Comments on: Creative Spaces – just…why?

By: Many me « electronic museum

Many me « electronic museum — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:45:01 +0000

[...] this approach is this: I’m not two people, and although this can sometimes get ugly (yes, I ranted about Creative Spaces; no, I wasn’t particularly “professional”, but I feel passionate about some [...]

By: The whole NPG / Wikimedia thing « electronic museum

The whole NPG / Wikimedia thing « electronic museum — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:11:36 +0000

[...] to at least comment given my current thread of presentations and posts is all about freedom, openness and [...]

By: Ed Baker

Ed Baker — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:03:49 +0000

There is a slide on Rod Page’s talk at the Natural History Museum (http://www.slideshare.net/rdmpage/going-digital?type=presentation) which sums it up. Don’t re-invent the wheel, embrace social networks that already exist and build on, or in, them – don’t go it alone.

I have a creative spaces account, I’ve logged in twice – and both times were weeks ago.

By: Bridget McKenzie

Bridget McKenzie — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:56:17 +0000

This is a great thread of comments. I blogged about NMOLP a couple of weeks ago, http://bridgetmckenzie.blogspot.com/2009/03/great-creative-spaces-debate.html
This draws attention to the educational focus of the project, and points out that Webquests were a key part of the scope which hasn’t been acknowledged in the promotion & debate.
Since then, I’ve been playing quite a bit with Creative Spaces. In a nutshell I’m waiting to see more users join who aren’t ‘us lot’, to see how it will really work.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:03:23 +0000

@Celena – great to hear from someone “on the inside”, and yes, I agree with many of your points. As I say, I’m yet to spend any time on the WebQuests, but at first glance they do look very content rich.

I’m not (as you might have gathered!) convinced about Creative Spaces as a foundation, but we’ll no doubt see as time goes on…

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:01:43 +0000

@Ben – thanks again / re. Brooklyn (who, IMO, rock in many, many ways, not just their API). I’ve already got an interview lined up with Shelley who I’m going to ask about implementation, issues, copyright and all o’that stuff, so watch this space!

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:59:59 +0000

@Angela – thanks for your long and well thought-out comment. Lots of great points – I think for me the point about thinking a bit “more commercially” is particularly pertinent. Let me be a bit clearer: not commercial as in cash, but commercial in terms of thinking about competition, about markets, about audiences, about how people will use what we do. I don’t *ever* think that museums should become commercial entities, by the way (everyone!), but I do think that being more savvy and less fluffy is going to help all cultural institutions.

I can’t say I share your enthusiasm for metadata, however

By: Celena Bretton

Celena Bretton — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:17:10 +0000

I was at the V&A during some of this work and got a glimpse of the herculean effort required to build the infrastructure (policy, digitisation etc), so it’s great to see it in action but I also get that ‘what is this for?’ feeling, and I think it comes down to the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality that attaches itself to this kind of project. Creative spaces is a tool without a community at present – the gamble is whether or not the tool is enough in and of itself to generate the community virtually or whether greater investment is needed to develop the site as a core strand of offline engagement activities (during and post-event etc). I agree with Angela’s comment above – short-termism is a key issue – these platforms stand to fail spectacularly without investment in advocacy post-release, so I’m interested to see how the partners will develop the space themselves.

Incidentally – I love the webquests. The cross-collection focus is fantastic and the results are interesting and engaging. The interface is a bit clunky – pulling in full sites to displaying object data is a bit jarring, but the purpose is clear and the content is robust.

As a tabula rasa Creative spaces is less immediate, but it provides a good foundation for building activity. Will the project extend into harnessing the resources needed to develop it fully? With adequate attention to community building, and some fine-tuning, both the platform itself, and the partnership created to develop it, have enormous potential.

By: Ben O'Steen

Ben O'Steen — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:40:58 +0000

Just thought it pertinent to note the following: (via code4lib mailing list)

“For the developers among us and those interested in collection sharing –

The Technology staff at the Brooklyn Museum have just released our
collection API so that outside programmers can query our data and
create their own applications using it. For more information and
links, see
http://tinyurl.com/bafq6u

Let’s see what develops!

Deb Wythe
Brooklyn Museum
Digital Collections and Services
“

By: David Haskiya

David Haskiya — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:40:17 +0000

Mike, I agree with you that in general museum staff and collections going where the users are rather than trying to get users to come to them will get more bang for the buck.

I wonder how the Swedish Heritage Data API looks after going through Google Translate. Probably more like the Swedish Chef API!