Who are you calling cheap?
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.
August 25th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Flickr will give decent results, but not greatly helpful as it only provides a single tag on the object and does not capture an identity (can be cloacked).
To get really good value want something closer to a del.icio.us three dimensional tagged approach. This will show popular/common tags, allow for following an identity/screen name across items (such as an identity calls most everything of high value a vase, even paintings). Tagging should include the object being tagged, the individual tags applied to the object, and an identity for each tag. This will show that most people call an object a pitcher few call it a vase, which will have more value than a Flickr approach that will show only two tags (pitcher and vase).
August 29th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
That’s a very good point, though I guess even that limited information (a range of different tags) would be somewhat useful. I was also interested in the facility to add comments as well as tags. Something like del.icio.us would give us better quality information, but flickr remains a good way of getting images and information about the collections out there. We’ll see what transpires, and if people save any of the images to del.icio.us.
At the moment it’s in the nature of an experiment. No doubt at some point we’ll work out the best way of doing this. Any suggestions?
It also occurs to me that I’ll now have to add in all the views of the flickr images to our Statutory Perfromance Indicator totals…
October 10th, 2006 at 11:13 am
[…] I wrote a little about this earlier, but now seems a good time to expound at slightly greater length. Like many museum professionals I have been wondering (for years now it seems) about the best way of providing online access to collections. The objective has always seemed, at least in part, to force visitors to come to your site, which then becomes the sole point of contact. But the great advantage of digital information is the ease with which it can be copied and the ability to deliver the same content through a variety of different media and in a range of differing contexts. Couple that with the fact that the World Wide Web allows content to be drawn in from anywhere, enabling the creative re-use of resources originally built for quite other purposes; the growth of ’sociable technologies’ like blogs, wikis, YouTube, MySpace and Bebo; and the widespread deployment of tools that mean creating online content is now easy and requires no (or little) technical knowledge beyond that required to use a word processor, and we can see that there is now a world of shared content out there already being created, used, re-used and re-shaped. Perhaps its time to stop thinking about re-inventing the wheel and to take a free ride instead? […]