Behind the scenes

I’ve been invited to attend a mini-conference at Hochschule Bremen on using mobile technologies and user-contributed content in developing guided tours of heritage sites.  Let me first observe that Bremen is not an easy place to get to (or indeed away from) if the other end of your journey is Edinburgh. My round trip to attend this mini-Conference at the Hochschule Bremen involves flying from Edinburgh to Luton, then on from Luton to Bremen. The return leg – starting with getting up at 5am – involves a train journey from Bremen to Hamburg, another journey out to the airport, then a flight to Birmingham, and finally a flight back to Edinburgh.

So here I am now in the famed Luton Airport (immortalised by Lorraine Chase, but latterly more famous with a voice-over by Tony Robinson). This is the first time I’ve been in Luton Airport (or as it now grandly titles itself London Luton) since 1973, when I was a mere child and was flying out with my family on a package holiday to Tunisia – the first time I had been abroad. I can remember very little about it, apart from the fact that it was with Horizon Holidays (who later went bust) and that the garishly-painted plane we boarded was named ‘Halcyon Days’. I suspect it’s changed quite a lot in the intervening thirty-four years.

The EasyJet flight down from Edinburgh was fine – no frills needed on such a short journey, after all. Unfortunately, I’m now left with a couple of hours wait before I can check in. Oh well, at least there’s somewhere to site down. I may treat myself to something to eat shortly.

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…

A belated follow-up to the last posting. The day went well, the audience laughed when I wanted them to, and didn’t laugh when I wasn’t expecting it. I even managed to keep to time, despite having about 55 slides. So job done, and I got to visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery as well on Saturday morning. The fact that owing to part of the Northern Line being closed I missed my train home and had to wait two hours in King’s Cross Station was merely an added bonus.

There were a couple of slightly jarring moments. First when someone from the Tate was talking about a project for which they had been sponsored by BT and mentioned such sponsorship as a way forward for other museums. Errrm, no, not really. Big national institutions may be able to get sponsorship from the likes of British Telecom, but for the rest of us it is neither so easy nor so lucrative. I don’t expect to see major corporate sponsorship of, say, the Inversneckie Teaspoon Museum (© Graham Turnbull). Later, someone else had a flexible attitude as to what constitutes a question. Perhaps making a blatant commercial pitch in the Q&A session is not the best of ideas. Tacking “What do you think?” on the end doesn’t really make it a question, you know.

I was very interested in the digital photography project that the V&A have been running within the museum. People (though I recall that it seemed to be principally aimed at families) were given digital cameras to take round the museum and encouraged to take photographs, which they could then take back to the education centre, download and print. They could also work on the images on a computer (aided by digital artists brought in by the V&A) to create new images which could then be put onto objects such as T-shirts and key-rings. I assume there was a charge for this, but I can’t recall if that was mentioned. The whole project was very staff-intensive and must have been quite expensive, though it wouldn’t be as expensive for us as we wouldn’t have to cope with the number of visitors that the V&A does. It’s a great means of getting people to look at the objects in a different way. One thing I wanted to know was what they did with all then photographs taken by the participants - did they keep them? Certainly no-one got to take away the digital originals as far as I could see, but rather they only got prints (and the other stuff if they had wanted to do that). I’d have thought it would have been nice for people to take away the digital images and put them up on Flickr or on their Bebo or MySpace site. That’s what we will be doing in our John Muir’s Dunbar project - but of course we have no copyright issues with regard to works of art that may be the subject of the photographs.

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?

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…

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?

The education department of our museums service was lucky enough to receive two grants this spring from the Scottish Museums Council; one to institute our new Museums On The Move project, and one to begin a Podcasting project.  The former is now well under way, with equipment purchased, and community exhibitions already undertaken.  The latter is finally getting off the ground, though, as podcasting implicitly involves lots of computer hardware and software, it’s been slow-going.  We’re just about ready to start making our podcasts though, and over the next few weeks, we plan to visit schools and sign them up to help us create new audio content for our existing tours and to create new tours, and to work with a local day centre to record a series of audio memories of East Lothian that will appear on our site at regular intervals, ready for subscribers to download.

As a sort of proof-of-concept, and a chance to try out some of our new hardware and software, I’ve created an initial download (can you call it a podcast when there’s only one of them?  Lots of other sites seem to…) about my recent trip to the GEM Conference in Durham.  It’s only short, but it gave me the chance to use the software that came free with our mic and mixer (Audacity), and to use some of the copyright-free audio loops that also came free.

With luck, this will be the first of many.  It also appears on our podcasting page on the main site, where I’m currently setting up RSS and Atom feeds. 

Download East Lothian Museums podcast.