Managing and growing a cultural heritage web presence

November 6, 2009

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I’m absolutely delighted (and only slightly scared) to announce that I’ve been commissioned to write a book for Facet Publishing. Ever since I started working with museums online, I’ve felt that there is a need for strategic advice to help managers of cultural heritage web presences. There are of course hundreds of thousands of resources… [Read more…]

Museum in a day

October 19, 2009

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I’m delighted to announce the beginning of what I hope will be an exciting (and useful!) mini-project. Museuminaday is a concept which Dan Zambonini and I have come up with to support our workshop “The Lightweight Museum” at the DISH conference in December. Hopefully the name should do most of the work in explaining what… [Read more…]

Posted in: museum

“Can I find it on Google?”

October 16, 2009

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Let’s ask this: Just what do museum website users want? Actually, before we do that, the biggest question is “who is our audience?”. Wait. Before we do that, let’s assume that – what – 70-80% of museum website users want to find out some logistical stuff: “what’s on? how do I get there? how much… [Read more…]

Posted in: museum

Many me

October 7, 2009

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I first joined Twitter in 2007. In fact, if www.whendidyoujointwitter.com is correct, I joined on 20th February 2007. My first account was @dmje. I tweeted in that way that everyone seems to first tweet – a sporadic few “just what the hell is this Twitter thing all about?” followed by a long gap, followed by… [Read more…]

Posted in: community, museum, web2.0

The whole NPG / Wikimedia thing

July 15, 2009

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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… [Read more…]

Pushing MRD out from under the geek rock

July 13, 2009

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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… [Read more…]

Scraping, scripting, hacking

July 7, 2009

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I just finished my talk at Mashed Library 2009 – an event for librarians wanting to mash and mix their data. My talk was almost definitely a bit overwhelming, judging by the backchannel, so I thought I’d bang out a quick blog post to try and help those I managed to confuse. My talk was… [Read more…]

Posted in: museum

There is no PEBCAK

June 26, 2009

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Watching Google’s amazing “what is a browser” video (below) it is easy (and I can almost hear the geeks laughing) to assume that these are just stupid people on a bad day. I mean, what the hell is wrong with them? “My browser is Google”? WTF? The thing is, these aren’t stupid people. They’re just… [Read more…]

Posted in: museum

Being serious isn’t the whole answer

June 2, 2009

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It’s been interesting watching the response to whatever 2.0 is as the whatever it was has matured into whatever it is now. …I should probably rephrase that… The social web has changed as it crawled its way through those painful teen years of greasy skin, piercings, “you just don’t understand me” and shouting at its… [Read more…]

Posted in: museum

Dear DCMS. Please find our stats.

April 30, 2009

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* An open letter to whoever it may concern at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport * Dear Sir/Madam My attention was drawn recently to a Freedom of Information request which was made to you regarding museum web statistics. The request was made by an ex-colleage and friend of mine, Frankie Roberto, who used… [Read more…]

Posted in: museum