A couple of weeks ago I put the Salad Bowl thing on to the MoL server here: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museumObjects/index.aspx. Since access to this blog is, as from today, unrestricted I guess I need to explain this a little bit. I have imagined the stub of a museum object microformat (really the stub at the moment, hardly any of the data structure is really sorted, and I may drop it in favour of work-of-art anyway). Core parts of m-objects include identification with an institution, a URI and a unique identifier for the item (plus a name). To do something with data in this form (which I have enabled on a few of our catalogue driven sites like London's Burning and Exploring 20th Century London) there is a bookmarklet which highlights objects and lets you submit them to an application where your collection of objects is held - the Salad Bowl.
Right now it needs a log-in to see even the intro, which I should change. Anyway, the thing is full of bugs but essentially the bookmarklets work (on Mozilla and IE) and the new version, which submits data via forms rather than querystring, seems OK (as long as you are logged in BEFORE you submit an object, something else to fix). Once your objects are in there you can tag and describe them but no more at present. Obviously doing something cool with the tags would be best but this is a proof of concept and I'm not going to try to replicate work that could be borrowed from e.g. Steve.museum.
If you are interested in trying out the very alpha application, leave me a comment.
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