electronic museum

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The whole NPG / Wikimedia thing

July 15, 2009 · 18 Comments

There’s acres and acres of stuff to read and write about the whole National Portrait Gallery legal action threat against Wikimedia contributor Dcoetzee and his addition to the Wikimedia collection. I’m not going to try and add to the noise too much but it would seem apposite to at least comment given my current thread of presentations and posts is all about freedom, openness and MRD.

As always (just like the argument currently brewing about Free), there are two possible dangers in any debate like this. First, we go into too much detail and lose the view of the house because we’re examining the bricks too closely. Second, we polarise the debate.

I’m good at polarising, being a bear of simple brain – particularly when it comes to copyright. Simply, I don’t think it works in many cases, and I think this particular example holds – on many levels – great reasons as to why not. Cross-country, cross-domain, cross-sector, hidden images, non-hidden images, etc etc. This level of complexity doesn’t hold well with users, and they will abuse, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Having said that, there are clearly two sides to this particular debate, and actually I think both sides are being pretty reasonable. NPG have offered medium sized pictures; Wikimedia has been on the case for some years seeking access to these (arguably) public domain images. The discussion over the detail in this particular case will ramble on; the legal threat will be sorted out of court; everyone will ultimately go away at least semi-happy.

The bigger picture is the more important question, and it is this: why are cultural institutions putting collection (images) online? I ask this as an open question, as un-loaded as it can be (given you probably know where I’m coming from on this).

The possible answers are these (none is mutually exclusive, by the way):

  • to sell them / variations of them, such as prints, etc
  • to increase exposure to them
  • to increase exposure to the holding institution
  • to increase ticket sales / physical visits to the holding institution

So with these in mind, I think the important questions in this particular debate are not about the devil detail of cross-country copyright or whether Dcoetzee “should” have done what he did. I think they are:

  • does the exposure on Wikimedia increase exposure? (Answer: yes)
  • does exposure of hi-res pictures stop people from buying them (Answer: unknown, but possibly not)
  • does the exposure of the images improve the standing of the institution (as being a place that “has a great collection”) ? (Answer: yes)
  • does the exposure of the images increase click-through to the NPG website (and hence, assuming at least some kind of connection between traffic and physical visits) ? (Answer: unknown – I’m about to submit a FOI request to see if we can find out, but probably yes)
  • does the threat of legal action make NPG look good? (Answer: not really)

There’s some great questions here, which I’ve been asking our sector to answer for a while. Where is value in a networked age? How does virtual equate to physical? Does exposure increase or decrease physical sales (go ask Anderson or Gladwell this one…).

Just as a closing thought, I wonder if the NPG will be chasing Yahoo! for this YQL query or Google Images for this one? I suspect not.

Categories: content · museum · technology
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Pushing MRD out from under the geek rock

July 13, 2009 · 6 Comments

The week before last (30th June – 1st July 2009), I was at the JISC Digital Content Conference having been asked to take part in one of their parallel sessions.

I thought I’d use the session to talk about something I’m increasingly interested in – the shifting of the message about machine readable data (think API’s, RSS, OpenSearch, Microformats, LinkedData, etc) from the world of geek to the world of non-geek.

My slides are here:

Here’s where I’m at: I think that MRD (That’s Machine Readable Data – I couldn’t seem to find a better term..) is probably about as important as it gets. It underpins an entire approach to content which is flexible, powerful and open. It embodies notions of freely moving data, it encourages innovation and visualisation. It is also not nearly as hard as it appears – or doesn’t have to be.

In the world of the geek (that’s a world I dip into long enough to see the potential before heading back out here into the sun), the proponents of MRD are many and passionate. Find me a Web2.0 application without an API (or one “on the development road-map”) and I’ll find you a pretty unusual company.

These people don’t need preaching at. They’re there, lined up, building apps for Twitter (to the tune of 10x the traffic which visits twitter.com), developing a huge array of services and visualisations, graphs, maps, inputs and outputs.

The problem isn’t the geeks. The problem is that MRD needs to move beyond the realm of the geek and into the realm of the content owner, the budget holder, the strategist, for these technologies to become truly embedded. We need to have copyright holders and funders lined up at the start of the project, prepared for the fact that our content will be delivered through multiple access routes, across unspecified timespans and to unknown devices. We need our specifications to be focused on re-purposing, not on single-point delivery. We need solution providers delivering software with web API’s built in. We need to be prepared for a world in which no-one visits our websites any more, instead picking, choosing and mixing our content from externally syndicated channels.

In short, we now need the relevant people evangelising about the MRD approach.

Geeks have done this well so far, but now they need help. Try searching on “ROI for API’s” (or any combination thereof) and you’ll find almost nothing – very little evidence outlining how much API’s cost to implement, what cost savings you are likely to see from them; how they reduce content development time; few guidelines on how to deal with syndicated content copyright issues.

Partly, this knowledge gap is because many of the technologies we’re talking about are still quite young. But a lot of the problem is about the communication of technology, the divided worlds that Nick Poole (Collections Trust) speaks about. This was the core of my presentation: ten reasons why MRD is important, from the perspective of a non-geek (links go to relevant slides and examples in the slide deck):

  1. Content is still king
  2. Re-use is not just good, it’s essential
  3. “Wouldn’t it be great if…”: Life is easier when everyone can get at your data
  4. Content development is cheaper
  5. Things get more visual
  6. Take content to users, not users to content (”If you build it, they probably won’t come”)
  7. It doesn’t have to be hard
  8. You can’t hide your content
  9. We really is bigger and better than me
  10. Traffic

All this is is a starter for ten. Bigger, better and more informed people than me probably have another hundred reasons why MRD is a good idea. I think this knowledge may be there – we just need to surface and collect it so that more (of the right) people can benefit from these approaches.

Categories: content · copyright · museum · technology · web2.0
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Creative Spaces – just…why?

March 4, 2009 · 48 Comments

There’s been a fair bit of buzz around the launch of the NMOLP (National Museums Online Learning Project) – now apparently renamed as “Creative Spaces” for launch.

I’ve known about this project for a long while – when I was at the Science Museum, very initial discussions were taking place at the V&A about how to search and display collections results from more than one institution. The Science Museum were invited to take part in the project, but in the end didn’t because of resourcing and budgetary issues.

My second touch on the project was from the agency end – the ITT briefly crossed my desk at my current employer, Eduserv. We considered bidding, but in the end decided that it wasn’t a project we could deliver satisfactorily given the particulars of the scope and budget.

Back then – and I think now, although someone from NMOLP will have to confirm – the project was divided into two main sections: a series of “webquests” (online learning experiences, essentially) and a cross-museum collections search. The webquests can be seen here, but I’m not going to consider these in this post because I haven’t had time to spend enough time playing to have an opinion yet.

The Creative Spaces site is at http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ – at first glance, it’s clean and nicely designed, with a bit of a web2.0 bevel thing going on. It’s certainly visually more pleasing than many museum web projects I’ve seen. The search is quick, and there’s at least a surface appearance of “real people” on the site. I hesitate to use the word “community” for reasons that I’ll highlight in a minute.

There, unfortunately, is where the praise is going to stop. And here’s the three reasons why:

Firstly, this site, much like Europeana (which I’ll get my teeth into in a future post…) utterly fails to grasp what it is about the web that makes people want to engage. I’m astounded that we’re this many years into the social web and haven’t learnt about the basic building blocks for online communities, and are apparently unable to take a step back from our institutional viewpoint and think like a REAL user, not a museum one.

Try – just try – looking at this site with a “normal person” hat on. Now ask yourself: “what do I want to DO here?” or “how can this benefit me?” or “how can I have fun”? Sure, you can create a “notebook” or a “group” (once you’ve logged in, obviously..). The “why” is unclear.

For starters, the functionality is massively underwhelming. Take a look at www.ingenious.org.uk – a NOF digitise project which I worked on maybe 5-6 years ago. Now, I’m not over-proud of this site – it took ages, nearly killed a few people from stress, and the end result could be better, but hey – it has CROSS COLLECTION SEARCH, you can send an ECARD, you can SAVE THINGS TO YOUR LIGHTBOX, you can CREATE A WEB GALLERY. And this was FIVE+ YEARS AGO. Even then, I was underwhelmed by what we managed to do. Now, looking at NMOLP, I’m not underwhelmed – I’m…speechless…

Secondly, there just simply isn’t a reason WHY. Why would I possibly want to create a profile? Where is my incentive? C’mon guys – this is social web 101. Let me quote Wikipedia, when they talk about the Network Effect:

“A more natural strategy is to build a system that has enough value without network effects, at least to early adopters. Then, as the number of users increases, the system becomes even more valuable and is able to attract a wider user base. Joshua Schachter has explained that he built Del.icio.us along these lines – he built an online system where he could keep bookmarks for himself, such that even if no other user joined, it would still be valuable to him“

The other day, I had a Twitter conversation with Giv Parvaneh, the Technical Manager at NMOLP regarding this post, which talks about “monetizing” media. He blogged his response here. Now, we had a minor crossed-wires moment (it’s hard to discuss in 140 chrs) – but my point was not that museums should “monetize” everything (although, I DO think that museums should learn about real business practices, but that’s another post altogether). My point was that users need to feel special to take part. They need to be part of a tribe, a trusted group who can do and say things that they find personally useful. They need experiences with integrity. If you’re not sure what I mean, just spend some time on the Brooklyn Museum collections pages. These guys get it – the “posse“, the “tag game“, the openness. Compare this back to the sterile, shallow experience you have on NMOLP. Now ask yourself – “where would I spend MY time?”. Get it yet?

The second major reason is that, once again, we’re failing to take our content to our users. This is a huge shortfalling of Europeana. People want experiences on their own terms, not on ours. C’mon, let’s not have another collections portal. Spend your social media money adding and updating entries on Wikipedia, or create an object sharing Facebook application. Or just put everything on Flickr. And, please, please, please create an API or at the very least an OpenSearch feed. If the issue is something around copyright – get your arses back to your funders and content providers and sit them down in front of Google images for an hour so they can begin to understand THE INTERNET, before renegotiating terms with them.

The final reason hangs off the search facility. My vested interest here is of course hoard.it – and if you want to hear our rantings about the money spent on big, bad technology projects, then keep an eye out for our Museums and the Web Paper. We aren’t necessarily suggesting that the hoard.it approach should be the technology behind cross-collections searching. But we are suggesting that the approch that NMOLP have taken is expensive, old, clunky and ultimately flawed. When I first saw the technical specification, my response was – “well, why not just spend £20-30k on a Google Search Appliance and simply spider the sites?” – and I haven’t changed. Why re-develop the wheel?

If I was less of a grumpy old man, I’d feel bad about slagging off a new project this hard – I like the people involved, I like the institutions, and I understand the reasons why (museum) projects spiral into directions you probably wouldn’t ever choose. But then I remember that this puppy cost the taxpayer just short of £2 million pounds, and that Europeana will cost €120 million. And then I realise that we have an obligation to keep badgering, nagging, slagging, criticising until someone – finally – gets it right.

At the end of the day, Frankie sums it all up much more succinctly in his email to the MCG list than I do in this post. He simply asks: why?

Categories: collections · community · content · innovation · museum · web2.0
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Why 3 won’t replace 2

February 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I was at the Hague during the latter part of last week, doing a keynote at CATCH // Museum 2.0. The organisers had seen me talking at “Kom je ook?” and asked me to go over again.

This talk – “Why the Social Web is here to stay (and what to do about it)” is an expansion on the one I did in December last year at Online Information. That one focused a bit more on the enterprise, wheras this one was specifically pitched at cultural heritage.

The message is much the same: connecting with others is deeply important to people. The social web connects people. Therefore, the social web is deeply important…

Anyway. Here are the slides

Categories: conference · content · museum
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The person is the point

February 6, 2009 · 5 Comments

This is just going to be a quickie, mainly so I get it out before I go away on holiday never to remember it again. At some point I might expand on it.

Over the last few weeks in particular, we’ve seen the public finally sitting up and noticing Twitter. It’s been on the BBC, all over the news and makes for interesting watching on Google Trends, too:

Twitter / UK / 12 months

Twitter / UK / 12 months

About a year ago, my assessment of so-called “lifestreaming” was that it was all a timesink. Back then, I hadn’t pulled as deeply on the Twitter crack pipe as I have since, or do now. Looking back (nearly 5,000 tweets and 300 followers in), my thoughts are on the one hand changed – radically – and on the other, mostly the same.

My views have changed in terms of signal / noise ratio because Twitter has deeply, deeply affected me, the way I work and the way I consume and receive content and news. I can’t think of a technology that comes even close. The panic – and it is panic – that I feel when I consider a world without Twitter is, actually, pretty worrying.

On the other hand, my views about institutional Twitter have changed only a little. Back then, I questioned that Twitter has a place at all in an institutional setting. Now, with some water under the bridge, I’ve tuned my assessment of this. My current take on this is that there are only a few ways in which institutions can create convincing, fun, and followable Twitter streams.

The first of these is when it is automated (for example, Towerbridge – and this particular example is a genius use of various bits of technology). The second is at the opposite end of the spectrum, and that is when institutions are given personality, usually because the person doing the tweeting can sit outside the corporate MarketingFluff (TM). The obvious example is the always-great Brooklyn Museum. The third is when it is just plain useful, giving rapid updates on a topic in a way that other channels can’t.

As the interest grows, we’re starting to see the cultural sector increasingly wanting a slice of the pie, and the first thing they’re asking is how do we engage with this new channel? How do we mix it into our offering and make it work for us?

Right now, many of the museums on Twitter are using it in an informal, below-the-radar context. The problem is that as the thing goes more mainstream, we’re likely to see the same old problem we’ve seen with institutional blogging: it just ends up becoming the same old shit from marketing leaflets, regurgitated into new channels.

Twitter, like blogging, needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness. As long as institutions can retain this – i.e., do it for a reason – then, IMO, things will get more interesting. If they don’t, we’ll probably all be unfollowing museums as quickly as we can slide down the steep, slippery trough of disillusionment…

Categories: community · content · innovation · marketing · museum · social network · web2.0
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Ten things a web designer would never tell you

February 6, 2009 · 2 Comments

Following the barcamp (BathCamp) that we ran last year, I was looking for a way of maintaining some momentum around the local tech scene, and decided to put together a monthly evening meetup. The first of these was on Wednesday 4th Feb.

Talking at the event were two pretty well known people from the web industry: Paul Boag (Boagworld and Headscape) and Ryan Carson (Carsonified).

Paul did an exceptional talk entitled “10 things a web designer would never tell you” – a tongue in cheek (but scarily accurate) parody of the approaches taken in many web projects. I particularly liked “4. Form a committee to provide feedback…(before you know it you will have a design everybody can tolerate)…” and “6. Enforce corporate style guides to the letter”. Actually, the entire list is pretty easy to check off if you’ve been involved in this kind of stuff before. Comment if this all seems horribly familiar!

Interestingly, Paul followed the talk up with a blog post taking the same tongue-in-cheek tone and got so many comments from people who thought it was actually straight advice that he first of all had to move the “THIS IS TONGUE IN CHEEK” message from the bottom of the post to the top and I see just now has even had to add a new post: “For those of you hard of humour“. Funny stuff.

Anyway. Here’s a video of the talk that I took on a friend’s Flip. Quality is slightly poor (not the Flips’ fault but my failure to get a bigger file up to Vimeo..)

Ryan did a talk on the excellent Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. I’ll be posting the video of his talk just as soon as I can squeeze it through my limited home bandwidth.

Categories: content · design · museum
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The problem with process

February 3, 2009 · 11 Comments

This blog post has been lurking as an idea in my drafts folder for a long time, waiting for me to write something about the issues of “enterprise” and “lightweight”. 

If you haven’t gathered it already you’re either new here or have been seriously thick skinned when I’ve ranted on about why I think IT is crap and what we need to do about that. In a nutshell: IT should help people. It usually hinders them. We should try harder. 

That’s the general thrust of what is actually a very straightforward argument. I seem to spend far too much of my time looking at failed potential and not enough looking at astonishing goodness.

From this you’d probably gather – and you’d be mainly right – that I understand, and have much more time for, “lightweight” than I do “enterprise”. I think you can get closer – much closer – to the true horizon of “good IT” with rapid, lightweight approaches than you ever can with heavy, expensive ones. 

More process, please

Process hell. Thanks johnbullas / Flickr (click for bigger)

I do, however, also understand the need for control, for backups and safety, for security. The problem I have is that so, so often these processes are over-specified. And the problem with over-specification is that it flies in the face of the way we normally go about our lives.

It’s much more natural for us to turn to the person next door or call a friendly web guy and ask “is there any chance you could just…”. It’s what us social animals are good at – a bit of sharing, communal back-scratching, wheeling and dealing. Look at specifications. The fact is, no one knows how the damn thing is going to work, so how the hell are is anyone going to write it down on week one of the project? Project Management is a similar veil we draw into the process mix and pretend is useful, but find me one person who can accurately forecast their time on a task, and I’ll show you a liar.

This is how we end up tied into a sterile, personality-free wasteland where every item has to be built into a specification or you have to raise a ticket with a “service desk” (generally an oxymoron, IMO) to get, say, Google Analytics code pasted into the footer of your website or redirect a URL.

The problem is: this isn’t how people do things. That’s why it bugs the shit out of every poor sucker who gets tied up in it.

Here’s the question: why can’t we ring the guy up? Why can’t we call in favours, buy the dev a pint, tell him we’ll help him out with some CSS he’s struggling with? This is the way, after all, that most business gets done – someone you know puts in a good word for a friend of yours, he does you a favour, you remember it the next time around. I’m not suggesting that goes too far – there’s a horrific cronyism at the other end of the scale – but I’m just unsure how anyone gets anything creative or effective done when there is no personality in the system. The reason we can’t do this (usually) is that there’s another process (”change control”) underneath. And under that, somewhere, hiding in the dark, is fear. 

Mitigating risk is one thing. Being over-cautious is quite another. It’s also a rapidly shrinking spiral where your systems and processes begin to close down on each other because of fear that “things might go wrong”. Lock it down, prevent the changes, project manage it to death. Kill the project before – gasp – something goes awry.

I think “lightweight” consistently shows that creativity can only come out of flexibility. I also believe that this can – with some creative, human thinking – be translated into “the enterprise”. Maybe I’m naive. Maybe it isn’t turtles all the way down, but Process.

I hope not.

Categories: content · technology · web2.0
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Specification Hell

January 6, 2009 · 6 Comments

I just spent my afternoon working on a 50-page functional specification. 

Now that I’ve been on the agency side for more than a year, I’m confident in reporting that agencies hate reading specifications almost as much as clients hate writing them. 

The world is full of dry documents, and I try (probably like most people) to avoid them as much as I can. That’s why I spend as little time as possible on Mr. Nielsen’s site or over on the W3C. What always strikes me about specifications for websites, however, is the extreme contrast between the engaging, colourful, user-centric thing which is the intended end-result and the grim, stultifying 100-page dirge which is usually provided at the beginning of a web project.

Functional specs have emerged from a kind of pastiche of needs. On the one hand you have the client who is forking out tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Not only do they (obviously) want to know what they’re getting for their money, but specifications are impressive, aren’t they? Nothing like an enormous great fat wad of a document to really show the agency that you mean business. From the agency side, you have a bunch of project managers and web developers: the PM’s are desperate to assign days and the web developers are desperate to avoid those “ooh, you couldn’t just…” moments later on in the project.

Under the hood is also a kind of legal wrangling which everyone hopes they won’t ever need – what if it all goes to shit, relationships break down and all those “sure, I’ll just do X” or “they said they’d do Y” moments come back to haunt you?

The net result is grim, particularly when you take a step back and consider the impact on creativity, innovation or “moving things forward”. When developers and PM’s are working to the letter of a specification, it’s no wonder that those additional extras get left behind. When your document binds you so closely to a fixed output (”the dropdown on the right displays X, which when selected does Y to div Z”) you don’t have a hope of being flexible, let alone able to take on board user needs or requirements.

In my experience, the reality is far from the dotted “i” and crossed “t” scenario which forms the backdrop to specifications. Developers are terrible (as is everyone, IMO) at estimating effort, usually resorting to doubling their initial guess because they know someone somewhere is going to take the piss later on; PM’s are terrible at taking flexibility on board; clients are terrible at writing specifications (or reading documentation). 

People are, after all, human.

What actually happens in a successful web project is very different, very fluid, and relies on a series of largely undefinable communication strands between client and agency. Personality plays a huge role in this: I’ve worked, for example, with developers who are incapable of doing anything except working 100% to the letter (me: “this dropdown has 10,000 items in it” – them: “that’s what you asked for”), and I’ve worked with clients who are 100% happy for the agency to drive the entire process, just wanting “a website” and no further questions, thanks anyway. 

There is no golden bullet, but in my experience there are a few approaches that have proven themselves time and time again.

  1. Be prepared to be flexible, both as a client and as an agency. Rigidity is almost always going to go wrong. Start the process (as client) knowing what you want but be prepared to accept different approaches. If you’re on the agency side, be creative enough to think about (and suggest) approaches that you’ve seen out on the web – say AJAXy validation or particularly good ways of going through a sign-up process. Clients usually like nice things.  
  2. Put legal measures like contracts in place but remember that the chances are you won’t end up in court and it is usually better to devote more time to talking and meeting consistently and regularly during your project than to writing huge, hefty legal horrors. Use a standard contract, attach a design brief, get everyone to sign it. Then move on.
  3. Always (always!) have a single point of contact defined early on in the process. Never step outside of the golden rule – the contact is between these two people: one from the client, one from the agency; any other communication goes through you, with no exceptions. Make sure communications are logged (usually via email, but bug trackers, Basecamp, Google Docs etc etc ultimately do the same thing). 
  4. If you’re a client with a vision or an agency with a solution, create it as visually as you possibly can. Instead of writing vast documents, create the following (in increasing order of effort and usefulness):

    - hand-drawn sketches of the site map, key pages, user interactions, “pinch points”

    - wireframes, initially in Powerpoint but ultimately in something like Axure or Protoshare. You can also use wikis or tools like Google Sites to re-create key bits of the new site

    - if you have really hefty bits of functionality which can’t be explained easily with a wireframe, consider building a working prototype. I can hear the intake of breath here – yes, it’s a hell of a lot of effort, but if you have a friendly web dev who can knock out something in a day or two that explains functionality better than a 100 page document, it will pay for itself in no time at all.

The best web projects I’ve worked on have had a core document which clearly explains the overarching reason for the redevelopment, any constraints (either technical or otherwise), and then references a sitemap and a wireframe or prototype. Somewhere in the background is usually a contract, too.

That’s it. The rest is down to clear, open communication, flexibility and – perhaps most important of all – a shared committment to make the new site better rather than just “redesign” it.

Incidentally, if you hear (or use) the phrase “content migration”, the project has probably failed already :-)

Categories: content · design · innovation · museum
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Introducing OneTag

March 24, 2008 · 15 Comments

You might have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front for the last couple of weeks. This is because I’m having a drive to send some ideas partying and have therefore been knee-deep coding my latest project most evenings.

OneTag logoI’ve put together an idea for people who run conferences or events. It’s called OneTag (www.onetag.org). It’s very simple conceptually, although as I’m discovering, a complete *dog* to code… – the idea is that it aggregates all the “buzz” about a particular (live) event and then provides the means to view this in different ways. Find out more at http://www.onetag.org/ot/about.asp.

Usual “it’s a beta” disclaimers apply…

I’ve agreed with David Bearman and Jennifer Trant that I’ll be trialling the system during the Museums and the Web 2008 conference in Montreal.

I need your help…

First off, if you’re going to the conference and intend to blog, twitter or upload any photos then the global tag follows the same pattern as previous years and is therefore mw2008. If you’re blogging then just add this as a tag or category; if you’re twittering then please use the hashtag #mw2008 as part of your tweet.

Second, if you’re the owner of a blog or other social networking site, will be blogging about the conference and have feed addresses you can supply me with, then let me know in the comments or via email and I’ll add these to the OneTag aggregator.

Finally, if you’d like to get access to the mw2008 OneTag feeds and views to help me test them then do feel free to get in touch – again, via email if you know it or using the comments to this post. Alternatively, tweet me direct at http://twitter.com/dmje.

I’m at the stage where as many critical eyes as possible is going to help muchly..

Thanks in advance!

Categories: blogging · conference · content · mashup · museum
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Omeka – an online exhibits framework

March 17, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Tom Scheinfeldt contacted me through a comment on the Electronic Museum blog. He’s MD of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) who among other things produce Zotero – a kind of semantic webby bookmarking toolbar.

Omeka logoCHNM have recently produced an open source application called Omeka (Swahili for “to display or lay out goods or wares”..) – a product specifically pitched at museums or other cultural institutions wanting to put their collections and exhibits on the web.

To date the offerings in this space tend to follow one of two distinct and reasonably unsatisfactory flavours: Either you choose an ‘out of the box’ templating and publishing system (albeit with the promise that you can “edit your own templates”) which come with systems like MultiMimsy or TMS, or you choose to start from scratch and build the entire thing from nothing.

Omeka - ExhibitThe former is generally pretty bad form for the user: most of these products are generic, badly designed and force museums to follow a prescribed path of development with little flexibility to change or choose their collections management system. The latter is complex and expensive, and although carries with it huge amounts of flexibility, it also has the burden of any bespoke system.

Tom and his team noticed that over the course of several years working with the museum sector that:

“We found ourselves building more or less the same website over and over again, or at least the feature set“

They also noted that although there were tools for curators, there weren’t any for educators or webmasters: the ‘front of house’ people who wanted to create online exhibitions. They decided that they would build some of these common approaches into a framework application for delivering narrative exhibitions online.

Omeka AdminOmeka is an open source application which you download and install on your LAMP web environment. It draws content in real time (i.e isn’t a “tick and publish” like many of the other systems in this space). At the moment you export your data from your collections management system and import it into Omeka for delivery to the web, but Tom was quick to point out that this is “just an intermediary step” and that they’re working on a database abstraction layer which will allow for “live sync” with existing collections managements systems. This is great news, and absolutely the direction that needs to be taken more in our sector.

Tom and his team used the metaphor of a blog to guide their thinking on development. They:

“…thought it should be as easy for museums to publish online exhibitions as it is for individuals to start a blog…and in many ways WordPress has been our model…“

They have a drag and drop exhibit builder, a strong API and also a plugin architecture which allows users to add their own functionality. All of this is very positive news given the approaches taken to date with the systems I’ve mentioned above – very clunky, very web1 and with bad UI’s for both users and administrators.

I’m in the middle of installing Omeka to do some “real world” testing but it certainly looks and sounds very positive to me. If anyone out there has experience using Omeka (or the other systems I’ve been rude about) then please comment away. Examples of institutions using Omeka can be found on their website.

Categories: api · collections · community · content · exhibition · gallery · museum · objects · software · web2.0