Behind the scenes

It’s a long time since I posted anything, but at last I’ve got around to writing up ‘What I did on my holidays’. I’d saved up my annual leave so I could visit my brother in New Zealand in July - it’s such a long way that you need to go for a good while to make the long journey there and back worthwhile. But don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the details of the journey and the many failings of British Airways. Well, not right now, anyway.

One of the stranger consequences of presenting at Museums and the Web in April was being buttonholed after my talk by Wallis Barnicoat from Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, who was interested in what I’d been saying about our project working with many partners, most of them small, volunteer-dependent museums. I fooloishly mentioned that I would be in New Zealnd in July, and she immediately asked me if I could come and speak to her team. For a moment or two the thought “But I’ll be on holiday” struggled with my desire to tell people about the good things we’ve been doing. The latter won easily, though, and I agreed. The exact details of how I would get from Wanganui to Wellington and back, and when, were arranged later by email.

I ended up recapitulating my mw2007 talk for the museum development team in Te Papa in the morning, and repeating (a slightly amended version of) my presentation at Digital Dialogues in June to a larger group - including people from elswhere in Te Papa as well as the National Library and National Archives - in the afternoon. The thematic link between the two is that technology available freely (or at least very cheaply) enables us all to do things both alone and in collaboration that only a few years ago would have seemed to be well beyond our capacity and certain to be absurdly expensive. In particular we have ways of engaging with existing and new audiences that we couldn’t have developed ourselves - sometimes it’s just a question of looking at things from a different angle to see how we can use them. The talks went pretty well, though I was asked some hard questions, particularly by the afternoon crowd. That’s good as it keeps you on your toes and gets you thinking. I feel I can always answer any question - provided that “I don’t know” counts as an answer :-).

What is encouraging for us in East Lothian is to see that even a small local museum service can innovate and do things that others will look to copy. We can be a model for larger institutions, here and abroad; we have things to say and to teach. Sometimes the lack of resources is itself a spur to new ways of working (that’s management-speak for ‘necessity is the mother of invention’).

A slight disappointment was that I saw more of the offices than I did of the museum. But I can’t really complain - after all, I can now say that our influence reaches right around the world! What I haven’t done, though, (and in some ways I am writing this to remind myself to do so) is to follow up the contacts I made in NZ. There’s always potential for collaboration in new projects - in fact in writing this I’ve just had an idea, but I’m keeping it secret for now…

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’ve just attended a workshop on museums and blogging by the three guys from the Walker Art Cente - a follow on from a similar session last year. It was amazing to see how the traffic generated by the Walker blogs has boomed since then, and a confirmation that producing content of this sort is a worthwhile because there is an audience out there for it. Once again there were useful tips, although as ever there were things we’ve already done or are in the planning stage (though with Bebo.com in our case, as that is what teenagers in East Lothian predominantly favour at the moment). Even this is heartening as it is in a sense getting some external validation of how we are planning (and encouraging others) to proceed.

Now I’m off to ponder the idea of Facebook, Bebo et al. as virtual street corners - as teenagers increasingly tend to get moved on by the police from the physical street corners which have been their territory since time immemorial.

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…