museum collections
Simple idea – use Google coop to provide public search access into a number of museum collections. The “brute force” approach of Google is dumb, yes, but also incredibly familiar to users, compelling to developers, and provides relevant, useful results.
As well as being a demonstrator for what the coop can usefully do, the other point behind this one is to try and set the bar for any future cross-museum collaboration in the area of collections searching.
The challenge is this: whatever we do in the future should be way, way better than this – given that it is free, easy and took, literally, 5 minutes to put together.
See it here at the url below. And please get in touch if you want to collaborate or have your site added to the crawl.
3 Responses “museum collections” →
mikelowndes
May 9, 2007
Question to self . Just what IS the point of Google Site Maps if Google does not use them to index content its algorhythm would normally ignore (for whatever reason)?
I ask this because many Museum sites (and certainly my previous employer!) have interesting and useful content that’s not indexed (or at least indexed well). Google would say – ‘well here’s what you need to do to make it visible, go do it…’. But poor stressed out Musem staff just don’t have the time/energy. I was hoping the Site Map idea would be a solution to this issue, but sadly not as my experiments with Mike’s Co-Op search proved. Any Google folks listening – the sector would ike to talk to you!
Mike
Mike
May 9, 2007
Mike – my understanding was that this was exactly what GSM did. What did your experiments show that implied otherwise?
mikelowndes
May 12, 2007
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318&ctx=sibling
To quote from this: ‘By submitting a Sitemap file, you can take control of the first part of the crawling/indexing processes: our discovery of the pages.’ appears to suggest that sitemaps do as we assume.
But further down: ‘This program does not replace our normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program [..]. We cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index. ‘
Notice the IF? In other words, adding a Site Map does not guarantee indexing. The Site Map is not a bypass. If for some reason the usual Google algorhythm can’t find your page, tough.
cheers
Mike