Talking the talk
This Friday I’ll be in London giving one of the presentations at Digital Dialogues (not this one by the way). My title is ‘Repurposing the wheel’, and I’m beginning to wonder if I sound a bit like a stuck record on the subject of making use of the huge range of free (or at least very cheap) applications and services that are now available to everyone (including museums) to make content available and to engage with new and existing audiences. No matter. Many still seem to think that putting anything on the internet must cost huge sums of money, and are either put off by that or happily hand over great wedges of cash, for stuff that really isn’t worth, and shouldn’t cost, that much.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some web projects that will rightly cost a lot of money, but for most of us the major cost (and what in the end really counts for the visitor) is creating the content. The people best-placed to do that are the people who know the collections - the museum’s own staff - and the process of creation therefore has to be easy. We can’t expect all our staff to become web developers. Mind you, we shouldn’t stop them either.
This is what I’ve tried to do with our web sites. I’ve used a simple, free, content management system, Website Baker, for the main sites, and used the free WordPress here for the blog. I’ve made use of Flickr for our images (and as a means of tapping into the existing huge Flickr photo-sharing community) and YouTube for our video (ditto), and other members of the museums service have also been contributing. With a small number of staff in a small service there is no ‘web team’ - we’re all it, and sharing the load is essential (though inevitably some bear a greater share of the burden than others).
There’s no special reason for the picture - I just thought for once I’d include an image - this is from a set taken by participants in a workshop at John Muir’s Birthplace recently. I just rather like it. You can see the others on our Flickr page.
Update: Sigh. It looks like the Museums Association, with scant regard for how the web works or any idea of archiving data, remove events from their web site after they’ve taken place. Not very helpful for anyone wanting to review what’s going on in the sector, is it?