Open Objects

Nine days to go! And entering Cosmic Collections just got easier

2009-11-19T22:38:00.003Z

Quoting myself over on the museum developers blog, Cosmic Collections – do one thing and do it well:

I’ve realised that there may be some mismatch between the way mashups tend to work, and the scope we’ve suggested for entries to our competition. The types of interfaces someone might produce with the API may lend themselves more to exploring one particular idea in depth than produce something suitable for the broadest range of our audiences.

So I’m proposing to change the scope for entries to the competition, to make it more realistic and a better experience for entrants: I’d like to ask you to build a section of a site, rather than a whole site. The scope for entrants would then be: “create something that does one thing, and does it well”. Our criteria – use of collections data, creativity, accessibility, user experience and ease of deployment and maintenance – are still important but we’ll consider them alongside the type of mashup you submit.

I've updated the Cosmic Collections competition page to reflect this change. This page also features a new 'how to take part' section, including a direct link to the API and to a discussion group.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this change - there's an email address lurking on the competition page, and I'm on twitter @mia_out and @coscultcom.

In other news, programmableweb published a blog post about the competition today: Science Museum Opens API and Challenges Developers to Mashup the Cosmos. Woo!

And I don't know if it's any kind of consolation if you're entering, but I'll be working right alongside you up until Friday 28th, on an assignment for my MSc.

Organisational pain

2009-11-05T19:12:00.002Z

If you work in a large organisation (or a cultural heritage organisation of almost any size), you may find cathartic release in reading this response to criticism of a large website from a member of its internal webteam:

...simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like.

As always, I'm not particularly pointing the finger at my own institution, but I've definitely been there. Cultural heritage institutions tend to have bonus! added! overload on web teams, so the list of improvements you want to make is always much longer than the resources you have available.

'Cosmic Collections' launches at the Science Museum this weekend

2009-10-22T00:30:00.004+01:00

I think I've already said pretty much everything I can about the museum website mashup competition we're launching around the 'Cosmos and Culture' exhibition, but it'd be a bit silly of me not to mention it here since the existence and design of the project reflects a lot of the issues I've written about here.

If you make it along to the launch at the Science Museum on Saturday, make sure you say hello - I should be easy to find cos I'm giving a quick talk at some point.

Right now the laziest thing I could do is to give you a list of places where you can find out more:

You can RSVP at eventbrite or simply find out more about the Cosmic Collections launch event and about the mashup competition.
You can read 'A new API and hack competition - this time not from a tech company but by a museum!', an interview with Chris Heilmann on the Yahoo Developer Network blog.
There are two separate interviews with me, 'Cosmic Collections: the geeky stuff' and Ali Boyle, the Curator of Astronomy, 'Background on our Cosmos & Culture exhibition'. (My apologies to the readers of the collections blog for my nerdtastic interruption. And that was me trying to speak like a normal person - tragic, really.)
You can also ask questions about it, connect with other participants, share tips, etc on the competition wiki.

Finally, you can talk to us @coscultcom on twitter, or tag content with #coscultcom.

Btw - if you want an idea of how slowly museums move, I think I first came up with the idea in January (certainly before dev8D because it was one of the reasons I wanted to go) and first blogged about it (I think) on the museum developers blog in March. The timing was affected by other issues, but still - it's a different pace of life!

On 'cultural heritage technologists'

2009-10-17T17:14:00.002+01:00

A Requirements Engingeering lecture at uni yesterday discussed 'satisfaction arguments' (a way of relating domain knowledge to the introduction of a new system in an environment), emphasising the importance of domain knowledge in understanding user and system requirements - an excellent argument for the importance of cultural heritage technologists in good project design. The lecture was a good reminder that I've been meaning to post about 'cultural heritage technologists' for a while. In a report on April's Museums and the Web 2009, I mentioned in passing:

...I also made up a new description for myself as I needed one in a hurry for moo cards: cultural heritage technologist. I felt like a bit of a dag but then the lovely Ryan from the George Eastman House said it was also a title he'd wanted to use and that made me feel better.

I'd expanded further on it for the first Museums Pecha Kucha night in London:

Museum technologists are not merely passive participants in the online publication process. We have skills, expertise and experience that profoundly shape the delivery of services. In Jacob Nielsen's terms, we are double domain experts. This brings responsibilities on two fronts – for us, and for the museums that employ us.

Nielsen describes 'double usability specialists' or 'double experts' as those with expertise in human-computer interaction and in the relevant domain or sector (e.g. ref). He found that these double experts were more effective at identifying usability issues, and I've extrapolated from that to understand the role of double expertise in specifying and developing online and desktop applications.

Commenters in the final session of MW2009 conference described the inability of museums to recognise and benefit from the expertise of their IT or web staff, instead waiting until external gurus pronounced on the way of the future - which turns out to be the same things museum staff had been saying for years. (Sound familiar?)

So my post-MW2009 'call to arms' said "museums should recognise us (museum technologists) as double domain experts. Don’t bury us like Easter eggs in software/gardens. There’s a lot of expertise in your museum, if you just look. We can save you from mistakes you don't even know you're making. Respect our expertise - anyone can have an opinion about the web but a little knowledge is easily pushed too far".

However, I'm also very aware of our responsibilities. A rough summary might be:

Museum technologists have responsibilities too. Don’t let recognition as a double domain expert make you arrogant or a ‘know it all’. Be humble. Listen. Try to create those moments of understanding, both yours from conversation with others, and others from conversation with you - and cherish that epiphany. Break out of the bubble that tech jargon creates around our discussions. Share your excitement. Explain how a new technology will benefit staff and audiences, show them why it's exciting. Respect the intelligence of others we work with, and consider it part of our job to talk to them in language they understand. Bring other departments of the museum with us instead of trying to drag them along.
Don't get carried away with idea that we are holders of truth, we need to take advantage of the knowledge and research of others. Yes, we have lots of expertise but we need to constantly refresh that by checking back with our audiences and internal stakeholders. We also need to listen to concerns and consider them seriously; to acknowledge and respect their challenges and fears. Finally, don’t be afraid to call in peers to help with examples, moral support and documentation.

My thoughts on this are still a work in progress, and I'd love to hear what you think. Is it useful, is it constructive? Does a label like 'cultural heritage technologist' or 'museum technologist' help others respect your learning and expertise? Does it matter?

About 'lessons from a decade of museum websites'

2009-10-15T13:39:00.004+01:00

An article I wrote for Museum iD, 'an independent ideas exchange and thinktank for museums and heritage professionals' has been published online. The entire version of 'Learning lessons from a decade of museum websites' is available online, but as a taster, it starts:

2009 may be remembered as the year when various financial crises gave us time
and cause to stop and reflect on the successes and failures of the past decade
or so of museums on the web. This reflection is aided by the maturity of
the web as a technical platform – models are now available for most common
applications of cultural heritage online, and a substantial body of experience
with digitisation and web projects exists within the cultural heritage
sector. It also offers an opportunity to pose some questions about the
organisational changes museums might face as both the expectations of our
audiences and our own working practices have been influenced by our interactions
online.

Some of it's really practical, and comes from my desire to share the lessons I've learnt over ten years in the cultural heritage sector:

Based on my experience and on that of other museum technologists, I’ve listed
some sample questions about your audiences, content and organisational goals
related to the project. The answers to these questions will begin to
reveal the types of interactions your audiences could have with your content,
with each other and with the museum itself. In turn, focussing on those
social and functional interactions you wish to support will determine the
website and interaction metaphors suitable for your project.

And some of it comes from a desire to see museums communicate better internally, and to make the most of existing knowledge and resources, no matter where it sits in the organisation:

Some of the questions above may seem rather daunting, but by involving
staff from a range of disciplines in the project’s earliest scoping stages, you
gain a greater variety of perspectives and make available a wider range of
possible solutions. Inviting others to participate in the initial stages
of project design and taking advantage of the innovation and expertise in your
organisation is a good way to discover reusable resources, bring to light any
internal duplications or conflicts, and to ‘reality check’ your idea against
organisational mission and operational reality. For example, most museums
contain people who spend their days talking to audiences and watching them
interact with exhibits and interpretative content – observations that can help
bridge the gap between the physical and online audience experience.
Similarly, museum technologists are not merely passive conduits in the online
publication process but often have skills, expertise and experience that can
profoundly shape the delivery of services.

If you need to understand emerging technologies, ‘mash-up days’
are among the lightweight, inexpensive but potentially high-impact ways to
enable staff to research and experiment with new platforms while engaging in
cross-departmental collaboration. Cross-specialism workshops,
‘unconferences’ , social media communication tools and even traditional meetings
are a great way to create space for innovation while benefiting from years of
institutional knowledge and bridging the disconnect that sometimes exists
between departments. Integrating social and participatory (or ‘Web 2.0’)
applications for collaboration and consultation into organisational practice
can improve the chances of success for web projects by allowing staff to
become as familiar as their audiences with the potential of these tools.

A lot of my thinking harks back to the ideas that coalesced around the Museums and the Web conference earlier this year, summarised here and here.

Finally, I snuck in a challenge at the end: "Our audiences have fundamentally changed as a result of their interactions online – shouldn’t the same be true of our organisations?".

Let's push things forward - V&A and British Library beta collections search

2009-09-13T16:38:00.004+01:00

The V&A and the British Library have both recently released beta sites for their collections searches. I'd mentioned the V&A's beta collections search in passing elsewhere, but basically it's great to see such a nicely designed interface - it's already a delight to use and has a simplicity that usually only comes from lots of hard work - and I love that the team were able to publish it as a beta. Congratulations to all involved!

(I'm thinking about faceted browsing for the Science Museum collections, and it's interesting to see which fields the V&A have included in the 'Explore related objects' panel (example). I'd be interested to see any usability research on whether users prefer 'inline' links to explore related objects (e.g. in the 'tombstone data' bit to the right of the image) or for the links to appear in a distinct area, as on this site. )

I'm not sure how long it's been live, but the British Library beta catalogue search features a useful 'Refine My Results' panel on the right-hand side of the search results page.

There's also a 'workspace', where items and queries can be saved and managed. I think there's a unique purpose for users of the BL search that most sites with 'save your items' functions don't have - you can request items directly from your workspace in advance for delivery when next in the library. My friendly local British Library regular says the ability to save searches between sessions is immensely useful. You can also export to delicious, Connotea, RefWorks or EndNote, so your data is transportable, though unfortunately when I tested my notes on an item weren't also exported. I don't have a BL login so I haven't been able to play with their tagging system.

They've included a link to a survey, which is a useful way to get feedback from their users.

Both beta sites are already useful, and I look forward to seeing how they develop.

What's the point of museum collections online?

2009-09-13T13:34:00.008+01:00

Earlier this week I posted on our developer blog to ask 'what’s your number one question about presenting museum collections online?'.

Merel van der Vaart (@MerelVaart on twitter), who has just finished an internship with the Science Museum's climate change content team, posed an interesting question in response:

"I'm still struggling to decide what the value of online access is. Not that I think it's bad, but how exactly is it good?"

I tend to think that everyone knows the benefits of online collections, so it's actually a really good question - why are we putting collections online? Who does it benefit? Are the benefits clear to others in the museum, and to our audiences?

I can think lots of answers, but the exercise of stopping and examining my automatic response was really useful. I'm still thinking about the presentation on selling your ideas because it's made me realise the importance of having answers to questions we'd forgotten might be questions.

Top ten tips for selling your IT project

2009-09-03T19:40:00.004+01:00

I'm spending two days in Manchester for the JISC event, Rapid Innovation in Development. I've already had some interesting, inspiring and useful conversations and I'm looking forward to tomorrow (and more importantly, getting some quality programming time to try them out).

The event has a focus on helping developers effectively market their projects or ideas to wider audiences (aka 'normal people'). With that in mind, here are my notes from Alice Gugan's talk on her 'top ten tips for selling your project'.

She pointed out that it's not exhaustive but does list the key tips to focus on.

Focus on your audience. Who they are, their interests, their technical level. If you're talking to a journalist, talk to who they're writing for.
USP - what is yours? How does your project really change the lives of your audience? This is your main message. What makes your project stand out?
Short and snappy sub-points. Not too many, make sure they lead logically on from your main message.
Be confident. Be sure of your ground, be believable, be enthusiastic.
Project your voice!
Engage eye contact with your interviewer - if you have to scan your notes, still try to make eye contact with the audience.
No gimmicks! They can be great but they won't necessarily make people remember what your project was about.
No jargon! It's often a barrier to your audience. This includes acronyms.
Practice, practice, practice. But keep it fresh, enthusiastic and believable.
Test it on a stranger and adjust according to their reactions.

All good points! Based on years of geek conversations across several domains, I'd suggest making your pitch into a story about the engaging/useful/inexpensive/secure (etc, you get the picture) experience someone has while using your product. You can always bring out the technical details and features list later - once you've got people interested.

It's often hard to step back from the detailed perspective and remember how to talk about your project who haven't been living with it daily, but if you can't do that it's hard to make the best of your work by sharing it with a wider audience.

Focusing on your audience can be tricky - it's easier for pitches than more general presentations, but working out how to address audiences with different levels of technical or sector knowledge can be tricky. Maybe that's why I like user stories as pitches - it makes you step back from the acronomic** detail and think about what really makes your idea unique.

** Yeah, I made that up, but it's a nice cross between acronyms, macro and moronic.

[Update: thanks to Paul Walk for Alice's surname.

Also, I've found myself thinking about the event quite a bit since Friday - both in terms of the tips for presenting technical projects to non-technical staff, and generally in terms of the useful tips and inspiring ideas I picked up in conversation with other attendees. Congratulations to all concerned for a great event!]

Getting closer to a time machine-x-curator in your pocket

2009-08-25T17:56:00.000+01:00

If life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans thenI'm glad I've been busy planning various things, because it meant that news of the EU-funded iTacitus project was a pleasant surprise. The project looked at augmented reality, itinerary planning and contextual information for cultural tourism.

As described on their site and this gizmowatch article, it's excitingly close to the kind of 'Dopplr for cultural heritage' or 'pocket curatr' I've written about before:

Visitors to historic cities provide the iTacitus system with their personal preferences – a love of opera or an interest in Roman history, for example – and the platform automatically suggests places to visit and informs them of events currently taking place. The smart itinerary application ensures that tourists get the most out of each day, dynamically helping them schedule visits and directing them between sites.
Once at their destination, be it an archaeological site, museum or famous city street, the AR component helps bring the cultural and historic significance to life by downloading suitable AR content from a central server.

There's a video showing some of the AR stuff (superimposed environments, annotated Landscapes) in action on the project site. It didn't appear to have sound so I don't know if it also demonstrated the 'Spatial Acoustic Overlays'.

Pre-tagging content for sharing on Twitter

2009-07-29T09:55:00.009+01:00

The Age newspaper has implemented an interesting social media widget on their article pages. Their 'Join the conversation' widget shows how many people are reading the same article, links to discussion of the page on Twitter, allows the reader to easily add their own comment to Twitter, lists other articles that people who read this article read, and where appropriate, adds a 'Related Coverage' section above the other standard nav links.

I've included a screenshot because I assume attention for each article is fairly transitory so there may not be other readers or twitter discussions on the sample article by the time you read it:

I'm particularly interested in their approach to Twitter. They've used automatically generated hash tags to group together discussion of each article on Twitter. For example, in this article, 'First climate refugees start move to new island home' the hash tag is '#fd-e06x'. If you use their 'Comment on Twitter' link it automatically sends a status to the Twitter site (if you're logged in) with the article URL and '#fd-e06x'.

The 'Read tweets' link takes you to the Twitter search page with the pre-populated search term '#fd-e06x'. Of course, the search won't show any discussion about the issues in the article or about the article itself that haven't used their hash tag.

The system also seems to generate a new hash tag for each article, even those that are updates on previous breaking news stories. So these two articles (Woman hit by train fights for life, Woman fights for life after train station accident) about the same incident have different hash tags - perhaps this can be fixed in a later iteration.

I wonder if it would be possible to harvest possible topical tags from other tweets about the article (checking all the various URL shortening services) to suggest more human-friendly tags related to an article? It's probably not worth it for The Age, but it might be for content with a longer life. Or would an organisation be at risk of appearing to endorse those labels?

Interestingly, the pages don't mention the hash tags, so the process is invisible to the user. Would explaining it lead to greater uptake? I use a Twitter client (partly because I can easily shorten long links, while The Age doesn't pre-shorten their links) so would take the URL directly from the location bar, missing out their hash tag.

Selfishly, because I'm thinking about it for work, I'd love to know how they generate their 'other people who read this' and 'Related Coverage' links. I assume the latter is manually generated, either as direct links or based on article or section metadata.

Also selfishly, I'd like to know their motives, and whether they have any metrics for the success of the project.

The NPG's response to the Wikimedia kerfuffle

2009-07-16T07:05:00.005+01:00

[Apparently responses are being listed on a Wikimedia page, which I suppose makes sense but please bear in mind this is usually read by about five people who know my flippant self in real life]

I haven't been able to get the press release section of the National Portrait gallery to load, so I'm linking to an email from the NPG posted as a comment on another blog. I'm still thinking this through, but currently the important bit, to me, is this:

The Gallery is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available. It is one of the Gallery’s primary purposes to make as much of the Collection available as possible for the public to view.

Digitisation involves huge costs including research, cataloguing, conservation and highly-skilled photography. Images then need to be made available on the Gallery website as part of a structured and authoritative database.

Obviously, I am paid by a museum to put things online so I might be biased towards something that ultimately means my job exists - but while a government funding gap exists, someone has to pay the magical digitisation fairies. [This doesn't mean I think it's right, but the situation is not going to be changed by an adversarial relationship between WMF and the cultural heritage sector, which is why this whole thing bothers me. Lots of good work explaining the Commons models and encouraging access is being undone.]

You can't even argue that the NPG is getting increased exposure or branding through the use of their images, as there's a big question over whether images hosted on Wikimedia are being incorrectly given new attribution and rights statements. Check the comment about the image on this blog post, and the Wikipedia statement from Wikimedia about the image and the original image page.

To use a pub analogy, is Wikimedia the bad mate who shouts other people a round on your tab?

Soliciting conversation and listening actively while isolating discussion

2009-07-16T04:06:00.005+01:00

I've been paying more attention to The Age's "what's on" listings and reviews while I'm actually in Melbourne, and noticed that their film critic, Jim Schembri, is doing a fine job soliciting responses on his film reviews. At the end of a piece on 'Bruno: Comic genius or witless git?', he asks:

What do you think? Is Bruno funny? Half funny? Not funny? What do you think of Sacha Baron Cohen? Do you agree with anything in this article? Does the author make any valid points? Is there skill involved in this brand of comedy? Or is he a middle-aged fud who just doesn't get reality humour?

What do you think of the Shock and Guffaw School of Comedy? Should ethics factor in to it? Or are the laughs worth it, whatever the cost?

And what did you think of the saturation Bruno media blitz? Did you enjoy it? Or was it a case of "enough already"?

What is you favourite Sacha Baron Cohen moment? Is there a scene from his films or TV shows that make you laugh every time you think of it?

And if you had to choose between Bruno, Borat or Ali G, who would you most take to: (1) a wedding? (2) a funeral? (3) a kid's birthday party?

Your valued thoughts are hereby sought.

These direct questions are a good attempt at provoking discussion. I'm never sure how well specific questions soliciting audience response work, and in this case I'm not sure what prompted them - does it lead to a more constructive discussion? Reduce flame wars or trolling? Your valued thoughts are hereby sought.

But this is the best bit, and the point I'd like to make to museum bloggers - he also responds to comments:

The design is subtly clever, in that the blog author's responses appear inline, but are distinguished from audience comments with a heavier typeface. They're also attributed differently - "Schembri note" versus the 'Posted by blah on blah at blah'. This provides a level of authority while allowing direct responses to specific comments. I'm not sure how he'd respond to a bunch of similar comments - does it work if it appears as a separate comment? Would it display differently?

It's a great example of starting a discussion and actually sticking around to listen to the results - it turns a blog post into a conversation.

The other interesting point is that there's a very similar piece of content by the same author, Borat's bro is fully sick in the film section of the 'main' site, and the sub-heading makes it sound like it's also a participatory piece - "Bruno: a comic genius or a witless git? You be the judge" - but it's not. And there are no links to the blog piece, so at a guess the majority of readers would never know they could comment on the film. Effectively, the discussion is isolated from the main site, the general reader. I can think of a few reasons why this might be the case, but a more interesting question might be - what effect does this have?

I'm still thinking this through (particularly in relation to cultural heritage and social media) - your thoughts would be welcome in the meantime.

Melbourne museum 3.0 meetup/pecha kucha July 16

2009-07-07T03:18:00.005+01:00

More details about the museum 3.0 meetup/pecha kucha in Melbourne on July 16:

Drinks @ ACMI Lounge from 5:30pm
About 6pm take our drinks to Studio 1 for the Pecha Kutcha sessions
After that: a selection of this side of the city's finer drinking establishments...

We have four pecha kucha speakers so far - you could volunteer yourself (or a workmate) on the museum 3.0 ning thread. It might sound intimidating, but it's a lot of fun, and as a speaker it's good because it's all over in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

The London museum pecha kucha was a lot of fun and I'm generally looking forward to meeting some people working in cultural heritage in Melbourne and finding out about some of the cool work going on here.

'Shownar: reflecting online buzz around BBC programmes' [read: museum objects]

2009-06-30T14:42:00.005+01:00

Call me mildly obsessive (sad, even), but I got really excited when I read this and mentally replaced 'BBC programme' with 'museum object'. From the BBC Internet Blog:

Today sees the launch of Shownar; a new prototype from BBC Vision which aims
to track online buzz around BBC TV and radio programmes and reflect it back in
useful and interesting ways, aiding programme discovery and providing onward
journeys to discussion about those programmes on the wider web.
...
Shownar aims to track the wealth of activity that takes place around BBC progammes online and work out which are currently gaining the most attention.
...
So, how does it work? In the first instance, we decided to focus on tracking in-bound links to programme-related pages on bbc.co.uk, so we could be confident that the discussions were actually about a BBC programme ... We took a look at a range of possible suppliers, and for this initial prototype chose data provided by Yahoo! Search BOSS, Nielson Online's BlogPulse (which indexes over 100 million blogs), and Twingly (which searches microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca for links, even when they are shortened using URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly). We are also ingesting data from LiveStats, the BBC's own real-time indicator of traffic. Once ingested, this data is processed according to a specially created algorithm to calculate the 'buzz measure' for every BBC programme - more detail on the algorithm can be found on Shownar's Technical information page.

The post discusses some of the interfaces and benefits - I think the possibilities are pretty endless, and will be exploring how it might enhance the discoverability of and harness conversations about the Science Museum's online collections over the year.

Hat tip: @giv_p

Museum pecha kucha night

2009-06-21T13:42:00.029+01:00

The first museum pecha kucha night was held in London at the British Museum on June 18, 2009. I took rough notes during the presentations, and have included the slides and notes from my own presentation. The event used the tag 'mwpkn' to gather together tweets, photos, etc. The focus of this first museum pecha kucha was on sharing insights and inspiration from the Museums and the Web conference held in Indianapolis in April.

The event was organised by Shelley Mannion, who introduced the event, emphasising that it was about fun and connecting the museum tech community in an interesting way.

Gail Durbin (V&A), takeaways from MW2009
She's a practical person, looks for ideas to nick. Good idea as things get hazy after a conference, good intentions disappear.

First takeaway - Dina Helal let her play with her iPhone, decided she had to have one. She liked her mobile for the first time in her life.

Second - twittering was very important. Decided to do something with it. Twittering is hard, sending out messages that are interesting is difficult.

Enthusiasm at conferences is short lived - e.g. people excited about wedding site, but did they send in wedding photos? She talked to people about a self-portraiture idea, 'life on a postcard', but hasn't had a single response.

RSS feeds - came away knowing we had to review our RSS feeds, had been without attention for a long time.

Learnt that wikis are very hard work, they don't automatically look after themselves.
Creative use of Flickr - museum 'my karsh' collection

Resolved that had to work with Development. Looking at something like the British Library's - adopt a book for fathers day.

Something that bothers her - many museums think of 'Web 2.0' just as more channels to push out information, there's no sense of pulling in information about visitors.

Beck Tench, one of the most interesting people she met at the conference - practice and work go together very closely. Flickr plant project. She wants to get staff involved - has meeting on Fridays, in local bar, tweets to everyone, conducts something called Experimonth.

Last thing learnt - librarians have better cakes.

Silvia Filippini Fantoni (British Museum and Sorbonne University)
Silvia makes a plea for extra seconds as a non-native speaker (and synthesis not the best feature of Italians). Lecturer in museum informatics and evaluation methods at Sorbonne and project manager for multimedia guide project at British Museum.

So her focus at the conference was mostly on guides. Particularly Samis and Pau and others. Mini workshops and workshops on the topic before and during the conference. Demos from Paul Clifford (Museum of London). Exhibitors. Lots of museums are planning to develop applications.

Interest in using mobile technology as an interpretive tool is constantly growing, especially delivered on visitors own devices. Proliferations of mobile platforms. Proliferation of different functionalities - not just audio - visual, games, way finding, web access and communication, notes and comments. Have all these new platforms and functionalities improved the visitor experience? Yes, but there are some disadvantages.

Asks: aren't we trying to do too much? Are we trying to turn a useful interpretive tool into something too complex? Aren't we forgetting about core audio guide audience?

Are people interested in using their own devices? Do they have the time to pre-download, do they bring their devices? Samis and Pau - the answer is no/not yet. For the medium and short term still need to provide media in the museums. Touch screen devices are easier to use. Limited functionality makes interface simpler. Focus on content - AV messages, touch and listen.
Importance of sharing and learning from best practice. Some efforts at and after MW2009 - handheldconference.org. Discussion of developing open source content management system for mobile devices - contact Nancy Proctor.

Daniel Incandela (Indianapolis Museum of Art)
He's from America so should have extra time too. Also sick and medicated (so at least one of us will have a good time during the presentation).

Enjoys robots, dinosaurs, football and a good point. On holiday while here.

Slide - Shelley's twitter profile - she's responsible for him being here while on holiday.

He blogged about preparing for the presentation and got a comment from one of the pecha kucha founders - the main thing is to have fun, be passionate about something you love.

Twitterfall on the big screen was a major breakthrough at MW2009, (#mw2009 trended as a topic and attracted the attention of) pantygirl.

Digital story telling and tech can't happen without support, Max Anderson has been dream leader.

He's here representing IMA so going to showcase some projects - Roman Art from Louvre webisodes - paved the way for informal, agile, multiple content source creation.

Art Babble. IMA blog - ripped off other museums - gives many departments from museum a digital voice.

Half time experiment with awkward silence (blank slide). [In the pub afterwards, I discovered that this actually made at least one of the English people feel socially awkward!]

Brooklyn Museum - for him the real innovators for digital content for museums, won many awards at MW2009.

Te Papa's 'build a squid' had him at 'hello'. First example of a museum project that actually went viral?

Perhaps we could upgrade MW site? Better integration of social media, multimedia from previous conferences.

Loves Bruce Wyman - reason to go to MW2010.

art:21 - smart team, good approaches to publishing across platforms.

Wonders about agility - love new and emerging projects (?) we hear about at conferences, but how do we face an idea and deal with own internal issues?

The Dutch at Indy (were great) - but somewhere outside north America next for Museums and the Web?

Philip Poole (British Museum)
Everything I got from MW2009 can be put into one statement - spread it about. Enable your content to be spread by other people through APIs.

Does spreading out content dilute our authority? By putting it onto other websites, putting it in contact with other people. No, of course not.

Video was big at MW2009.

If going to use different platforms, will people come? We need to tailor content to different websites - can't just build it and assume people will come. Persian coins vs. ritual Mayan sacrifice on YouTube - which will get bigger audience? [Pick content delivery to suit audience and context.]

Platforms include ArtBabble, YouTube (shorter, edgier), iTunes U. Viral content - we can put features on our website, but a YouTube or Vimeo audience are going to spread things better. iTunes, U, can download and listen on train - takes out of website entirely.

Stats are important - e.g. need to include stats of video on different platforms, make sure people above you recognise the value in that. DCMS - very basic stats - perhaps they should be asking for different stats. "If DCMS ask how much video we put on YouTube, we'd all start doing it." [Brilliant point]

API - take content from website and put elsewhere. IMA Explore section - advertise the repeating pattern in their URLs - someone used them but wasn't going very well, they got in contact with him and helped him succeed, now biggest referrer outside search engines. He wants to do that for the British Museum - he knows the quirks, the data.

Why the 'softly softly' approach? Creating an entire API interface is huge mountain, people above you will want to avoid it if you show them the size of the whole mountain.

Digital NZ - fantastic example. Can create custom search, embed on website, also into gallery and people can vote for it

The British Museum is a museum of the world for the world, why should their web presence be any different?

Mia Ridge (Science Museum)
Yes, that's me. My slides on 'Bubbles and Easter eggs - Museum Pecha Kucha' are on slideshare - scroll down the page for full text and notes - or available as a PDF (2mb).

I talked about:

keeping the post-conference momentum going, particularly the 'do one thing' idea;
museum technologists as 'double domain experts';
not hiding museum geeks like Easter eggs but making more of them as a resource;
the responsibilities of museum geeks as their expertise is recognised;
breaking down internal silos; intelligent failure;
broken metrics and better project design (pitch the goal, not the method);
audience expectations in 2009;
possible first questions for digital projects and taking a whole museum view for new projects;
who's talking/listening to your audiences? trust and respect your audiences;
your museum is an iceberg (lots of the good stuff is hidden);
(s)mash the system (hold a mashup day);
and a challenge for your museum - has the web fundamentally changed your organisation?

Frankie Roberto (Rattle)
Went to the conference with a 'fan' hat on, just really enjoys museums. Loved the zoo - live exhibits are interactive, visceral. Role of live interpretation - how could it work with digital technology? Everyone loves dinosaur - Indy Children's Museum. All museums should have a carousel (can't remember what he was going to say about it).

The Power of Children; making a difference - really powerful stories.

Still thinking about the idea of creating visceral experiences.

ArtBabble - shouldn't generally create silos but ArtBabble spotted that YouTube wasn't working for certain types of content.

Davis LAB - kiosks and sofa. Said 'we are on the web'.

Drupal - lots of museums switching to it.

Richard Morgan (V&A) on APIS - ask, what is your museum good at?, and build an API for that - it may not be collections stuff.

'Things to do' page on V&A. Good way of highlighting ways to interact on website.

Semantic data, Aaron's talk on interpretation of bias, relocation from Flickr photos.
Breaking down ideas about authority on where an area is bounded by. OpenStreetMap - wants to add a historical layer to that so can scroll backwards and forwards in time. [I should ask whether this means layering old maps (with older street layouts like pre-Great Fire of London, or earlier representations?). Geo-rectification is expensive because it's time-consuming, but could it be crowdsourced? Geo-locating old images would be easier for the average person to do.]

Open Plaques - alpha project.

Thinks we won't need to digitise in the future as stuff will be born digital (ha, as if! Though it depends where you draw the lines about the end of collections - in my imagination they're like that warehouse scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc and we won't run out of things to properly digitise any time soon. Still, it's a useful question.)

Dan Zambonini (Box UK)
'Every film needs a villain'. In his impressions and insights from MW2009 he'll say things we may or may not agree with.

Slide - stuff we can do vs. stuff we can't do on either side of a gulf of perceived complexity. It's hard to progress from one to the other. Three questions to bridge gap - how to make relevant to everyday job, how to show advantages, how to make it easy.

Then he realised should talk about personal things - people and connections made. About people, stuff that happens in the evening. The evening drinks don't happen at UKMW - it's a shame we have to go to the other side of the world to talk to each other. [It does it you're at an event like mashed museum the day before - another reason to open it up to educators, curators, etc.]

Small museums vs. big museums - [should make stuff accessible to small museums.] Can get value by helping people. (He tells his ex-girlfriend that ) small is the new big. Also small quick wins. Break down the big things into smaller things, find ways can get to them through small changes in behaviour, bits of information.

How small is small? Greater or less than one day. If less than a day, might as well try it. If it's going to take a week, not small.

Museums should share data - not just as API - share data on traffic, spill gossip on marketing costs, etc. [Information is power, etc]

Celebrate failure - admit that some things go wrong.

Bigger picture - be honest. Tell us when to shut up (on e.g. the MCG email list?). Sometimes feel like there's too much politics. I know some of us can be a bit hot-headed but it's frustration (not meanness).

"never willingly outsource creativity" - that's rubbish.

If not on twitter, get on it. The more people talking to each other, the more powerful we are as a group. [But what happens if you miss a few days of twitter? I like twitter, but it's inaccessible if you don't have time to constantly keep up, or don't have a computer at home. Still, getting more people talking is an excellentbl point, even if twitter itself doesn't work for some people.]

The sector is missing practical, specific blog, not news and opinions. [Do collections system specific user groups take the place of blogs?]

Use grants to innovate and produce open source stuff. Right now private agencies will take a lot of the strain of applying for grants.

Sort out that copyright stuff. How difficult can it be?

Final slide summing up and last bit of innuendo. 'Beer makes you more attractive' - it's the after sessions stuff at conferences that's so valuable.

Frankie, Dan and Daniel's slides are also available in the 'Museum Tech Pecha Kucha' event on slideshare (and mine has now got an audio track, thanks to Shelley).

'Reshaping the Art Museum'

2009-05-21T01:25:00.003+01:00

I'm sneaking a moment from revision to point you to this thought-provoking article 'Reshaping the Art Museum' in Artnews:

To an unprecedented degree, market research about the needs, wants, fears, and anxieties of visitors is shaping how museums are designed. "We got a lot of comments that it's just overwhelming to come to museums," says Lori Fogarty, director of the Oakland Museum of California, which inaugurates a complete reinstallation of its art, natural history, and science collections this fall. So the new galleries will feature "loaded lounges" where visitors can relax, read catalogues, or do hands-on activities, along with open spaces that accommodate up to 25 people for concerts, storytelling, or other such programs.

But a bigger change in her plan is connecting people who might never have visited art museums with the people who curate them. Fogarty calls it transparency—"breaking the fourth wall"—having curators answer questions about how and why they choose works. Visitor feedback will be encouraged, and the exhibitions, in turn, will be based on the "wiki model," with curators representing only one voice in a mix that includes conservators, community members, and artists. "We can't count on the fact that potential visitors were brought to museums as kids," Fogarty says. "Many have no cultural or experiential reference; they don't think of the museum as a place that welcomes them or has anything of interest to them."

At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, director Olga Viso is also using a major reinstallation as an opportunity to remake the museum into a more civic space. "We want to be in dialogue with the audience instead of in the place of authority," as she puts it. Such efforts may mean involving the community in the organization of shows or asking people to vote on the selection of artworks. When the new installation opens in November, says chief curator Darsie Alexander, curators will hold in-gallery office hours—giving visitors insights into the way exhibitions happen, and giving the staff a chance to find out "how visitors encounter work in space—the kinds of questions they ask about art, what they find interesting, and how long they stay."

...

And for all the innovations in programming, marketing, and education, Campbell argues, the core mission remains the same. "We can make ourselves more user-friendly, but ultimately one of the key experiences of visiting a museum is that moment of standing in front of an object," he says. "Suddenly you're responding to something physical, real, that changes your own perspective. And great museums will always do that, as long we get people through the doors."

Final thoughts on open hack day (and an imaginary curatr)

2009-05-13T14:13:00.004+01:00

I think hack days are great - sure, 24 hours in one space is an artificial constraint, but the sheer brilliance of the ideas and the ingenuity of the implementations is inspiring. They're a reminder that good projects don't need to take years and involve twenty circles of sign-off, even if that's the reality you face when you get back to the office.

I went because it tied in really well with some work projects (like the museum metadata mashup competition we're running later in the year or the attempt to get a critical mass of vaguely compatible museum data available for re-use) and stuff I'm interested in personally (like modern bluestocking, my project for this summer - let me know if you want to help, or just add inspiring women to freebase).

I'm also interested in creating something like a Dopplr for museums - you tell it what you're interested in, and when you go on a trip it makes you a map and list of stuff you could see while you're in that city.

Like: I like Picasso, Islamic miniatures, city museums, free wine at contemporary art gallery openings, [etc]; am inspired by early feminist history; love hearing about lived moments in local history of the area I'll be staying in; I'm going to Barcelona.

The 'list of cultural heritage stuff I like' could be drawn from stuff you've bookmarked, exhibitions you've attended (or reviewed) or stuff favourited in a meta-museum site.

(I don't know what you'd call this - it's like a personal butlr or concierge who knows both your interests and your destinations - curatr?)

The talks on RDFa (and the earlier talk on YQL at the National Maritime Museum) have inspired me to pick a 'good enough' protocol, implement it, and see if I can bring in links to similar objects in other museum collections. I need to think about the best way to document any mapping I do between taxonomies, ontologies, vocabularies (all the museumy 'ies') and different API functions or schemas, but I figure the museum API wiki is a good place to draft that. It's not going to happen instantly, but it's a good goal for 2009.

These are the last of my notes from the weekend's Open Hack London event, my notes from various talks are tagged openhacklondon.

Tom Morris, SPARQL and semweb stuff - tech talk at Open Hack London

2009-05-13T12:46:00.003+01:00

Tom Morris gave a lightning talk on 'How to use Semantic Web data in your hack' (aka SPARQL and semantic web stuff).

He's since posted his links and queries - excellent links to endpoints you can test queries in.

Semantic web often thought of as long-promised magical elixir, he's here to say it can be used now by showing examples of queries that can be run against semantic web services. He'll demonstrate two different online datasets and one database that can be installed on your own machine.

First - dbpedia - scraped lots of wikipedia, put it into a database. dbpedia isn't like your averge database, you can't draw a UML diagram of wikipedia. It's done in RDF and Linked Data. Can be queried in a language that looks like SQL but isn't. SPARQL - is a w3c standard, they're currently working on SPARQL 2.

Go to dbpedia.org/sparql - submit query as post. [Really nice - I have a thing about APIs and platforms needing a really easy way to get you to 'hello world' and this does it pretty well.]

[Line by line comments on the syntax of the queries might be useful, though they're pretty readable as it is.]

'select thingy, wotsit where [the slightly more complicated stuff]'

Can get back results in xml, also HTML, 'spreadsheet', JSON. Ugly but readable. Typed.

[Trying a query challenge set by others could be fun way to get started learning it.]

One problem - fictional places are in Wikipedia e.g. Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto.

Libris - how library websites should be
[I never used to appreciate how much most library websites suck until I started back at uni and had to use one for more than one query every few years]

Has a query interface through SPARQL

Comment from the audience BBC - now have SPARQL endpoint [as of the day before? Go BBC guy!].

Playing with mulgara, open source java triple store. [mulgara looks like a kinda faceted search/browse thing] Has own query language called TQL which can do more intresting things than SPARQL. Why use it? Schemaless data storage. Is to SQL what dynamic typing is to static typing. [did he mean 'is to sparql'?]

Question from audence: how do you discover what you can query against?
Answer: dbpedia website should list the concepts they have in there. Also some documentation of categories you can look at. [Examples and documentation are so damn important for the update of your API/web service.]

Coming soon [?] SPARUL - update language, SPARQL2: new features

The end!

[These are more (very) rough notes from the weekend's Open Hack London event - please let me know of clarifications, questions, links or comments. My other notes from the event are tagged openhacklondon.

Quick plug: if you're a developer interested in using cultural heritage (museums, libraries, archives, galleries, archaeology, history, science, whatever) data - a bunch of cultural heritage geeks would like to know what's useful for you (more background here). You can comment on the #chAPI wiki, or tweet @miaridge (or @mia_out). Or if you work for a company that works with cultural heritage organisations, you can help us work better with you for better results for our users.]

There were other lightning talks on Pachube (pronounced 'patchbay', about trying to build the internet of things, making an API for gadgets because e.g. connecting hardware to the web is hard for small makers) and Homera (an open source 3d game engine).

Google updates search, playing catch-up?

2009-05-12T23:14:00.004+01:00

A quick post in case you've missed it elsewhere - whether in response to the ridiculously-titled 'Wolfram Alpha' or to Yahoo's 'open strategy' (YOS) and work on enhancing search engine results pages (SERPs) with structured data, Google have announced a "new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier" and "rich snippets" that "show more useful information from web pages than the preview text". Searchengineland have compared Google and Yahoo's offerings.

Update: some of the criticism rumbling on twitter yesterday has been neatly summarised by Ian Davis in 'Google's RDFa a Damp Squib':

However, a closer look reveals that Google have basically missed the point of RDFa. The RDFa support is limited to the properties and classes defined on a hastily thrown together site called data-vocabulary.org. There you will find classes for Person and Organization and properties for names and addresses, completely ignoring the millions of pieces of data using well established terms from FOAF and the like. That means everyone has to rewrite all their data to use Google's schema if they want to be featured on Google's search engine. Its like saying you have to write your pages using Google's own version of html where all the tags have slightly different spellings to be listed in their search engine!

The result is a hobbled implementation of RDFa. They've taken the worst part – the syntax – and thrown away the best – the decentralized vocabularies of terms. It's like using microformats without the one thing they do well: the simplicity.

Further, in the comments:

the point of decentralization is not to encourage fragmentation and isolation, but to allow people to collaborate without needing permission from a middleman. Google's approach imposes a centralized authority.

There's also a (slightly disingenuous, IMO) response from Google:

For Rich Snippets, Google search need to understand what the data means in order to render it appropriately. We will start incorporating existing vocabularies like FOAF, but there's no way for us to have a decent user experience for brand-new vocabularies that someone defines. We also need a single place where a webmaster can come and find all the terms that Google understands. Which is why we have data-vocabulary.org.

Isn't the point of Google that it can figure stuff out without needing to be told?

Mashups made of messages - tech talk at Open Hack London

2009-05-12T13:05:00.001+01:00

More (very) rough notes from the weekend's Open Hack London event - please let me know of clarifications, questions, links or comments. You can also check out other posts here tagged openhacklondon.

Mashups made of messages, Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)

Systems architecture on Doppler lets them combine 3rd party systems with their stuff without tying their servers up in knots.

At a rough count, Dopplr uses about 25 third party web APIs.

If you're going to make a web service, site, concentrate on the stuff you're good at. [Use what other people are good at to make yours ace.]

But this also means you're outsourcing and part of your reliability to other people. For each bit of service you add, network latency [is?] putting another bit of risk into your web architecture. Use messaging systems to make server side stuff asynchronous.

'&' is his favourite thing about Linux. Fundamental in Unix that work is divided into packets; each doing the thing it does well. Not even very tightly coupled. Anything that can be run on the command line, stick & on the end, do it in the background. Can forget about things running in the background - don't have to manage the processes, it's not tightly coupled.

Nothing in web apps is simple these days - lots of interconnected bits.

In the physical world, big machines use gearing - having different bits of system run at different speeds. Also things can freewheel then lock in to system again when done.

When building big systems, there's a worry that one machine, one bit it depends on can bring down everything else.

[Slide of a] Diagram of all the bits of the system that don't run because someone has sent an HTTP request - [i.e. background processes]

Flickr is doing less database work up front to make pages load as quickly as possible. They queue other things in the background. e.g. photos load, tags added slightly later. (See post 'Flickr engineers do it offline'.)

Enterprise Integration Patterns (Hohpe et al) is a really good book. Banks have been using messaging for years to manage the problems. Atomic packets of data can be sent on a channel - 'Email for applications'.

Designing - think about what needs to be done now, what can be done in the background? Think of it as part of product design - what has instant effect, what has slower effect? Where can you perform the 'sleight of hand' without people noticing/impacting their user experience?

Example using web services 1: Dopplr and AMEE. What happens when someone asks to see their carbon impact? A request for carbon data goes to Ruby on Rails (memory hungry, not the fastest thing in the world, try to take things off that and process elsewhere). Refresh user screen 'check back soon', send request to message broker (in JSON). Worker process connected to message broker sends request to AMEE. Update database.

Example using web services 2: Flickr pictures on Dopplr page. When you request a trip page, the page loads with all usual stuff and empty div in page with a piece of Javascript on a timer that polls Flickr.

Keeps open connection, a way to push messages to the client while it's waiting to do something.

When processing lots of stuff, worker processes write to memcache as a form of progress bar, but the process is actually disconnected from the webserver so load/risk is outsourced.

'Sites built with glue and string don't automatically scale for free.' You can have many webservers, but the bottleneck might be in the database. Splitting work into message queues is a way of building so things can scale in parallel.

Slide of services, companies that offer messaging stuff. [Did anyone get a photo of that?]

Because of abstraction and with things happening in the background, it's a different flow of control than you might be used to - monitoring is different. You can't just sit there with a single debugger.

[Slide] "If you can't see your changes take effect in a system your understanding of cause and effect breaks down" - not just about it being hard to debug, it's also about user expectations.

I really liked this presentation - it's always good to learn from people who are not only innovating, but are also really solid on performance and reliability as well as the user experience.

[Update: a version of this talk is on the Dopplr blog with slides and notes.]

Rasmus Lerdorf on Hacking with PHP - tech talk at Open Hack London

2009-05-09T20:24:00.000+01:00

Same deal as my first post from today's Open Hack London event - these are (very) rough notes, please let me know of clarifications, questions or comments.

Hacking with PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf

Goal of talk: copy and pastable snippets that just work so you don't have to fight to get things that work [there's not enough of this to help beginners get over that initial hump]. The slides are available at http://talks.php.net/show/openhack and these notes are probably best read as commentary alongside the code examples.

[Since it's a hack day, some] Hack ideas: fix something you use every day; build your own targeted search engine; improve the look of search results; play with semantic web tools to make the web more semantic; tell the world what kind of data you have - if a resume, use hResume or other appropriate microformats/markup; go local - tools for helping your local community; hack for good - make the world a better place.

SearchMonkey and BOSS are blending together a little bit.

What we need to learn
With PHP – enough to handle simple requests; talk to backend datastore; how to parse XML with PHP, how to generate JSON, some basic javasccript, a JavaScript utility library like YUI or jquery.

parsing XML: simpleXML_load_file() - can load entire URL or local file.

Attributes on node show up as array. Namespace attributes call children of node, name namespace as argument.

Now know how to parse XML, can get lots of other stuff.
Context extraction service, Yahoo - doesn't get enough attention. Post all text, gives you back four or five key terms - can then do an image search off them. Or match ads to webpages.

Can use get or post (curl) - usually too much for get.

PHP to JavaScript on initial page load: JSON_encode -> javascript.

Javascript to PHP (and back)
If you can figure out these six lines of code, you can write anything in the world. How every modern web application works.
Server-side php, client-side javascript.

'There's nothing to building web applications, you just have to break everything down into small enough chunks that it all becomes trivial'.

AJAX in 30 seconds.
Inline comments in code would help for people reading it without hearing the talk at the same time.

JavaScript libraries to the rescue
load maps API, create container (div) for the map, then fill it.

Form - on submit call return updateMap(); with new location.

YGeoRSS - if have GeoRSS file... can point to it.

GeoPlanet - assigns a WOE ID to a place. Locations are more than just a lat long - carry way more information. Basically gives you a foreign key. YQL is starting to make the web a giant database. Can make joins across APIs - woeid works as fk.

YQL - 'combines all the APIs on the web into a single API'.

Add a cache - nice to YQL, and also good for demos etc. Copy and paste cache function from his slides - does a local cache on URL. Hashed with md5. Using PHP streams - #defn. Adding a cache speeds up developing when hacking (esp as won't be waiting for the wifi). [This is a pretty damn good tip cos it's really useful and not immediately obvious.]

XPath on URL using PHP's OAuth extension

SearchMonkey - social engineering people into caring about semantic data on the web. For non-geeks, search plug-in mechanism that will spruce up search results page. Encourages people to add semantic data so their search result is as sexy as their competitors - so goal is that people will start adding semantic data.

'If you're doing web stuff, and don't know about microformats, and your resume doesn't have hResume, you're not getting a job with Yahoo.'

Question: how are microformats different to RDFa?
Answer: there are different types of microformats - some very specific ones, eg hResume, hCal. RDFa - adding arbitrary tags to page. even if no specific way to describe your data. But there's a standard set of mark-ups for a resume so can use that. if your data doesn't match anything at microfomats.org then use RDFa or erdf (?).

RDFa, SearchMonkey - tech talks at Open Hack London

2009-05-09T18:40:00.006+01:00

While today's Open Hack London event is mostly about the 24-hour hackathon, I signed up just for the Tech Talks because I couldn't afford to miss a whole weekend's study in the fortnight before my exams (stupid exams). I went to the sessions on 'Guardian Data Store and APIs', 'RDFa SearchMonkey', Arduino, 'Hacking with PHP', 'BBC Backstage', Dopplr's 'mashups made of messages' and lightning talks including 'SPARQL and semantic web' stuff you can do now.

I'm putting my rough and ready notes online so that those who couldn't make it can still get some of the benefits. Apologies for any mishearings or mistakes in transcription – leave me a comment with any questions or clarifications.

One of the reasons I was going was to push my thinking about the best ways to provide API-like access to museum information and collections, so my notes will reflect that but I try to generalise where I can. And if you have thoughts on what you'd like cultural heritage institutions to do for developers, let us know! (For background, here's a lightning talk I did at another hack event on happy museums + happy developers = happy punters).

RDFa - now everyone can have an API.
Mark Birkbeck

Going to cover some basic mark-up, and talk about why RDFa is a good thing. [The slides would be useful for the syntax examples, I'll update if they go online.]

RDFa is a new syntax from W3C - a way of embedding metadata (RDF) in HTML documents using attributes.

e.g. <span property="dc:title"> - value of property is the text inside the span.

Because it's inline you don't need to point to another document to provide source of metadata and presentation HTML.

One big advance is that can provide metadata for other items e.g. images, so you can e.g. attach licence info to the image rather than page it's in – e.g. <img src="" rel="licence" resource="[creative commons licence]">

Putting RDFa into web pages means you've now got a feed (the web page is the RSS feed), and a simple static web page can become an API that can be consumed in the same way as stuff from a big expensive system. 'Growing adoption'.

Government department Central Office of Information [?] is quite big on RDFa, have a number of projects with it. [I'd come across the UK Civil Service Job Service API while looking for examples for work presentations on APIs.]

RDFa allows for flexible publishing options. If you're already publishing HTML, you can add RDFa mark-up then get flexible publishing models - different departments can keep publishing data in their own way, a central website can go and request from each of them and create its own database of e.g. jobs. Decentralised way of approaching data distribution.

Can be consumed by: smarter browsers; client-side AJAX, other servers such as SearchMonkey.

He's interested where browsers can do something with it - either enhanced browsers that could e.g. store contact info in a page into your address book; or develop JavaScript libraries that can parse page and do something with it. [screen shot of jobs data in search monkey with enhanced search results]

RDFa might be going into Drupal core.

Example of putting isbn in RDFa in page, then a parser can go through the page, pull out the triples [some explanation of them as mini db?], pull back more info about the book from other APIs e.g. Amazon - full title, thumbnail of cover. e.g. pipes.

Example of FOAF - twitter account marked up in page, can pull in tweets. Could presumably pull in newer services as more things were added, without having to re-mark-up all the pages.

Example of chemist writing a blog who mentions a chemical compound in blog post, a processor can go off and retrieve more info - e.g. add icon for mouseover info - image of molecule, or link to more info.

Next plan is to link with BOSS. Can get back RDFa from search results - augment search results with RDFa from the original page.

Search Monkey (what it is and what you can do with it)
Neil Crosby (European frontend architect for search at Yahoo).

SearchMonkey is (one of) Yahoo's open search platforms (along with BOSS). Uses structured data to enhance search results. You get to change stuff on Yahoo search results page.

SearchMonkey lets you: style results for certain URL patterns; brand those results; make the results more useful for users.

[examples of sites that have done it to see how their results look in Yahoo? I thought he mentioned IMDb but it doesn't look any different - a film search that returns a wikipedia result, OTOH, does.]

Make life better for users - not just what Yahoo thinks results should be, you can say 'actually this is the important info on the page'

Three ways to do it [to change the SERP [search engine results page]: mark up data in a way that Yahoo knows about - 'just structure your data nicely'. e.g. video mark-up; enhance a result directly; make an infobar.

Infobar - doesn't change result see immediately on the page, but it opens on the page. e.g. of auto-enhanced result- playcrafter. Link to developer start page - how to mark it up, with examples, and what it all means.

User-enhanced result - Facebook profile pages are marked up with microformats - can add as friend, poke, send message, view friends, etc from the search results page. Can change the title and abstract, add image, favicon, quicklinks, key/value pairs. Create at [link I can't see but is on slides] Displayed in screen, you fill it out on a template.

Infobar - dropdown in grey bar under results. Can do a lot more, as it's hidden in the infobar and doesn't have to worry people.

Data from: microformats, RDF, XSLT, Yahoo's index, and soon, top tags from delicious.

If no machine data, can write an XSLT. 'isn't that hard'. Lots of documentation on the web.

Examples of things that have been made - a tool that exposes all the metadata known for a page. URL on slide. can install on Yahoo search page, add it in. Use location data to make a map - any page on web with metadata about locations on it - map monkey. Get qype results for anything you search for.

There's a mailing list (people willing and wanting to answer questions) and a tutorial.

Questions

Question: do you need to use a special doctype [for RDFa]?
Answer: added to spec that 'you should use this doctype' but the spec allows for RDFa to be used in situations when can't change doctype e.g. RDFa embedded in blogger blogpost. Most parsers walk the DOM rather than relying on the doctype.

Jim O'D - excited that SearchMonkey supports XSLT - if have website with correctly marked up tables, could expose those as key/value pairs?
Answer: yes. XSLT fantastic tool for when don't have data marked up - can still get to it.

Frankie - question I couldn't hear. About info out to users?
Answer: if you've built a monkey, up to you to tell people about it for the moment. Some monkeys are auto-on e.g. Facebook, wikipedia... possibly in future, if developed a monkey for a site you own, might be able to turn it auto-on in the results for all users... not sure yet if they'll do it or not.
Frankie: plan that people get monkeys they want, or go through gallery?
Answer: would be fantastic if could work out what people are using them for and suggest ones appropriate to people doing particular kinds of searches, rather than having to go to a gallery.

Christian Heilmann on Yahoo!'s YQL, open data tables, APIs

2009-04-28T22:46:00.003+01:00

My notes from Christian Heilmann's talk on 'Reaching those web folk' with Yahoo!'s new-ish YQL, open data tables and APIs at the National Maritime Museum [his slides]. My notes are a bit random, but might be useful for people, especially the idea of using YQL as an easy way to prototype APIs (or implement APIs without too much work on your part).

For him it's about data on the web, not just technology.

Number of users is a crap metric, [should consider the user experience].

Stats should be what you use to discover areas where are the problems, not to pat yourself on the back.

People with blackberries have no Javascript, no CSS. Don't have front-loading navigation they have to scroll through - cos they won't.

If you think of your site as content, then visitors can become 'broadcasting stations' and relay your message. Information flows between readers and content. They're passing it on through distribution channels you're not even aware of.

Content on the web is validated with links and quotes from other sources e.g. Wikipedia. People mix your information with other sources to prove a point or validate it. eg. photos on maps.

How can you be part of it?
Make it easy to access. Structure your websites in (plain old semantic HTML) a semantic manner. Title is important, etc. Add more semantic richness with RDF and microformats. Provide data feeds or RSS. Consider the Rolls Royce of distribution - an API. Help other machines make sense of your content - search engines will love you too.

Yahoo index via BOSS API - Yahoo do it because they know 'search engines are dying'. Catch-all search engines are stupid. Apples are not the same apples for everyone. Build a cleverer web search.

http://ask-boss.appspot.com/ - nlp analysis of search results. Try 'who is batman in the dark knight' - amazing.

BOSS provides mainstream channel for semantic web and microformats. Microformats are chicken and egg problem. Using searchmonkey technology, BOSS lists this information in the results. BOSS can return all known information about a page, structured.

Key terms parameter in BOSS - what did people enter to find a site/page? http://keywordfinder.org/ - what successful websites have for a given keyword.

Clean HTML is the most important thing, semantic and microformats are good.

If your data is interesting enough, people will try to get to it and remix it.

[Curl has grown up since I last used it! Can be any browser, do cookies, etc.]

Now the web looks like an RSS reader.

Include RSS in your stats.

Guardian - any of their content websites put out RSS through CMS. They then provided an API so end users can filter down to the data they need.

Programmable Web - excellent resource but can be overwhelming.

The more data sources you use, the more time you spend reading API documentation, sos every API is different. Terms, formats, etc. The more sources you connect to, the more chances of error. The more stuff you pull in, the slower the performance of your website.

So you need systems to aggregate sources painlessly. Yahoo Pipes. A visual interface, changes have to be made by hand.

You can't quickly use a pipe in your code and change it on the fly. e.g. change a parameter for one implementation. No version control.

So that's one of the reasons for YQL: Yahoo Query Language. SQL style interface to all yahoo data (all Yahoo APIs) and the web. Yahoo build things with APIs cos it's the only way to scale. Book: 'scalable websites', all about APIs.

Build queries to Yahoo APIs, try them out in YQL console. Provides diagnostics - which URLs, how long it took, any problems encountered. Allows nesting of API calls.

Outputs XML or JSON, consistent format so you know how to use that information.

YQL also helped internally because of varying APIs between departments.

Gives access to all Yahoo services, any data sources on the web, including html and microformats, and can scrape any website.

Open tables
Easy way to add own information to YQL. Tell Yahoo end point where can get the info.

Jim wanted to allow people to access data without building an API. All it needed was a simple XML file.

[Though you do need RSS results from a search engine to point to - I'm going to see what we can output from our Google Mini and will share any code - or would appreciate some time-saving pointers if anyone has any. Yes, hello, lazyweb, that's my coat, thanks.]

Basically it's a way of providing an API without having to develop one.

Concluding: you can piggyback on people's social connections with other people by making data shareable. [Then your data is shared, yay. Assuming your institution is down with that, and no copyrights or puppies were hurt in the process.]

APIs are a commitment - have to be available all the time, lot of traffic, but hard to measure traffic and benefits. Making APIs scale is a pain and have to be clever to do it. Pointing YQL open data table pointing to search engine on your site also works.

Saves documenting API? [??]

YQL handles the interface, caching and data conversion for you. Also limits the access to sensible levels - 10,000 hits/hour.

Jim - 'images from collection' displayed on page as badge thing with YQL as RSS browser. Can just create RSS feed for exhibition than can new badge for new exhibition.

Using YQL protects against injection attacks.

Comment from audience - YQL as meta-API.

Registering is basically making the XML file. You need a Yahoo ID to use the console. [The console is cool, basically like a SQL 'enterprise' system console, with errors and transaction processing costs.]

We had questions about adding in metrics, stats, to use both for reporting and keeping funders/bosses happy and for diagnostics - to e.g. find out which areas of the collection are being queried, what people are finding interesting.

github repository as place to register open tables to make them discoverable.

There's a YQL blog.

[So, that's it - it's probably worth a play, and while your organisation might not want to use it in production without checking out how long the service is likely to be around, etc, it seems like an easy way of playing with API-able data. It'd be really interesting to see what happened if a few museums with some overlap in their collections coverage all made their data available as an open table.]

Running notes, day 3 (Saturday) of MW2009

2009-04-27T23:40:00.000+01:00

These are my running notes from day 3 of the Museums and the Web conference - as the perfect is the enemy of the good I'm getting these up 'as is'. I did a demo [abstract] in the morning but haven't written up my notes yet - shame on me!

The session 'Building and using online collections' included three papers, I've got notes from all three but my laptop battery died halfway through the session so only some of them are already typed - I'll update this entry when I can sneak some time.

Paul Rowe presented on NZMuseums: Showcasing the collections of all New Zealand museums (the linked abstract includes the full paper and slides).

National Services Te Paerangi (NSTP).

4 million NZers, 400 museums. NZMuseums website - focal point for all NZ museums. NSTP administers the site, Vernon Systems is solution provider.

Each museum has a profile page including highlights of their collections. Web-based collection management system.

What needs to be in place for small museums to contribute? How can a portal be built with limited resources? What features of the website would encourage re-use of the data?

Some museums had good web presences, but what about the small museums? Facing same issues that small or local govt museums in the UK face.

Museums are treasures of the country, they show who we are. Website needs to reflect that.

Focus groups - volunteers are important - keep it simple; keep costs low; some places had limited internet connectivity; reservations about content being on the internet were common.

Promoting involvement to the sector - used existing national monthly newsletters to advertise workshops and content deadlines. Minimum of 20 items for placement on site to avoid 'box ticking' [some real commitment required]. Used online forum for FAQs.

Lack of skills - NSTP were trained so could then train staff and volunteers in museums. Digitising, photography for the web.

Had to explain benefits to small museums. It gave them an easy start to getting an online presence.

They overcame resistance by allowing watermarking and clear copyright statements; they showed existing museums sites that allowed tagging; promoted that would help them reach a diverse dispersed audience.

First tag on site - 'shiny nose'. First comment was someone admitting they'd touched the nose on a bronze sculpture.

eHive.

Could also import Excel spreadsheets as content management system didn't exist at early stage of project. Also provided a workaround for people with lack of internet - the spreadsheet could be posted on CD.

API provides glue to connect eHive (Collections Management System) and NZMuseums site together.

Tips for success
Use OS software where possible; use existing online forums and communication networks to save answering questions over again.

90% of these collection items not previously available on the internet. 99% of collection items have images.

[Kiwis are heroes! Everyone was incredibly modest about their achievements, but I think they're amazing.]

Next was Eero Hyvönen on CultureSampo - Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web 2.0: Thematic Perspectives for the End-user (the linked abstract includes the full paper and slides).

Helsinki semantic web thingies
Part of national ontology project, Finland
Vision - international semantic web of cultural heritage. Marriage between semweb and web 2.0

Challenges - content heterogeneity, complexity

Other challenge relates to the way cultural content is produced - Freebase, Wikipedia, open street maps, etc,

Semweb for data integration; web.2 0 approach for content production

Automatically enriched by each piece of knowledge.

In Finnish the sampo is a magic drum that makes everything possible.

Portal intended for human users and machines. Trying to establish a national way of producing content so can be published automatically.

Infrastructure - 37,000 class concepts in ontology. MAO, TAO - museum ontologies, collaboratively built ontologies, then mapped to national system. End user sees one unified ontology. [A little pause while I pick my jaw up from the ground.] 66 vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies available online as services, can be used as AJAX widgets. Some vocabularies are proprietary so can't be published online in the service.

28 content providers, 22 libraries and museums and some international associates like Getty places, Wikipedia.

16 different metadata schemas. [Including some for poetry!]

134,000 cultural collection items (artefacts, books, videos, etc)

285,000 other resources (places, people etc)

Annotation channel for content items - web 2.0 type interface.

Semantic web 2.0 portal

Portal users - for humans, Google-like but semantic search. Nine perspectives into cultural heritage. Three languages. Recently view items, recently commented items.

Map view.

With one line of JavaScript on own website, can incorporate CultureSampo on own website.

[Sadly my laptop died here and the rest of my notes are handwritten. You can probably get the gist from the published paper and the slide, but the coolness of their project was summed up by this tweet: Musebrarian: What can you do with a semantic knowledgebase? Search for "beard fashion in Finland" across time and place. #mw2009

It might not sound like much, but the breadth of content, and the number of interfaces onto it was awe-inspiring.]

Sadly my notes from Brian Dawson's paper, Collection effects: examining the actual use of on-line archival images are also still on notepaper. The paper was a really useful examination of analytical approaches to understanding the motivations of people using cultural heritage collections.

A quick summary of my MW2009

2009-04-27T19:13:00.001+01:00

I'm posting this now to get it out of the way (and done in April) though I still haven't caught up on the Museums and the Web 2009 'backchannel', tidied my notes or read all the papers I wanted to read. I may update this later as I remember things I wanted to say.

Some strong themes (memes?) emerged during the conference. In general, while lots of great sites and projects were presented, including some lovely examples of projects breaking new ground in best practice, some of the most important ideas weren't about presenting new, flashy things but rather reflected a maturity in approach, and a consolidation of the role of the web in museums.

Breaking out of the bubble
From the informal conversations and unconference sessions proposed it seems to be an issue lots of people are struggling with - how do we communicate with managers, curators, educators to get them excited about the possibilities of the web; Nina's question about how we bring the levels of participation we're seeing on museum websites into the physical museum; how does (or how should) an integrated web program change an organisation; how do web teams go from mavericks to maturity?

And leading on from that -

The post-conference challenge - do one thing in April

Conferences are great, especially one as social as Museums and the Web. Those inspiring late night conversations, the unexpected connections, putting faces to names... but I sometimes come away from conferences as cynical as I am enthused because before you know it, you're back at the same conference next year and nothing has changed.

The 'do one thing different when you get back' idea that suffused the crowd-sourced closing plenary really inspired me. Using the post-conference high to make one small change or proactively share with colleagues rather than letting it dissipate seemed to appeal to lots of people - I wonder if there's a way of finding out who's taken up the challenge. I hope I'm going to keep the inspiration to do the Right Thing, to keep pushing for quality when resources and energy are limited and projects are many.

I also realised that after all the inspiring conversations of last year some of us came back from MW2008 and ended up with BathCamp, so while the post-conference crash back to reality may be unavoidable, it doesn't mean you can't get something done anyway.

So I've been working away on the museums API wiki (possibly better known as 'museums and re-usable shareable data' but hey ho), tagging links 'mw2009' in delicious, and following up some contacts with email conversations. There's a lot more I should be doing, and if I haven't yet been in contact with you about something we discussed, let me know.

The unconference
I want to write a proper post about how it worked so that other people would feel comfortable running one of their own, but in the meantime, I'll just say that I was thrilled that it seems to have been so useful for people.

Twitter
The impact of Twitter was really evident at this conference. Apart from finding people for food or drinks, I used it most usefully to suggest an informal meetup of people interested in museum APIs during the Friday, and to find a whole bunch of people to go and eat noodles with. You can get a sense of the progress of the conference from my MW2009 tweets (from my 'event' twitter account).

Randomness
On a personal note, I also made up a new description for myself as I needed one in a hurry for moo cards: cultural heritage technologist. I felt like a bit of a dag but then the lovely Ryan from the George Eastman House said it was also a title he'd wanted to use and that made me feel better. And I won a 'backchannel award' for blogging from the conference, woo!

As well as earlier posts on the opening plenary and the unconference session on failure I still have more notes to dump into posts, I'll tag them all so you can find them under MW2009.