Behind the scenes

Documenting the collections - what is that exactly? At its simplest it just means recording all the information we have about each object we have in the museums collection. It is this information - from the name and type of the object, its size and the material it’s made from to the stories, the people and the places associated with it - which is essential in undertanding the object; in relating the stories we can tell with it; and in making the connections between our own objects, things elsewhere and the lives and interests of our visitors (both physical and online). Without the documentation the objects are mute - they do not speak for themselves (except to those experts who already carry some of this information around in their heads anyway). So I’m pleased that we have been awarded a grant from the Scottish Museums Council to support the establishment of a Collections Officer post to work on the documentation and conservation of our collections.

But (there’s always a ‘but’) what sort of information is this? It often tends to be technical, and to use obscure professional terms whose meaning would not be obvious to the non-expert. Since we are planning to put our collections information online (and to connect information about collections with the Site and Monuments Record and the records of the East Lothian Archives) the question is: will visitor be able to find stuff that they are looking for, that is in our collections, if they don’t know the terms we have used to describe them? Probably not, unless by complete chance. If that’s the case, what can we do about it?

Yesterday I went to a really interesting presentation yesterday on tagging as a means of facilitating resource discovery (or, in English, helping searchers find stuff). Tagging means adding individual words or short phrases that describe, or relate to the record being tagged. For example, you might tag a photograph of a fishing boat with the tags ‘boat’, ‘photograph’ and ‘fishing’. But you might also use other terms (perhaps the boat’s name, or names of crew or owners, or other terms relating to fishing). In the end you have a list of words and phrases that relate to the photograph. The fun bit for visitors searching for stuff on your site comes when they can search on one of these tags (maybe by clicking on it in a list on screen) and bring up all the other items tagged with the same word or phrase. Searching (and finding) becomes simpler - once you’ve found one item, you can easily find more items of the same sort, or related to the thing you’ve found.

But the really fun thing is when you allow visitors to the site to add their own tags to collection items that they find while searching. This helps future visitors find what they are looking for more easily. It got me thinking about how we might do this for our own collections, both adding in our own tags and allowing visitors to contribute - helping searchers, and helping us to understand how our visitors categorise and think about our collections. It turns the documentation of the collections from an internal professional process into a wide scale ongoing collaborative process. The ‘our’ in ‘our collections’ is no longer just us curators, but expands to potentially include all of us.

So if anyone reading this ends up applying for our Collections Officer post, you now know why you’ve got a little extra job to do…

I think I’ve finally stopped fiddling with my presentation for Museums and the Web 2007. Of course, one of the disadvantages of computers for the perfectionist-inclined obsessive re-writer is the ease with which you can endlessly tinker with your text / presentation / layout. In the end you are making changes that probably no-one else would ever notice, that in all likelihood make no difference to the impact (or lack thereof) of your end product. It’s also a danger that by focusing on the detail you can lose sight of the overall shape of your paper or presentation. Those of us old enough (as I am, alas) to remember the years B.C. (Before Computers) will recall those heady days of paste and typewriters, where making changes was such a pain you quickly reached the stage of “Dammit, it’s good enough.”

Anyway, it is done. Fingers crossed. I just need to pack my suitcase, decide which books I’m going to take, and make sure I’ve printed up all the paperwork I need.

Actually, it turns out I haven’t stopped fiddling - I’ve just thought of a small change I’d like to make…

Apparently the show referenced below is entitled 1707-In The Footsteps of Defoe, and the first episode, focussing on Prestonpans and points East, will be broadcast on Monday 2nd April at 3.45pm on BBC Radio 4.  See here for more info.

Radio 4 is available to listen to online.

A couple of weeks ago I waited in a freezing cold Prestongrange Museum (it’s been closed for the season since October), waiting for a reporter and a producer from BBC Radio 4.  They were in the area making a documentary about Daniel Defoe and his role in the events surrounding the Act Of Union between Scotland and England, 300 years ago.  Quite what part the town of Prestonpans played in all this is unfamiliar to me, but the radio people were keen to get a flavour of the area and the relationship between its present-day cultural activities and its illustrious past.

It was an interesting insight into the BBC’s working methods.  Despite the fact that the interview was to be recorded and edited for later broadcast, I was far from relaxed.  Instead, it felt rather like a job interview, and I was very self-conscious, trying to seem slightly more authoritative than I am.  The thing was, they were asking questions about the museum’s role and its relationship to the past.  These are interesting topics, and I’m sure I could explain them at length in an extended conversation.  However, they’re also subjects that rarely cross the mind when  faced with the day-to-day realities of my job, i.e. creating worksheets, going on classroom visits, going cap-in-hand for funding, devising activities etc.  We rarely have the luxury of stepping back and assessing our place in the local community or justifying it.  These things certainly aren’t at the front of my mind, ready to encapsulate in a ten-second soundbite. At times I was aware that I was waffling, rather as you do when faced with a difficult question at an exam viva, for example.  I could have asked for a minute to compose my thoughts (we weren’t live after all), but having a big furry microphone placed near your face does tend to lend an artificial urgency to proceedings. 

So I have renewed sympathy for politicians of all stripes who appear on programmes like Today and Newsnight, and (usually) manage to sound half-way coherent when faced with a barrage of probing questions.  My interviewer was not at all Paxman-like, but still I managed to fluff my lines on more than one occasion.  I did, I think, manage to make some points about the museum’s relationships with other local amenities and attractions, and how we hope to build on these to establish a new industry in Prestonpans (i.e. leisure and cultural tourism) to replace the old ones (i.e.  mining, pottery etc.).  The programme goes out in the first week of April, apparently, so we’ll se whether they’ve managed to edit me to make me seem fluent, or whether my thoughts will end up on the cutting-room floor.

Our Museums On The Move program continues with another successful venture, this time out to Haddington’s Knox Academy.  Three classes of S1 students invited their parents, friends and families to see the grand opening of their “Great Scots” exhibition last night, and a jolly good time was had by all.  The Great Scots on show ranged from the usual suspects (Robert Burns, William Wallace, Mary Queen of Scots) to icons of the Heat Magazine generation such as Gillian McKeith and Michelle McManus.  The depth of research into each student’s choice of Scot varied, naturally, but all concerned embraced the project enthusiastically.  As well as lending a glass cabinet and some AV equipment, we also loaned a stethoscope (to represent Elsie Inglis), a miniature TV (John Logie Baird), a mobile phone (Alexander Graham Bell), a Burns address from 1921 and portraits of Mary Queen of Scots.  Objects to represent Scots of more recent vintage were few and far between in our collection, but the students came up trumps, either bringing in their own memorabilia (for Oor Wullie or Ewan McGregor, for example) or creating objects of their own.  We were all particularly impressed with the Tardis (David Tennant) that opened up to reveal facts about the actor.  In fact, this notion of interactivity was particularly evident in nearly all the students’ displays, from audio-visual presentations to quizzes where you had to lift the flap to reveal the answer.  A worthwhile project, then, and a good chance to show a wider audience the work of the school.  Hats off to Mr. Wood, Ms. McPhee and Ms. Anderson of the History dept. for organising the event so effectively, and to the students of S1.

See here for more pics.

So No.6 has gone to Bo’ness. Makes a change from Port Meirion, I suppose.

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?

One of the nice things about museums is you get to work with talented and creative staff.  One such is Malcolm Cruickshank, a museum assistant at Prestongrange.  When he’s not giving tours at the museum, he’s an accomplished artist, and some of his his work is currently on display at Jedburgh’s Community and Arts Centre until September 15th.