On a recent balmy July evening, a number of people gathered in a pub in London to discuss 'linking museums'. Described as 'a meetup for people interested in the applications of linked data, microformats, RDFa (etc) for museums and the cultural heritage sector', it was organised and publicised largely over twitter and on the 'museums and machine-processable data' wiki (with a few emails and mailing list posts). I'd tried to make sure the event was open to linked data sceptics as well as the converted, and to people who worked in museums but didn't consider themselves technical, so that the discussions ...
[This week's guest post is by Rhiannon Looseley, E-Learning Officer (Web), Museum of London, and MCG Committee member. It was originally published on her blog] Early (very early) on Thursday morning, I got up and got the 7.03 train from Euston to Birmingham for this year's Museums Computer Group (MCG) Spring Meeting. The theme of the day was 'Programming, Promotion and Policy' and I was looking forward to the interesting range of topics that we had on the programme, particularly hearing from the people behind the immensely successful way in which the story of the Staffordshire Hoard find was announced, and ...
Museums Collections Centre, Birmingham 25 Dollman Street, Birmingham B7 4RQ Training Room
[This week's guest post is written by Shelley Mannion is Digital Learning Programmes Manager at the British Museum's Samsung Digital Discovery Centre] Four recent events have prompted me to think about trending topics in digital heritage: - Museums and the Web 2010; - Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media; - MuseumNext; - Museums & Heritage Show This post gave me the opportunity to revisit my notes and attempt to pull out some common threads. Here are three: Sober social media At MW 2010, the ever-prescient Sebastian Chan described his investigation of how school children and teachers accessed the Powerhouse Museum website. To his surprise, these educational users were ...
[This week's guest post is written by Frankie Roberto, Experience Designer, Rattle] It's said that a week is a long time in politics. Right now, in the few days after of a General Election, that's even more the case. What does the result mean for the UK's cultural heritage sector? I haven't a clue. However, it was good to be reminded recently of policy of the re-introduction of free museum entry for the national museums (implemented in 2001). Even with big spending cuts apparently on the horizon, I can't see this policy being reversed any time soon - and for that, ...
[This week's guest post is written by Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer, The Science Museum] I will start with a confession: the title of this post is really a lie - I'm mostly writing about the last fortnight in cultural heritage. As one of those stranded overseas by Iceland's volcanic ash, my post-Museums and the Web conference week was oddly disrupted, and it'll be a while longer again before I'm caught up on everything else I was meant to be doing in those eight days. I arrived in Denver early to take part in the Wikimedia@MW2010 workshop. I've been reflecting on the ...
[This week's guest post is written by Jon Pratty, Arts Council] "Can museum content creators move 2 pace of journalists?" tweeted Effie Kapsalis, reporting from Seb Chan's presentation at Museums and the Web 2010 in Denver, Colorado. Since I wasn't at MW2010, just attending vicariously via Twitter and the Conference.archimuse.com website, it was kind of frustrating to be catching snatches of conversations that really rang bells, based on my own experiences at 24 Hour Museum and Culture24. Effie's tweet drew an instant response from me: I don't think museum content curators can work at the pace of journalists. Word for word, published piece for ...
[This week's guest post is by Jeremy Ottevanger, Web Developer at Museum of London Pecker up, Buttercup! Following the uplifting experience of the 2009 Jodi Awards, I vowed to stop being such a miserable sod and to blog some optimism. Well, due to some duplicity on the part of the space-time continuum that never happened, so now is my chance to set that straight. I have to confess upfront that I suddenly have my own particular reason for feeling optimistic (I've got a new job), and in contrast I know some of you may be facing all sorts of work-related strife of your ...
[This week's guest post is co-written by Rhiannon Looseley, e-Learning Officer (web), Museum of London and Claire Ross, a researcher at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities] This week there are two of us blogging - we decided we'd be able to cover more this way - and we want to concentrate first on some stuff that's been happening in digital learning. We'll also pick out a few things that are going on in the cultural heritage online sector generally as well. We've been asked before how e-learning/digital learning/online learning is different to other museum web/tech stuff, a lot of which is ...
[This week's guest post is written by Gemma Sturtridge, Assistant Collections Officer at the Museum of Croydon] This week I came across the launch of the Connected Histories Project. Once completed this aims to become the first port of call for researching historical sources by linking up existing databases. This sounds like an exciting project for archives, historians and academics. But it got me thinking, what about our sector? Could we actually create a search facility for researchers pointing at basic catalogue records across museums? I know that Croydon's embarrassing offer Research Croydon, hidden away on the internet, generates legitimate enquiries ...