Behind the scenes

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. 

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.

One of our weekly tasks in East Lothian’s museums is to count and bank donations. The cash in the box actually provides a good measure of how we’re doing but it sometimes also provides a snapshot of where our visitors come from. At John Muir Birthplace we always find American coins and bills in the box, as well as a wide variety of Euro coins (replacing all the francs, deutschmarks and so on from a few years ago). Aussie, Canadian and other coins still appear - it’s always interesting to see what does turn up.

There was a particular suprise just the other day - a little bag containing £1 in old 10p (2/-) and 5p (1/-) coins. At first sight completely useless and just a hassle but rest assured, they’ll find a use! It was in fact a dead handy donation as we spent a good while rumaging around last year trying to find just these items for our handling boxes….

The Digital Resource Development Team project is funded by a grant of £300,000 from the Scottish Executive for three years. We’re already into year two now and finished sub-projects are starting to roll out.

In developing the project idea (and how long ago that seems now!) I was most concerned to avoid providing a series of training events, since in my experience (both my personal experience, and in seeing others whose training I have authorised) most training is wasted unless what you learn is pretty well immediately applied in a real-world situation. If you just attend the training course, do a couple of imaginary exercises unrelated to your real job, and then return to your normal schedule of activity you will very quickly forget what you have learned. It’s practice that embeds the learning.

So my concept for the DRDT was that the learning would take place through participation in real projects - producing end results (digital objects, websites, publications or whatever) that increased the participants’ knowledge, skills and experience, but also benefitted institution as an outcome.

As with most projects of this type, most of the money is spent on paying staff - just over two thirds of the £300k in this case. This always seems a lot at first glance, but the difficulty is not so much in raising money to buy things, but rather in finding people to undertake the tasks. It is the eternal problem of small museums - yes, we can get a grant of £10,000 for this project - but who is going to actually do it? And who’s going to do their job while they are working on the grant-funded project?

The remaining third of the RDCF funding is financing the partner projects. A key question here has been how to stimulate project ideas and involve  the partners in activities, when they lack the knowledge and confidence to say what it is they would like to do. That is, it’s no use asking people what they want to do until they know what thay can want to do - until they understand the range of possibilities, all they can ask for is more of what they already know. Yet we don’t want to impose our ideas of what they should do, lacking any knowledge of their individual institutional needs. The approach has been for Kye and Angus, the Project Officers, to meet the partners on their own sites and talk about the sorts of things they are currently doing and would like to do, and to offer suggestions as to how digital technologies could make a contribution to those ambitions. Kye and Angus then work with the partners to put together project proposals.

The original business plan was deliberately vague (i.e. I had no idea at the time*) as to how the ‘projects’ money would be allocated. Currently a substantial proportion has been set aside as a ‘Challenge Fund’ which offers grant of up to 100% to partners in a series of roughly quarterly application rounds, the second of which was decided at the end of last month. Most of the projects have been modest in size - a project should not strain the capacity of the applicant actually to deliver - ranging from setting up a CMS-based website to accompany a new exhibition in the City Arts Centre in Edinburgh to providing the equipment to enable the Scottish Fisheries Museum to move over to digital reproduction of its photographic archive, by way of interactives for galleries, the digitisation of video and the production of DVDs.

Meanwhile we have also been helping partners find ways to keep their websites up to date (without detailed technical knowledge), delivering a range of basic training to provide a background in webby stuff and working with digital images, and in putting together a ‘kit’ to enable the production of panoramas for virtual tours - in particular to enable a form of access to those hard-to-get-at parts of museums up spiral staircases and the like.

The real test of all this, of course, will be not in the material produced through the project, but in what happens after.

*The time scale for the application to the RDCF was very short - the guidelines were published on 22nd December 2003, with a deadline for applications of 31st March 2004 - effectively eleven weeks to build a regional partnership, devise a project and agree an application and business plan. Of course we were already somewhat prepared, thanks largely to City of Edinburgh Museums earlier in the year, but that is another story…

East Lothian Council had put together an application to the Big Lottery Fund’s Living Landmark programme for Prestongrange (combining the museum and the Morrison’s Haven site across the road). The commitment to redevelopment at Prestongrange is a long-standing one, but the Living Landmark scheme offered an opportunity for funding that in many ways would have been less complicated than the funding routes we were previously looking at (these involved a number of different funders for different aspects of the redevelopment). However, as is the way of these things, many are called, but few are chosen - and Prestongrange did not make it through to the next round of selection. Well, they don’t call it the Lottery for nothing.

Still, the work that was done in producing the application will not have been wasted, as it will form the basis for our subsequent applications. In particular this process has given us a much clearer integrated vision of what we would like to do with the site, and the process of public consultation which will inform the development process has got underway. We always knew that Prestongrange was a site of enormous significance in Scotland’s industrial and social history. This has been reinforced by the results of the first phase of the Community Archaeology project. Now we have a vision for the site. All we need to do now is work with the community to fill in the details - then fill in the applications and win the grants.

After that the hard work will really start…

After some experimentation in using Website Baker’s news module as a blogging application, I’ve decided to switch to a real blogging tool: WordPress. It has more of the features you need for blogging, including trackbacks and pings. So at least now the blog will be picked up by Technorati, etc. The WSB news module is fine for news, but a blog should be able to be so much more - potentially a real conversation with (and between) your audience.

The only question remaining is whether I should transfer the existing posts over to WordPress. Since there aren’t too many of them, I think I will - but I’ll do that tonight at home. Then I can set up the redirects so this will become eastlothianmuseums.org/blog.

Our museums at Prestongrange and Dunbar open to the public between April and October. This means that every year we have to recruit a fresh team of Museum Assistants. No while it is the case that we have some staff from the previous year who apply again (other having moved on to other employment), the bulk of the Museums Assistants in any year will be new to the Museums Service and mostly new to working in a museum environment.

This year the interviews took up two full days. Having been on both sides of the equation, I can say that while being interviewed is a stressful and potentially-dispiriting experience, actually interviewing is more physically exhausting, and carries its own particular stress factors. The need to treat all candidates fairly and equally - to ask the same questions and in the same way, while keeping up an appropriate level of interest in answers often not dissimilar to ones you have already heard fifteen times is very tiring; the need to keep good notes of candidates’ answers, to help you remember who it was that said what; and the eventual need to choose between candidates who are all capable of doing the job on the basis of who nonetheless seemed at interview to be the best culminate of course in the worry that despite your best efforts, you might have made a wrong decision.

All in all, though, over the years we have been very lucky in the people who have come to work for us. I suppose that is one advantage we have as a museum service - the job itself appeals to people, not just as a route to getting paid, but as something worthwhile and enjoyable in itself. And who am I to disagree with that - after all it’s why all of us are here.

I mentioned the price that the view from my office exacts. Yesterday it was ten degrees celsius. That is bearable if you are moving around, but while sitting at the desk…shiver!

So I relocated to the office at the front of the building which was a good ten degrees warmer, and worked from there - isn’t technology wonderful?

Today my office is a balmy fourteen degrees. So I’m still in the front office…

One of the tasks that falls to many curators is working with a trust or society that’s involved in the ownership or running of a museum. This morning Jo and I attended a regular meeting of the John Muir Birthplace Trust (surprisingly enough at John Muir’s Birthplace).

It’s an interesting set-up. The building and the ‘permanent’ exhibition (the whole project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, ELC and private donations) are owned by the Trust, while the building is operated by the Council’s Museums Service and the revenue cost of opening to the public and running all our public programmes comes from East Lothian Council (and any additional funding we can find).

This creates the potential for ‘interesting’ situations, particularly when you consider that the Council is itself one of the Trust partners. Who sets the mission for the Birthplace? Who has ultimate responsibility for the activities, exhibitions, workshops and events that take place there? Who has the final say, even, on how and when the building is open to the public? In practical terms, much of this is going to be driven by the limits of the Museums Service budget, but it’s not something that we can take unilateral decisions on. Of course, we do have a management agreement that sets out parameters for some of these things, but as is the nature of such agreements, it is not exhaustive, and each situation needs to be judged [cliche alert!] on its merits.

It’s the Museums Service staff, after all, who have the knowledge, skills and experience of running the Birthplace (and our other museums). But we have to be aware that what we do here reflects not just on the Council, but also on the wider community represented on the Trust, and on the Trustees themselves.There will always be a judgement call to be made as to what we can do (for example to take advantage of a new opportunity) without consulting the Trustees - based always on our now two-and-a-half years experience of operating the building and working with the Trust - and what we need to talk to them about. Of course we always hope that we will all agree anyway. I have to say that so far no situations have arisen where there has been a disagreement between the Museums Service and the JMBT. Hmmm, is there any wood handy…?

I suppose what I’m saying is that, in a relationship like this, it all really depends on Trust.