Behind the scenes

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?

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.

I suppose I ought to explain the image in the page header. It’s part of the Haddington set of weights and measures from 1707, which is a particularly nice set including Avoirdupois weights (the one illustrated is a 2lb - 2 pounds for those who don’t understand all that non-metric stuff - about 0.91kg), Troy weights (like a set of nested brass flower pots), pint and Wine Gallon (smaller than an Imperial gallon) measures and a big brass bushel. In addition we have at least one measure that pre-dates these: a Scots pint. Scots pints, like Scots miles were larger by a fair amount than their English equivalents.

What is the significance of these weights and measures? Apart from their indication of the role of the local burgh in regulating trade, ensuring that traders gave good measure and didn’t cheat their customers, they have a particular political significance. By Article XVII of the Act of Union, English weights and measures were to be used throughout the newly-established Kingdom of Great Britain (”…the same weights and measures shall be used throughout the United Kingdom as are now established in England, and standards of weights and measures shall be kept by those burghs in Scotland to whom the keeping the standards of weights and measures, now in use there, does of special right belong; all which standards shall be sent down to such respective burghs from the standards kept in the exchequer at Westminster, subject, nevertheless, to such regulations as the Parliament of Great Britain shall think fit.”).

Scots money, by the way, was worth less than the English equivalent - one pound Scots was worth 1s 8d (about 8.5p, one twelfth of a pound Sterling).

What a good morning to have a site visit at Prestongrange with some members of the Living Landmarks bid team. I don’t think I’ve been as cold as that since 1982. Of course I hadn’t dressed for the occasion, so I have only myself to blame. I could hardly have been unaware of the weather conditions as it had taken 15 minutes to be able to see out of my car windscreen first thing (and that involved driving up the road with my head out of the window to somewhere where the sun would shine on it.

Still, I spent a good two hours exploring the site including the areas to the south amongst the trees. It’s fascinating to see what has survived amongst the growth of the last forty years. I haven’t explored the back areas of the site during winter before, and it’s surprising how much more you can see when there are no leaves on the trees. The two reservoirs are amazing - like little walled gardens - but while some of the infrastructure of drainage pies and sluices it still visible, it mostly exists in small reminders sticking just out of the earth. As you explore you can follow these pipelines, but it’s hard to know just what they are for or when they date from. Of course on a site with a history as long as Prestongrange’s it’s not always clear to what extent later structures have wiped away or re-used existing ones. But that’s for phase 2 of the Community Archaeology Project to sort out.

We don’t make enough use of much of the site, largely because we have lacked the resources to make it more accessible and meaningful. But I can imagine how the site might be - of course I’ve been imagining how Prestongrange could look since I first saw the site when I was up here for my interview for the Museums Officer post in 1994, so I may be a serial dreamer. But this time - who knows?

So with my fingers and toes completely numb, I climbed back into my car and the windscreen wipers and screenwash wouldn’t work. Bizarrely, when I pulled the lever to wash/wipe the windscreen the rear wiper went on. But that, as they say, is another story.