museum directory – v3 now available!

Update – 18/10/07

I just uploaded version 3 of the “mashed museum” directory. It includes:

• an autocomplete form for all 3,800+ museums in the UK – see CodeProject for a description and download of the script
• a search form which includes collection type, museum name, and postcode terms
• google map mashup for museum location
• flickr mashup for museum / museum town / museum region images
• a simple YouTube video search for museum name
• a “search for nearby” museums function

I have also knocked up a very quick (very, very alpha!) Netvibes/iGoogle museum search widget which you can preview here.

Thoughts on this version:

1. Overall, I like the additional functionality but I’m not 100% sure it is actually a more usable product than the previous version. I’ll be interested to hear whether people think it’s an improvement. There is always a crux point with building web apps where the enthusiasm of the programmer to get as much geek stuff in there as possible starts to “feature creep” beyond what the user actually wants or needs…

2. I’m suprised that the autocomplete works so well – the only way I could get it to work is to load in all 3,800 museum names and ids into the page at render time, so I was expecting it to creak. In fact it seems remarkably fast, and stable too..

3. Yes, I’ve been lazy with the YouTube tab and have embedded the easy Flash widget rather than doing it properly. Next version, maybe…

Let me know what you think!

ps. the Mashed Museum experiment has had over 7,000 visits since launch…

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Museum directory is a mashup which I built while at the UK Museums on the Web “Mashed Museum” day.It displays a drop down of UK museums and then three panels which show basic museum location data, a Google map placemark, Flickr searches for the museum name and Yahoo search results for the museum name.Please note that the data list is not corrected, or complete – this is a beta mashup so don’t get annoyed if your museum isn’t on it or details are incorrect!

How I did it

I got my raw museum address data by running some Yahoo searches against their API. I then styled the XML of the returned results so I could drop it into Excel. Once I’d done some (rather nasty) munging – for example, separating of postcode data from address – I then looked around for a way of geocoding postcodes. Tom Anthony’s blog provided a solution which I hacked so that the postcodes were in a drop-down and each time the dropdown was changed, the Google Ajax API looked for the lat/long and then appended these to a text file. This was a classic bit of “pushed for time” hacking – it’s a terribly unrobust technique but I simply didn’t have time to do it properly…

Next up, I converted the lot into an access database and then wrote a simple script to run through this and generate KML for display on Google Earth. This worked fine but I wanted to take it a step further so I hacked together a simple page which calls the Google maps API, Flickr API and Yahoo search API using XMLHTTP and then displays these all on one page.

Next steps…

The two obvious things to do are:

1. Import some cleaner data. I now have a CSV of this from the 24hr Museum who have probably the best UK museums dataset. When I get some time, I’ll run this though into the app and see what pops out…

2. Extend the interface so that more services are consumed and displayed. There are a number of other possibilities for services which could be quite nice here. Videos on YouTube is one, but also some way of using “comment on this page” technology for the museums website. Maybe I’ll use Google Notes for this or something similar. I figure I’ll have to use a tabbed view because of lack of screen real-estate…

Update (3rd July 07) – I’ve imported the 3,800 record CSV from the 24hr Museum. See the new version of the directory. Version 3 coming soon!