations. Willoughby's use of Oracle on the back-end means that any ODBC-compliant database can query the underlying database and extract collections data.

The paper then looks at some of the possibilities for the Museum of London's OAI-PMH repository. We've implemented an OAI repository for the People's Network Discover Service (PNDS) for Exploring 20th Century London (which also means we're set to get records into Europeana), but I hope that we can use the repository in lots of other ways, including the possibility of using our repository to serve data for federated searches.

There's currently some discussion internationally in the cultural heritage sector about repositories vs federated search, but I'm not sure it's an either/or choice. The reasons each are used are often to do with political or funding factors instead of the base technology, but either method, or both, could be used internally or externally depending on the requirements of the project and institution.

I can go into more detail about the scripts we use to extract data from MultiMimsy or send sample scripts if people are interested. They might be a good way to get started if you haven't extracted data from MultiMimsy before but they won't generally be directly relevant to your data structres as the use of MultiMimsy can vary so widely between types of museums, collections and projects.

Talking to IT students about the cultural heritage sector, and a small 'woot'

I've just written a report of a visit I made with June (our diversity manager) and Bilkis (our web content manager) to Kingston University to talk to students from the Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics about the role of IT professionals in museums.

The full post is on the Museum of London blog ('Why should IT students consider working in cultural heritage?') but I thought it was worth linking to here because the discussion raised lots of interesting questions that might benefit from a wider audience:

How can we engage with our audiences? How would you challenge us, as a museum, do to a better job? Is there obvious stuff we’re missing? Do you have an idea for a project a museum could work with you on? Do you want to contribute to our work? Do you have any more questions about museum jobs?

On a more theoretical level, what effect might new methods of collecting objects or stories have – does it create a new kind of visibility for content from IT literate people with reliable access to the internet? How can we engage with people who aren’t comfortable online?

I think I got more out of the session than the students did, and it's nice to think that one or two of them might consider working in a museum when they graduate.

And the small 'woot'? This blog has been listed as an example of a 'programming and development blog' in the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards 08. I have no idea how that happened, but it's very flattering.

Calling geeks in the UK with an interest in cultural heritage content/audiences

You might be interested in BathCamp – a bar camp in Bath on a Saturday (with overnight stay) in late August. This is an initial open call so head along to the website (BathCamp) and check it out. Ideally you would have an interest in cultural heritage content, audiences or applications, but we love the idea of getting fresh perspectives from a wide range of people so we don't expect that you would have worked with the cultural heritage sector (museums, galleries, libraries, archives, archaeology) before.

What Does Openness Mean to The Musum Community?

There's an almost-live report from Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly's "What Does Openness Mean to The Museum Community?" forum at the Museums and the Web conference yesterday at http://mw2008.wetpaint.com/page/report

It's a really important discussion and as it's a wiki I assume you can add comments. I am running late for a session but will sort out my notes later.

Notes from Advanced Web Development: software strategies for online applications at MW2008

These are my notes from the Advanced Web Development: software strategies for online applications workshop with Rob Stein, Charles Moad and Edward Bachta from the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Museums and the Web 2008 (MW2008) in Montreal. I don't know if they'll be useful for anyone else, but if you have any questions about my notes, let me know.

They had their slides online before the presentation, which was really helpful. [More of this sort of thing, please! Though I wish there was a way to view thumbnails of slides on slideshare so you can skip to particular slides.]

The workshop covered a lot of ground, and they did a pretty good job of pitching it at different levels of geekdom. Some of my notes will seem self-evident to different types of geeks or non-geeks but I've tried to include most of what they covered. I've put some of my own comments in [square brackets].

They started with the difference between web pages and web applications, and pointed out that people have been building applications for 30 years so build on existing stuff.

Last year's talk was about 'web 2.0' and the foundations of building solid software applications but since then APIs/SDKs have taken off. Developers should pick pieces that already work rather than building from the bottom up. The craft lies in knowing how to choose the components and how to integrate them.

There are still reasons to consider building your own APIs e.g. if you have unique information others are unlikely to support adequately, if you care about security of data, if you want to control the distribution of information, or if a guarantee of service is important (e.g. if vendors disappear).

Building APIs
They're using model driven development, using xmlschema or database as your model.

Object relational mappers provide object-oriented access to a database. Data model changes are picked up automatically and they're generally database-agnostic so you can swap out the back end. Object relational mappers include Ruby, Hibernate (also in .Net), Propel and SQLAlchemy.

IMA use Hibernate with EMu (their collections management system) and Propel. They've built an 'adaptive layer' for their collection that glues it all together.

Slide on Eclipse: 'rich client platform', not just an IDE. Supports nearly every language except .Net; is cross-platform.

Search
Use full-text indexes for good search functionality. They suggest Lucene (from apache.org) or Google gears. Lucene query types offer finer control than Google e.g. fielded searching [a huge draw for specialist collections searches], date range searching, sorting by any field, multiple index searching with merged results. Fast, low memory usage, extensible. Tools built on Lucene include Nutch (web crawler) and Solr – REST and SOAP API.

Bite size web components and suggestions for a web application toolkit
Harking back to the 'find good components' thing. Leverage someone else's work, and reduce dev/debugging costs – in their experience it produces fewer errors than writing their own stuff.

Storage – Amazon, Nirvanix, XDrive, Google, Box.net. Use Amazon S3 if accessed infrequently cos of free structure.

Video – YouTube, Revver, blip.tv also have developer interfaces. The IMA don't host any video on their website, it's all on YouTube.

Images – Flickr, Picasa. [But the picasa UI sucks so please don't inflict that on your users!]. Flickr support for REST, SOAP, JSON.

Compute (EC, Amazon web service) – Linux virtual machines. Custom disk images for specific requirements. Billable on use. See slides on costs for web hosting.

Authentication services – OpenID, OAuth.

Social computing
Consider social computing when developing your web applications – it's evolving rapidly and is uncertain. Facebook vs OpenSocial (might be the question today, but tomorrow?). Stick with the eyeballs and be ready to change. [Though the problem for museums thinking about social software applications remains – by the time most museums go through approval processes to get onto Facebook it'll be dead in the water. Another reason to have good programmers on staff and include content resources in online programs, so that teams can be more flexible while still working within the overall online strategy of their organisation.]

Developing on Facebook
Facebook API – REST-based API. Use their developer platform – simpler than original API calls. JSON simpler than XML responses. Facebook Query Language (FQL) reduces calls to API. Facebook Markup Language (FBML). HTML + Facebook specific features, inc security controls and interfaces features. [There's a pronoun tag with built-in 'they' if not sure of gender of person. Cute.] Lots more in their slides.

Widget frameworks
Widgets are the buzzword that hasn't quite taken off. The utility isn't quite there yet, so what are they used for? Players are Google, Netvibes (supports more platforms including Apple Mac dashboard, Yahoo, iGoogle, etc) but is Adobe AIR the widget killer? Flash-based runtime for desktop apps. e.g. twhirl. Run as background processes, and can access desktop files directly, clipboard, drag and drop. [I downloaded the AIR Google Analytics application during the session, it's a good example.]

Content management
The CMS is the container to put all the components together. A good CMS will let you integrate components into a new site with a minimum of effort. [Wouldn't that be nice?] Examples include Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Plone.

There aren't slides for the next 'CMS tour' bit, but they gave some great examples.

Nature holds my camera: they tried visitor blogging with a terminal in gallery so people could ask questions.

They talked about the IMA dashboard. [I asked a vague question about whether there was a user-driven or organisational business case for it – turns out it was driven by their CEO's interest in transparency, e.g. in sharing how they invest monies, track stats and communicate with their visitors. It helps engender trust and loyalty e.g. for donors. Attendance drives corporate sponsorship so there was a business case. It's also good for tracking their performance against actual actions vs stated goals.]

The advantages of using a web application toolkit – theromansarecoming.com took $50,000 to build for a four month exhibition. It hit the goals but was expensive. [The demo looked really cool, it's a shame you don't seem to be able to access it online.]

Breaking the Mode was built using existing components on the technical side, but required the same content investment i.e. in-house resources as The Romans Are Coming. The communication issues were much better because it was built in-house – less of a requirement to explain to external developers, which had some effect on the cost [but the biggest saving was i re-usable component] – the site took 25 hours to build and IT staff costs were about $1000. [So, quite a saving there.]

They demonstrated 'athena', the IMA's intranet. It has file sharing and task management and is built on drupal, looks a bit like basecamp-lite but without licensing issues. "Everything you do in a museum is project-based" and their intranet is built to support that.

There was discussion about whether their intranet could be shared with other museums. Rob Stein is a firm believer in open source and thinks it's the best way to go for museum sector. They're willing to share the source code but don't have the facilities to support it. There's a possibility that they could partner with other institutions to combine to pay small vendors to support it.

[I could hear a sudden burst of keyboards clicking around me as the discussion went onto pooling resources to create and support open source applications for stuff museums need to do. Smaller museums (i.e. most of us, and most are much smaller than MoL) don't have the resources for bespoke software or support but if we all combined, we'd be a bigger market. Overall, it was a really good, grounded discussion about the realities and possibilities of open source development.]

Back to the slides…

Team Troubles
[It was absolutely brilliant to see a discussion of teamwork and collaboration issues in a technical session.]

Divide and conquer – allow team members to focus on area of expertise. Makes it easier to swap out content and themes.

They're using MVC – Model (data management), Controller (interaction logic), View (user internface). They had some good stuff on MVC and the web in their slides (around 77-79). They also discussed the role of non-technical team members.

Drupal boot camp
[This was a pretty convincing demo of getting started with Drupal and using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) to create custom content types e.g. work of art to publish content quickly, though I did wonder about how it integrated with ORMs that would automatically pick up an underlying data structure. Slide 103 showed recommended Drupal modules. It's definitely worth checking out if you're looking for a CMS. If you're on Windows, check out bitnami for installation.]

Client side development
"The customer is always right"
They talked about the DOM (document object model) and javascript for Web 2.0 coolness.
They recommended using Javascript toolkits – more object-orientated, solve cross-browser issues, rapid development. Slide 109 listed some Javascript toolkits and they also recommended Firebug.

Interface components
They should be re-usable, just like the server-side stuff. They should some suggestions like reCAPTCHA, image carousels and rating modules. Pick the tools with best community support and cross-platform support.

CSS boilerplates
Treat CSS like another software component of web design and standardise your CSS usage. Use structured naming for classes and divs in server-side content generation. Check out oswd.org for free templates.

XML in the real world
They demonstrated Global Origins (more on that and other goodness at www.ima-digital.org/special-projects) which uses XML driven content.

Questions and discussion
I asked about integration with legacy/existing systems. Their middleware component 'Mercury' binds their commercial packages and other applications together. e.g. collection management system extraction layer. [This could be a good formalised model for MoL, as we have to pull from a few different places and push out to lots more and it's all a bit ad hoc at the moment. I think we'll be having lots of good discussions about this very soon.]

Some discussion about putting pressure on vendors to open data models. It's a better economic model for them and for museums.

Their CEO is supportive of iteration (in the development process). The web team is cross-department, and they have new media content creators.

[I was curious about how iterative development and the possibility of making mistakes work with their brand but didn't want to ask too many questions]

They made the point that you have a bigger recruiting pool with open source software. [Recruiting geeks into museums has been a bit of a conference meme.]

They give away iPods for online surveys and get more responses that way, but you do have to be aware that people might only give polite answers to survey questions so pay close attention to any criticism.

The IMA say you should be able to justify the longevity of projects when experimenting. Measure your projects against your mission, and how they can implement your mission statement.

So, that's it! I hope I didn't misrepresent anything they said.

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

Museums as social spaces – the good, the bad, and the (ugly) conversations of others

I've linked to two articles about museums as social spaces or the behaviour of the public in museums; one refers to virtual and the other to physical space but the issues are related.

In museums, social situations, control and trust, Jennifer Trant says:

as soon as you put museum collections in a public place, the public will do what they do …. search logs show us that many look for 'nude' … and if you let people comment, they will: they will tell you about your typos; they will tell you that their child could have made that painting; and they will argue about the significance of works. they will also tell you things that you might never have known, and you can learn from that. but what happens when two branches of a family choose your museum's site as the venue for a dispute about what was 'true' family history?

She also makes the point that museums "can't demand control" and have to trust that users will respect their content when they allow users to use their collections in the users' personal space.

This is one issue that probably causes a lot of anxiety within museums at the moment. We'll only really find out whether users will respect our content when we let them respond to it. What kind of visitors have the means and self-motivation to comment on, link to pages or display images, or otherwise respond to cultural heritage content?

On another note, is it worse to be disrespected or ignored?

I'm just quoting one more bit from her post before I go on, because I thought it was worth repeating:

"there are a number of different value propositions for distribution of reproductions of works of in their collections. there may still be some great icons that will sell. but in many cases the value of having a collection known may outweighs worries about lost revenue, particularly when the images being released on the public web really aren't large enough to do that much with."

So from visitors respecting content, to visitors respecting other visitors, and perhaps to whether museums respect the visitor experience…

Giles Waterfield relates his experience of the crowded New York MoMA in The crowds swamping museums must be tackled – soon and makes some good points about "the over-population and over-use of the museum space":

"the predominance and ready availability in our society of visual images can mean that apart from the (sometimes over-exposed) icon, works in a gallery risk becoming another form of rapidly-absorbed consumer fodder. … visitors at many contemporary art museums now often behave similarly, pausing only to take pictures of celebrity works"

This matters because:

"looking at art is a difficult experience, one that has to be learnt and that requires concentration. Little art was created specifically for the museum or gallery, at least until recently, and the museum is not necessarily the best place to appreciate it. If the museum experience becomes one in which the visitor is regularly concerned with negotiating a way through the crowds and avoiding noise, the status of the museum as a vehicle for displaying art becomes highly questionable.

…the series of subtle, intense and inter-linked experiences that are created require an appropriate environment. The Demoiselles may just about survive, but quieter works of art drown and the carefully considered relationships between them disappear when the pressure of visitors means it is hardly possible to concentrate or to view more than one work at a time, if that."

His article is specific to art galleries, and the types of attention, learning and reflection may well be different for art works and social history objects; but the effect of interactions between the space in which the object is seen and of encounters with other visitors is interesting.

In my own experience, I have to force myself to go see blockbuster exhibitions because I dread the crowds – not only can is be really difficult to have a decent look at the art or objects; the sheer number of people means that tempers are shorter and the atmosphere is slightly more 'Oxford Street on a Saturday' than 'quiet temple of contemplation'.

If you give up waiting for a chance to read the captions or panel text over someone else's shoulder, it's easy for objects to appear only as visual entertainment.