Behind the scenes

Meetings are a regular feature of museum life - just like everywhere else, really. I wonder if we should set targets for numbers of meeting and attendees? Today I attended the regular joint meeting with Library Staff at the grandly-titled Library and Museums HQ. This is regular in the sense that we meet twice a year, largely to catch up on what we’ve all been doing and are planning to do, but sometimes to latch on to projects where we (or they) can make a contribution. On occasion it might seem like mere listing of stuff, but sometimes you hear things that you want to know more about.

I’ve been very taken with the potential of ICT and in particular with Web 2.0 (that wonderful marketing term). Apparently over in Alternate Earth (the one with the evil Captain Kirk) so have libraries, as they have conferences about Library 2.0 (kind of like Museum 2.0 with added books). It’s made me wonder whether, rather than forging off on our own, we might more usefully get together with the librarians to work on some of the ideas (like the Bebo site and the flickr photostream). After all, in doing this sort of thing the major cost isn’t the technical equipment or the applications, it’s people to actually do the work of creating and updating the content. So now I’m waiting for list of urls from Andy so I can see what libraries around the world have been up to.

The fact that libraries and museums are so often moving along parallel tracks in this way means that we spend a lot of time duplicating effort and relearning lessons that others elsewhere have already learned, making mistakes that others have made and developing applications (or more usually variants of existing applications and services) that have already been developed and are freely-available elsewhere, if only we knew about it. We end up wasting time working out the how to do it, when we should be concentrating on what goes in it. And as for what’s going on over in the Education Universe… How on Earth can we ever keep up with it all.

Following on from the previous post, I note that the Brooklyn Museum have their own MySpace site. Mind you, it’s filtered from here under the category ‘Personals and Dating’. This seems like a cunning plan (the site, not the filtering, that is), but my daughters and their friends all use Bebo instead, so maybe we should look at some sort of presence there…

Collections Online meets Web 2.0

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?

Flickr.com is a web site that enables people to publish and share digital images – but in addition it allows people to contribute to the information associated with the images by adding comments and notes, additional tags (i.e. keywords) and to add individual images to their personal favourites. Museums across Scotland already have large quantities of digital images of objects in their collections (many created through Scran), but lack the knowledge or resources to make these images and the associated information available through their own web sites. Flickr.com provides a simple (and free) alternative.

At the end of August I uploaded a trial batch of 51 random images taken from our collections, together with the captions that had been written for them for Scran. I included their museum accession number and a number of keyword tags, and made them publicly available under a Creative Commons licence. The Flickr user account allows you to see at a glance how many times your images have been viewed (with the usual caveats about the effects of intermediate caching); how many have been ‘favorited’; and how many comments visitors have left. In the five weeks from August 23rd the 51 images were viewed a total of 365 times (ranging from 69 for the Red Cross Nurse to 4 for the portrait of James Miller); two of the images had been ‘favorited’; one had a comment requesting further information; and I received a publication request for an image. I took no steps to publicise this experiment, but I did make use of the code Flickr provides to put a changing random selection of your photos on your web site which link through to the individual images, both here and on the main museums site.

A few weeks is too short a time to fully assess the effects of making museum content available in this way, but I intend to keep adding to the photostream over the next year. Perhaps by then some patterns will be emerging – particularly if other museums also begin to make use of Flickr too. For the moment it is at least clear that we can reach some people in this way that otherwise we probably wouldn’t reach at all.

I wonder if I have to include this in my SPI statictics?

Note: the Flickr.com free account allows you to upload 20MB of images per month and has other restrictions. The Pro account with 2GB of uploads per month and few restrictions costs $24.95 per year – about £13.50!

Update: I was quite wrong about the statistics - 365 is the number of times all or part of the photostream has been viewed. The individual views of images are separate from that, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to total these individual image views. Anyone know the answer to that?