Thanks for adding us to mashedmuseum.org.uk. Try http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/browse?type=Document&tag=solidarity&output=rss2 for an example from a teaching site we’re about to launch. We should definitely catch up soon. If not before, I should be on your side for a meeting at the Science Museum sometime in late summer. I’ll be sure to let you know when.

Tom

Thats great. I’ll add it to http://www.mashedmuseum.org.uk. Do you have any examples for actual sites that can be used in this way?

Shame not to see you at mw2008 – we should catch up soon

Cheers

Mike

Omeka also has RSS feeds for search results out of the box, which could be another option for smaller institutions. Just add &output=rss2 to the query string of the search results URL (e.g. http://example.com/items/browse?search=foobar&output=rss2). It also works with any of the search criteria, so you can do this with a more complex search. For instance http://example.com/items/browse?type=Document&tag=gorbachev,stalin&output=rss2 would give you the RSS feed for all Documents that were tagged both gorbachev and stalin. Again pretty similar to Perry and Eric’s examples. We’re also talking about implementing ATOM.

Tom

Thanks, too. Incidentally (everyone who has commented!), I’m just creating a very simple and informal directory of these kinds of approaches over at http://www.mashedmuseum.org.uk – there is also a Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/mashedmuseum/.

I will probably be slightly spamtastic and invite all commenters to this shortly.

Mike

Yes, search results as Atom are a nice option, and I agree with one of the earlier commentators about doing this with Open Search. Here’s an example test implementation from Open Context (not really focused on museums, but sharing field notes / items from archaeological digs):

http://www.opencontext.org/database/open_search.php?q=copper

Just change the query parameter and get an Atom feed based on your search terms. This is similar to the example Perry gave for the Portable Antiquities Service.

Best!
-Eric

Mike’s example from the Bolton site is for site-wide searches – in the next month or two we are will be adding a collections database.

This won’t be particularly groundbreaking in itself (it will be a basic keyword search, thumbnail galleries etc.) but as I’ve mentioned above you can easily add cut and paste dynamic content to your pages using RSS, a bit of html/css and services like Feedburner. So there may be applications for the resulting feeds that I haven’t thought of yet.

Examples can be found on any of the “What’s on” pages on the Bolton site; e.g.

http://www.boltonmuseums.org.uk/whatson/facetofaceexhibition17may

In this example the generated content can be seen below the Google map on the right-hand side.

If you scroll down to the bottom of that page you will see “feed keywords” which is my DIY tagging system.

After adding keywords to selected pages I did a site-wide search for them, copied the resulting feed into a Feedburner account and using a feature called Buzzboost generated some code that can be pasted onto any page relevant to that feed.

This method also works for external services: there is a Bolton-centric feed from the Portable Antiquities Service on the following page:

http://www.boltonmuseums.org.uk/whatson/archaeological-finds17apr

Probably a bit too primitive to count as a mash-up but hopefully this will give people an idea about the potential of having search feeds on their sites.

Perry

That’s great, exactly what I was blogging about…really cool

For everyone else, here’s an example url:

http://www.boltonmuseums.org.uk/search_rss?SearchableText=oil

Cheers!

Mike

In fact this functionality is used in tandem with Feedburner to generate dynamic events feeds for internal pages (it would have been expensive to custom build this into the CMS).

Does this count as an example of a “smaller museum” filtering new technologies upwards for a change?