Date: 24 November  2011

Pre-UKMW11 networking and drinks event, the Marlborough Arms, 36 Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7HJ from 5.30pm.

Date: 25 November 2011

Venue: IWM London (find out how to get to IWM London)

Tickets for UKMW11 are now on sale at http://ukmw11.eventbrite.com.

The annual UKMW conferences, convened by the Museums Computer Group, have long been the place for high quality presentations and discussions on the matters that are shaping museums online today. As the UK heritage sector continues to live through difficult times, this year’s conference is an opportunity to reflect on the new landscape museums are now in, learn from inspiring speakers and network with your peers.

As the MCG’s Spring Meeting in Brighton showed, a renewed emphasis on partnerships inside and outside the sector will continue to challenge museums to be more flexible in their working practices. Sharing the stories of our successes and learning to discuss failures constructively is more important than ever before. The conference will frame solutions for the issues affecting the museum sector, and feature positive case studies with actionable lessons.

We’re excited to announce that our keynote speaker is Mark O’Neill (formerly CIO at the Department of Media, Culture and Sport), founder and leader of the UK Government’s ‘Skunkworks’, which brings together developers and government in an innovative, collaborative, agile space.

To be held at the Imperial War Museum in London on 25 November 2011, the conference will also include inspiring and practical sessions on getting projects right from the start, redefining success and designing for the future.

By remaining in touch with the leading edge of research, the politics of policy, as well as the day-to-day realities of professional work, UKMW continues to appeal to practitioners and academics, technologists and curators, policy makers and the commercial sector – with over 100 delegates from across the sector attending each year. And the event has built a reputation for the calibre of its speakers, the affordability and accessibility of its content, as well as the focus of its debate.

We’ll keep this page updated as speakers are announced, and will include details of the schedule for the day and the AGM.

Time
9.15-9.45 Registration with tea and coffee
9.45-10.00 Welcome: Ross Parry, Chair, MCG and Carolyn Royston, Head of New Media, IWM
10.00-10.30
Keynote: Mark O’Neill, Head of Innovation and Delivery, Government Digital Service
“The chaos of memories” – why we never learn from our corporate experience and how we can change that

Mark will be asking the question ‘What’s the difference between museums and Ikea?’

10.30-11.30 Session 1: ‘Getting it right from the start’Chair: Ross Parry
Peter Pavement, Surface Impression and Marc Steene, Pallant House Gallery‘Intensive collaboration between museum, developer and participants’

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester’s ‘Outside In’ project in 2006 offered opportunity to “outsider” artists – those marginalised by disability, health, social circumstances or because their work doesn’t fit a prescribed art norm. This case study will show how the project’s close involvement of all parties has really benefited quality, accessibility and engagement over the long term – and how the project has extended reach, profile and collaboration between heritage/art institutions.

Claire Ross, UCL and Tom Grinsted, IWM‘Cultural Collaborative Exchange: Collections, Social Interpretation, Partnerships and Project Management’

Social Interpretation and ongoing Cultural Exchange (SICE) explores how social media models can be applied to museum collections and interpretation. The SICE Project, led by IWM, KI and UCL, utilises Agile project management principles and a user-centred approach to provide museum objects with profiles, social circles, crowdsourced comments, and community moderation tools, creating truly social, shared objects.

11.30–12.00 Tea and coffee
12.00–12.30 Session 2: ‘Redefining success’
Jane Finnis, Culture24‘Let’s Get Real: How to Evaluate Online Success’

How to measure and define the success of cultural websites and online services is a problem common to all parts of the cultural sector – museums, archives, galleries, arts organisations, libraries and publishers. This presentation will bring the key findings and recommendation from the action research in which 24 organisations and agencies from across the cultural heritage and arts sector in the UK collaborated.

12.30-13.00 MCG AGM

13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-14.30
Open Mic It is a UKMW tradition to have an energising session in the day where, through a series of super short ‘micro presentations’, members from the floor have just 4 minutes to update on a project, call for partners, pitch an idea, ask for support, highlight a new initiative, or just contribute to the event and the life of the MCG more widely. (Details on the ‘Open Mic’ slot will be advertised closer to the event.)
14.30-15.30 Session 3: ‘Designing for the future’Chair: Carolyn Royston
Alex Bromley, Rhiannon Looseley and Matthew Rose, Museum of London ‘Integrating collections data to build sustainable online resources’

Collections Online launched earlier this year, the first stage of a large-scale project to overhaul the way that online collections resources are created and managed at the Museum  of London. Key to the project was the specification and commissioning of a CIIM (Collections Information Integration Module). The CIIM pulls data from the Museum’s collections management system and other data repositories,allowing staff to augment and customise it for a variety of different outputs.  This paper will look at the ‘hows’ and whys’ of COllections Online and the CIIM, it will use the new Picturebank for schools as a case study of the kinds of outputs the CIIM makes possible and will then share some of the quality assurance procedures and data standards that are essential to making projects like these sustainable and making the data in the CIIM re-usable for the future.

Luke Smith and Giv Parveneh, IWM‘Lives of the Great War: Building First World War life stories across archives through crowdsourcing’

Lives of the Great War is a ground breaking online and broadcast project to allow millions worldwide to work together piecing  together the life stories of those who lived and died during the First World War. This paper will provide an overview of the  project and explore the technical challenges and currently identified system components.

15.30-16.00 Tea and coffee
16.00-17.00 Session 3 continued: ‘Designing for the future’Chair: Mia Ridge
Seth van Hooland and Max De Wilde, Université Libre de Bruxelles Information and Communication Science Department Ruben Verborgh and Rik Van de Walle, Ghent University, IBBT, ELIS – Multimedia Lab

Johannes Hercher, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam

‘Bringing your collection into the Linked Data cloud: how to use Google Refine to get more out of your metadata’

This paper will focus on reconciliation, the process of mapping domain specific vocabulary to another (often more commonly used) vocabulary that is part of the Semantic Web.  This means the metadata is then available to the Linked Data Cloud. This paper aims to examine the feasibility of using subject vocabularies as linking hub to the Semantic Web.

Joe Padfield, National Gallery‘Presenting and Referencing High Resolution Images on the Web’

How many times have we been presented with a phrase like, “.. as you can see from the detail, figure …”, and then been unable to clearly distinguish important features because the printed detail was too small? This paper will introduce an example system demonstrating the possibility of linking traditional or web-based publication to live high resolution images as one might reference other articles or publications.

17.00-17.15 Jon Pratty, Arts Council EnglandNews of recent ACE digital funding opportunities; including more info about a new ‘pop-up’ IPTV arts channel for 2012 and progress of the NESTA digital R&D fund.
17.15-17.30 Wrap-up and close
It is a UKMW tradition to have an energising session in the day where, through a series of super short ‘micro presentations’, members from the floor have just 4 minutes to update on a project, call for partners, pitch an idea, ask for support, highlight a new initiative, or just contribute to the event and the life of the MCG more widely. (Details on the ‘Open Mic’ slot will be advertised closer to the event.)

Register now on Eventbrite