Behind the scenes

I’m always on the look-out for cheap (or free) ways of doing things - I am using WordPress for this blog, after all - and new ways of using services and applications in a slightly different way to further the aims of the museums service.

Scran was a marvellous example where the funding model meant that we could get work done that we needed (documenting and recording the collections) by staff and contractors entirely paid by the grant, since our match funding came from the value of the licence we granted to Scran to make the material available for education through their web site (which, strangely enough was something else we wanted to do).

So too with the mobile phone (that’s cell phone for US readers) audio tour at Prestongrange. The audio tour was planned anyway, but the mobile phone aspect was simply a cheap way of making the same material available through a different medium. When we began the planning for the tour MP3 players were rare and expensive gadgets that only technophiliacs owned. These days they are almost given away with breakfast cereals, so we’ve made the same content available for download as well.

Now I’m investigating another route for disseminating information about the collections. I have to give the credit for this idea to Dylan Edgar of SMC - but I don’t think he imagined I’d just run off and do it…

One of the great problems about putting collections databases online is that, generally-speaking, people don’t make use of them. But even if the information is online in a more accessible format, items still aren’t found by searchers because the descriptions used by curators are often very different from the words used by non-experts in searching for those self-same items. Yes, I am talking about folksonomy - though the term itself does seem sometimes to generate more heat (though I can see what he means) than light. So on to the experiment…

I’ve put fifty items from our collection into a Museums photostream on flickr.com (fifty-one images, though because I added a detail of one of the objects). It seemed to us (Dylan and me that is) that flickr offered two potential benefits, especially for smaller museums - a quick way of putting collections images and information online, and a way of enabling visitors to add their own information, comments, notes and tags. Or not. We shall see. The key thing about using flickr rather than trying to do the same thing on your own site (say by means of a wiki) is that we can tap into an existing huge community of people who otherwise would be very unlikely to come across our stuff.

You will see (at any rate you will if you have javascript enabled) a random selection from the set at the top of this page. Fingers crossed.

One of our weekly tasks in East Lothian’s museums is to count and bank donations. The cash in the box actually provides a good measure of how we’re doing but it sometimes also provides a snapshot of where our visitors come from. At John Muir Birthplace we always find American coins and bills in the box, as well as a wide variety of Euro coins (replacing all the francs, deutschmarks and so on from a few years ago). Aussie, Canadian and other coins still appear - it’s always interesting to see what does turn up.

There was a particular suprise just the other day - a little bag containing £1 in old 10p (2/-) and 5p (1/-) coins. At first sight completely useless and just a hassle but rest assured, they’ll find a use! It was in fact a dead handy donation as we spent a good while rumaging around last year trying to find just these items for our handling boxes….