tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-314523462024-03-13T07:39:49.190+00:00The Doofer CallJeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.comBlogger320125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-50830868778716330132015-05-07T13:35:00.000+01:002015-05-07T13:41:24.650+01:00VE Day in Holland: an Englishwoman writes homeMy Gran, Primrose, was born and raised in the north-east of England, mainly in the vicarage at Lamesley, outside Gateshead. Working as a shipping clerk in Newcastle during the 1930s, she met and later married my grandfather, Bernard, a Dutchman plying the North Sea selling bunker oil. They settled in a farmhouse outside Voorschoten, to the east of the Hague. They stayed there throughout the war, whilst the Netherlands was suffering German occupation, during which time they had two children, Clare and Timothy (my father). A couple of miles to the north-west was the V2 launch site at Wassenaar, as this map shows:<br />
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<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zDkcZWLxR2zI.kYUb9jEwar6o" width="640" height="480"></iframe>
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My dad and uncle recently discovered a letter from Primrose, apparently written on VE Day (but dated May 9th), which made that experience incredibly real for me, from the fears, loss and privations of war to the yearning for word from a family across the sea to the relief and hope for the future. Read it below.
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<div style="text-align: right;">
Eskeleth </div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
Voorschoten </div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
9th May 1945 </div>
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Darling Mummy<br />
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On VE day we are sitting in the garden in glorious weather, with our two sturdy infants toddling around the lawn. And the thoughts I have above everything else in these thrilling,marvellous days are: 'How are they at home? How are they doing? When shall I hear from them? ', etc. We are all well and quite healthy in spite of the strain of the last five years and the terrors and unspeakable famine of the last six months. Oh, what a glorious thing freedom is! It seems the most important thing in our lives now and a thing I shall treasure the rest of my life. How I have longed for news from you, especially since I had your last message some time round about March last year.<br />
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Timothy is wandering about picking buttercups and daisies – he is a picture with his rosy cheeks and very blond curls. Clare is waving to a British bomber overhead, bringing the desperately needed food to an airfield nearby. Both children speak English and some Dutch. Clare longs to go to “G'anny” and “Eng'and”, not to mention how her mother longs. We expect to be allowed to leave in about two months' time. Meanwhile, we hope to return to a more or less normal life and to enjoy the food sent from England. You have no idea what life has been like these years and this winter has been ghastly. The V2 rockets were fired off from Wassenaar and The Hague, an you can imagine the ravages done as 50% exploded here, and the Allies bombed the district (very heavily at times) all day long. We have been out of our house twice. Last May the SS turned us out and occupied the place for months. We returned just before Christmas and Bernard had to hide for months, like all men under 40. Everyone had to have secret hiding places in their houses and to have a wireless was a very risky thing – meant concentration camp or death. However, we kept ours and listened every day [to the BBC] under the stairs. I shall have a lot to tell on my return home. And what a lot I want to know about you all. To be separated from you all under these dreadful circumstances has been very hard to bear. My visit home will be a long one, probably lasting three months or so. I feel very tired, having had no holiday since 1939 and very little help indeed. With two tiny children it is at times too much for me. How marvellous that the summer is here – people had no coal or food last winter, no electricity or gas – can you imagine the chaos? A large part of our daily diet has been sugar-beets (horrible) and tulip bulbs. We were glad to have them. It has been a blessing to live in the country.<br />
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I shall write more news next time but don't want to make this too long. I have an English friend and her husband and child living here. Their house was destroyed in the bombardment of 3rd March last, when a huge part of The Hague was burnt down, including our English church, which had been closed since 1940. This morning we went to a service in the village for the peace thanksgiving. The British troops are arriving all the time and I hope to meet some soon and bring them home. We long to speak to a soldier from England. Yesterday saw still a few Germans about looking very miserable. Vile creatures, how they are loathed here.
Lots and lots of love to you all, darlings, and I long for a word from you.<br />
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Your loving Primrose.<br />
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PS Love from Bernard, Clare and Timothy. Daisies from the children.
Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-80313235144896493902015-04-21T15:39:00.001+01:002015-04-21T15:39:17.595+01:00Getting rid of Twitter's promoted linksDo you ever get annoyed by promoted tweets? I do, so I made this bookmarklet for when I'm using the Twitter web application:
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<a href="javascript:(function(){for(var%20a=document.getElementById('timeline').getElementsByTagName('div'),b=0;b<a.length;b++){if(a[b].getAttribute('data-disclosure-type')=='promoted'){a[b].innerHTML='';};}})()">unpromote</a><br />
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Drag this to your browser's favourites bar and click it when you're on Twitter, it will get rid of that annoying spam. OK, it's probably not worth the hassle, but you never know.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-33174606978311588072014-02-21T23:03:00.001+00:002014-02-22T17:47:10.115+00:00Collections distractions #4: A schoolboy describes a burning zeppelin to his fatherHere's <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030005513" target="_blank">a letter</a> I stumbled across a while back, not a surprise as such but startlingly real. It's a letter in which a boy tells his father, in quite a considered, illustrated account, about the burning of a zeppelin right by the house to which he had, I suppose, been evacuated. All four pages can be read in these high-res scans: <a href="http://zoom.iwm.org.uk/view/357794" target="_blank">sheet 1</a>; <a href="http://zoom.iwm.org.uk/view/357795" target="_blank">sheet 2.</a><br />
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Zeppelins were terrifying new technology and were responsible (amongst other things) for many civilian deaths in WW1. They must also have been quite terrifying to be on, being so slow, visible and ludicrously flammable. I was reminded of all of this, and particularly this letter, today whilst talking to some of the people I met at <i>Who Do You Think You Are Live</i>. A gentleman from the RAF Museum told me how it had taken until the middle of the war to realise that, by combining some technologies that had been around for a decade or more, it was possible to set light to enemy balloons (not actually in the way that happened in this account, though, with an incendiary bomb dropped from an aircraft above).<br />
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And it all brought back my very first week at IWM, 4 years back, when we new recruits did an object handling session. The mystery object that my group was given turned out to be a felt overboot, worn outside the leather boots of a zeppelin airman (it gets damn cold up there). It was recovered from a Suffolk field after its owner jumped to escape a conflagration of the sort that Patrick Blundstone described. The felt was still blackened from the burning hydrogen.<br />
This is not the boot, but it's not dissimilar:<br />
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30100552?cat=uniforms%2520and%2520insignia" target="_blank"><img alt="Boot (felt), Imperial German" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/251/media-251796/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=uniforms%2520and%2520insignia" /></a>
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Boot (felt), Imperial German <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank">© IWM (UNI 12723)</a><br />
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As always, remember that I'm not a historian and many or all of the statements in this post may be incorrect! Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-72233921447780225002014-02-12T23:34:00.004+00:002014-02-12T23:34:43.262+00:00One for RogerI'm determined to write at least a quick one tonight. Today I heard that Roger Tolson had died. Roger was until recently the Head of Collections at IWM, and prior to that the heart of the Art Department. I didn't see him much over the last couple of years but worked with him quite a lot before that. He was a lovely guy, warm and insightful and patient, passionate about art and our collections more widely. On more that one occasion he went out to bat for me, notably in order to enable us to put our treasured oral history collection online.
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I didn't know Roger well enough to be able to claim that I know what he loved best in our collections, but I'm just going to pick a couple of things from our First World War artworks with him in mind, a small sample of its variety.
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/20092?cat=art" target="_blank"><img alt="Wire" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/268/media-268579/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=art" /></a><br />
Wire <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank">© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2705)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/9959?cat=art" target="_blank"><img alt="Indian Army Wounded In Hospital in the Dome, Brighton" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/179/media-179722/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=art" /></a><br />
Indian Army Wounded In Hospital in the Dome, Brighton <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank"> © IWM (Art.IWM ART 323)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/20842?cat=art" target="_blank"><img alt="Royal Irish Fusiliers: 'Just come from the Chemical Works, Roeux: 21st May 1917'" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/148/media-148987/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=art" /></a><br />
Royal Irish Fusiliers: 'Just come from the Chemical Works, Roeux: 21st May 1917' <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank"> © IWM (Art.IWM ART 3013)</a>
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/867?cat=art" target="_blank"><img alt="A Daylight Raid On London, 7th July 1917: Seen from the roof of the Royal College of Science with the Brompton Oratory in the
foreground" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/285/media-285936/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=art" /></a>
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A Daylight Raid On London, 7th July 1917: Seen from the roof of the Royal College of Science with the Brompton Oratory in the
foreground<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank"> © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1070)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/13177?cat=art" target="_blank"><img alt="Monitor at Anchor in Bay, Imbros, 1.45pm, June 22nd 1915" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/179/media-179656/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=art" /></a>
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Monitor at Anchor in Bay, Imbros, 1.45pm, June 22nd 1915<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank"> © IWM (Art.IWM ART 4360)</a>
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Roger, I'm so sorry that we won't see you any more.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-12836191245624433452014-02-06T22:47:00.001+00:002014-02-06T22:56:50.167+00:00Collection distractions #3: West African Troops in India During the Second World WarAt least here in the UK, we tend to think about the British Empire in terms of the relationships between Britain and its dominions, and the British and the people of those countries. Of course that's very blinkered, but probably true nevertheless. Seeing the picture below suddenly reminded me that the people in those many and varied parts of the world had their own relationships too - they weren't only connected through the personage of whoever was on the throne in London at the time. Of course, when these West African and Indian soldiers met was an extraordinary situation - these people and their homelands having been drawn into a second gigantic war that started so far away but turned the world upside down. And I have no idea how they felt about Britain, the British, the Empire, or one another, but seeing these faces mixed together was like turning on a light for me.<br />
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205206688?cat=photographs" target="_blank"><img alt="WEST AFRICAN TROOPS IN INDIA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/49/media-49656/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=photographs" /></a>
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WEST AFRICAN TROOPS IN INDIA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank"> © IWM (IND 2864)</a><br />
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Within five years of this picture being taken India gained independence, which reached Ghana, the last of the West African territories, in 1965. Shortly after that the British Empire was pretty much history, but like the two world wars themselves its legacy is easily detected.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-83286252415060647912014-02-04T22:17:00.001+00:002014-02-06T22:57:05.214+00:00Collection distractions #2: Stereoscopic photos at the IWMWell today's collection distraction* is a number of stereoscopic photographs, mainly from the First World War**. These are pairs of images shot with a single camera and intended to be viewed with <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205195281" target="_blank">something akin to binoculars</a> to get a 3D effect, and we have a few hundred (I reckon), around <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=stereoscopic&items_per_page=10&f[0]=mediaType%3Aimage" target="_blank">150 digitised</a>. I was prompted by seeing one and the very next day seeing a tweet about the New York Public Library's brilliant <a href="http://stereo.nypl.org/" target="_blank">Stereogranimator</a>, which takes the images and merges them into either an animated GIF or an anaglyph - those pictures where you need an old-fashioned pair of 3D glasses with one red and one blue lens. You get to make them with a tool they offer, and you can either use one of NYPL's own (pairs of) images, or upload from Flickr. Nice app, even if the results can be variable.<br />
So here is one of our images and its "stereogranimated" version:<br />
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205244062?cat=photographs" target="_blank"><img alt="MINISTRY OF INFORMATION FIRST WORLD WAR OFFICIAL COLLECTION" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/234/media-234126/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=photographs" /></a><br />
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<i>4th Australian Brigade Pierrots at the 15th Australian Brigade Sports at Bois de Mai, Cardonnette, near Amiens, 8 June 1918.<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank">© IWM (Q 8180)</a></i><br />
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<a href="http://stereo.nypl.org/view/46556"><img alt="GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator - view more at http://stereo.nypl.org/gallery/index" src="http://stereo.nypl.org/view/46556.gif" /><br />GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator</a><br />
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Quite a few of our images seem to have come from this sports-day, but that's not really why stereoscopic images were popular at the time. Here's an illustration of their military use:<br />
<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205194699?cat=photographs" target="_blank"><img alt="German stereoscopic camera fitted with periscope for trench use on the Western Front." class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/37/media-37709/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=photographs" /></a>
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<i>German stereoscopic camera fitted with periscope for trench use on the Western Front. <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank">© IWM (Q 23938)</a></i><br />
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I don't know if such an apparatus was responsible for <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205303092" target="_blank">this view of the devastation at Verdun in 1916</a>, (no animated GIF I'm afraid) but if you take a look at the <a href="http://zoom.iwm.org.uk/view/365110" target="_blank">zoomable version</a><span id="goog_1278250089"></span><span id="goog_1278250090"></span> the scale of destruction is horrifying. The third dimension could surely have helped to tease out some understanding of this confusion.<br />
Here's another battlefield use, albeit not more memorial than practical:<br />
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<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205244072?cat=photographs" target="_blank"><img alt="MINISTRY OF INFORMATION FIRST WORLD WAR OFFICIAL COLLECTION" class="" src="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/234/media-234136/standard.jpg?action=e&cat=photographs" /></a>
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<i>Battle of the Soissonnais. Prisoners taken by the 34th Division on the
morning of 29th July 1918 when they captured Hill 158.</i> <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright" target="_blank">© IWM (Q 8190)</a><br />
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<a href="http://stereo.nypl.org/view/46570"><img alt="GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator - view more at http://stereo.nypl.org/gallery/index" src="http://stereo.nypl.org/view/46570.gif" /><br />GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator</a>
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Go and take a look at <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=stereoscopic&items_per_page=10&f[0]=mediaType%3Aimage" target="_blank">the whole lot</a>. <br />
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* yeah of course I had to come up with some sort of tagline for this supposed <a href="http://2014/02/pivoting-like-its-1999.html">series of posts</a>. This is subject to change. But it does reflect the fact that I am distracted far too often from what I should probably be doing by something amazing in our collections.<br />
** I'm going to try to be a good boy and use this phrase instead of "World War I" like the rest of the world. I'm on-message, me.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-19278959054333265562014-02-02T00:50:00.002+00:002014-02-06T22:57:14.838+00:00Collection distractions #1: IWM's First World War films<br />
This week at Imperial War Museums we finally made available a newly digitised set of <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?items_per_page=20&f[0]=mediaType%3Avideo&f[1]=contentDate%3AFirst%20World%20War&f[2]=contentDate%3AInterwar&f[3]=contentDate%3APre-1914&query=" target="_blank">films dating to the First World War</a> (and just before/after). These added hundreds to those we had already digitised, bringing the total to around 1200 hugely varied early films. In fact I think there may be more that listed at that link, because some have not been tagged with their period (feel free to remove the period filters). Digitisation was funded with the generous assistance of the EFG1914 project, part of the <a href="http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/" target="_blank">European Film Gateway</a>. Take a look at <a href="http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/node/33/efg1914/multilingual:1/showOnly:video" target="_blank">what they have</a>.
You are welcome to reuse many of the films you can see on our website - just click the "share and reuse" link to grab the embedding code, where it's available. At the moment I'm afraid it's streaming Flash but I have that in my sights, together with higher quality renditions (those annoying watermarks should go in due course).
Today I've picked a couple of aviation-related films that have caught my eye:<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060000104" target="_blank">British Women's Air Force</a></b><br />
Not as glamorous as it sounds...
<iframe frameborder="0" height="430" scrolling="no" src="http://www.iwm.org.uk/embed/?id=1060000104&media_id=227014" width="480"></iframe><br />
<b><a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060000140" target="_blank">Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutters taking off from HMS Argus</a></b><br />
This one I can't embed, but go and take a look. It's quite cool seeing how they're brought up to the deck on lifts, and they seem to take off at almost walking speed.<br />
<b><a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060000146" target="_blank">Unfolding the wings of a Short bomber</a></b> and various other shots of aircraft - flying boats etc. I don't know much about these early planes but I'm constantly surprised at how these things could even fly, at the speed of development that took us from the Wright brothers barely getting off the ground a few years earlier to these varied and formidable weird machines.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="430" scrolling="no" src="http://www.iwm.org.uk/embed/?id=1060000146&media_id=330616" width="480"></iframe><br />
<b><a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060023323" target="_blank">German fliers and planes on the Western Front, 1916-1918.</a></b><br />
Talking of unexpected machines, when I first saw pictures of the Gotha bombers I was taken aback. Here's a whole variety-pack of German aircraft, including Gothas (which first brought the terror of war from the air to London), as well as dog-fights (some of it fake), aerial photography, and (in reel 2) observation balloons on fire, the Red Baron, and Hermann Goering. Ugh. Here's reel 1:
<iframe frameborder="0" height="430" scrolling="no" src="http://www.iwm.org.uk/embed/?id=1060023323&media_id=321312" width="480">
</iframe>Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-62398717954300792482014-02-01T23:34:00.001+00:002014-02-06T22:57:27.706+00:00Pivoting like it's 1999: introducing "Collection Distractions"So, although I finished serious work on my PhD over a year ago and in theory have more time to blog, and despite the fact that I have plenty of things I want to write about and plenty more I probably should tell you about (things are busy at IWM), the clear fact is that I don't. I've just not got the energy, and I'm using my time to, well, have a life.
Part of the problem is that I can't write briefly, but I have a plan. There's something that's a constant source of inspiration and which I frequently want to share, namely the things I stumble across in <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=&submit=&items_per_page=20" target="_blank">IWM's collections</a>. I'm no historian and I will not be trying to instruct or talk with any authority; equally I'm not Retronaut, and may be tempted on occasion to dig a little deeper or add some context (within my limited ability). The things that catch my eye do so for all kinds of reasons: sometimes it's that shock of disruption to assumed knowledge, in the way that <a href="http://www.retronaut.com/" target="_blank">Retronaut</a> aims to do; sometimes it's a moving story or a comment from a user; sometimes it's simply an engrossing film or an amazing artwork; and all of these are seen from the vantage point of an amateur (though learning every day). In due course I will also try to find a way to promote some of the things that have been done with our collections by other people/organisations and indeed to try some new things myself - it's been a while since I played with collections data and content.
So if I'm true to my word you can expect more frequent, quick-and-easy posts showing you things I would hesitate to term "treasures", given the nature of IWM's subject matter, but which can nevertheless be extraordinarily profound, moving, beautiful or sometimes horrifying. Let's see how it goes.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-17088223139571573312013-07-18T23:17:00.000+01:002013-07-19T11:12:47.751+01:00The wrapSo, it's over. The PhD. Having first submitted the thesis in November... <br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavefish/8206212035/" title="A PhD by Eyes like a cave-fish, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8062/8206212035_8b2eb07c0c.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="A PhD"></a><br />
been examined in March, done my amendments (thereby adding another 150 pages...) and made my final submission at the end of May, and had the degree granted on June 1st...<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavefish/8960887927/" title="Official letter by Eyes like a cave-fish, on Flickr"><img alt="Official letter" height="201" src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3689/8960887927_dba33aebd9.jpg" width="286" /></a>
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I attended my graduation last week and picked up the certificate in the presence of much of my family - Fiona and the kids, and both our sets of parents, with silly hats playing a notable part...<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavefish/9258625566/" title="Doctor, Watson your son's head? by Eyes like a cave-fish, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7361/9258625566_1d470ffdab.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Doctor, Watson your son's head?"></a>
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and I finally - finally! - got to introduce my lot to the famous Ross Parry, and to thank him one last time.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<a href="https://twitter.com/jottevanger">@jottevanger</a> A great day! <a href="http://t.co/TnGgf0bAih">pic.twitter.com/TnGgf0bAih</a><br />
— Ross Parry (@rossparry) <a href="https://twitter.com/rossparry/statuses/355045324399722496">July 10, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
And yesterday when I received my own hard copy of 500+ pages of green hardbound proof of my labours, it really, really felt finished, and ready to sit by my bed and not be read.<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavefish/9317670665/" title="Bedtime reading by Eyes like a cave-fish, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2809/9317670665_229b2c72b5.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Bedtime reading"></a><br />
So it's about time that I did something with it. I don't really know what's next, perhaps some conference papers or journal articles, or perhaps I should listen to those suggestions of turning it into a book (which frankly sounds like a lot more work). But I might start by putting bits online here. The whole thesis (minus a couple of redacted interviews) should soon be in the University of Leicester's <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/library/find/lra" target="_blank">Research Archive</a> and in <a href="http://ethos.bl.uk/SearchResults.do" target="_blank">EThOS</a> so there's no need to stick the whole thing up independently, but I'm going to start with pasting the abstract here and attaching the short introductory chapter. Then, if you want more, let me know or seek it out. All comments, questions and dinner invitations are very welcome (if unlikely).<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Sustaining digital products in the museum sector: Balancing value and resources through good decisions.</span></b><br />
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<u>Abstract</u></div>
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<div>
Digital products are an increasingly significant part of the output of museums in the UK, but the rationale behind them and the long term plans for them are not always clear. This thesis argues that to consider such a digital product to be sustainable, the value it creates must justify the resources it requires. The decisions involved in building and supporting these products affect both the value proposition and the resource requirements, but also reflect the way that museums and their stakeholders see the balance between the two. At the same time, this balance is under the influence of a constantly changing environment. The study proposes a model of sustainability as a cycle of value, resources and decision-making, and three case studies are used to examine how decisions are reached in the face of flux and uncertainty. Some ways in which decisions can be biased or distorted are identified, and finally some approaches are offered for museums seeking to improve the balance of value and resources, and increase the quality of the decisions that underlie them.</div>
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<a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw180JLBQD-GYTE0MkFhYnQ3U3M/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><b>Chapter 1</b></a> (PDF on Google Drive)</div>
Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-53920259759623476472013-03-05T23:03:00.003+00:002013-03-05T23:07:30.602+00:00PhD: tickI had my PhD viva today. The last time I had a viva, 21 years ago, I believe I went in a touch intoxicated. That experiment in controlling nerves was not a success. I see it as a sign of how much I've grown up that this time I stuck to my pledge to reverse the order. This experiment worked, and after a really enjoyable 2 1/4 hours chatting with my examiners I was given the news that I had passed (I have minor corrections to make, but hey, I'll take that!) If I'm completely honest, perhaps the embarrassing 3rd class degree I "earned" in 1992 helped to get me to my doctorate by giving me a chip on my shoulder big enough to drive me through what I'd have to describe as a challenging (but immensely rewarding) seven years. That chip has now been doused in mayonnaise and eaten - nomnomnom!*<br />
This blog was intended initially to be a research diary. It's long since stopped being that, or anything much, but I do intend some time soon to write a bit about the whole PhD experience, to summarise what I did and the conclusions I reached, and maybe talk about where I'd like to take it next. For this post, though, I only want to do the most important thing of all: thank a bunch of people. Having done this in the acknowledgements of my thesis, which I expect that almost no-one I've thanked will ever read, I'm just going to paste it in here. All I'd add is that there are actually many other people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Many of sent tweets today and I didn't manage to acknowledge them all, but I read and deeply appreciated every one. But over the last 7 years I've also had conversations around the broad subject area of my research with countless colleagues, friends, peers, and venerable elders, and every one has left its mark in my thinking. Whoever of these I've failed to thank by name, I haven't forgotten: you have my sincere appreciation.<br />
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*literally: great chips at the Marquis today, courtesy of Ross. Thanks Ross!<br />
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I should like, first of all, to thank the AHRC for their support in funding this PhD, one of their first ever collaborative doctoral awards. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Ross Parry, my academic supervisor and an extraordinary teacher and friend, whose understanding of my thoughts around this subject so often exceeded my own ability to express them, and who managed somehow to shepherd me gradually towards the mindset of a scholar. The project’s commercial partner was MWR, and although the company went through two rebirths before finally ceasing operations, the support – financial, personal and academic – never wavered, first in the form of Andrew Sawyer and latterly of Martyn Farrows. To both Andy and Martyn, sincere thanks. Your input at critical moments has been invaluable and much appreciated.
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When I started the project I worked at the Museum of London, which soon signed up as a third partner. At MoL I owe a particular debt to my friend and manager, Pete Rauxloh, but would also thank Bilkis Mosoddik and Mia Ridge, colleagues there who took an extra load when my attentions were divided.
Carolyn Royston, my manager since I joined the Imperial War Museum in 2010, has offered every help she could, and done so at a time when my studies might have seemed like a distraction, given what I still had to learn in order to succeed in my day job. To her and my other patient colleagues at IWM, many, many thanks.
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My case studies were possible only through the vital support and documentation provided by their host institutions, and I am especially indebted to the individuals within and outside those organisations who gave their time as interviewees: Cathy Ross & Claire Sussums at MoL; Jill Cousins, David Haskiya, Luca Martinelli, Jan Molendijk, Nick Poole and Harry Verwayen, interviewed for Europeana; and NMSI’s Robert Bud, Andrew Nahum and Dan Evans. Many other individuals provided additional advice and insights that helped to steer me to a clearer understanding of these projects. <br />
A lot can happen in seven years, and it felt like most things did, and the moral support and enthusiasm for my study that I received from my friends and my family were priceless. Most of all, of course, I thank my lovely wife Fiona, whose patience and sacrifices so that I can complete this work have been embarrassingly great; and our children Isabella, Luca, and Sacha, three bairns with scarcely a memory between them of a time when Daddy wasn't studying for his PhD. To all four of them I give my love, thanks, apologies, and my promise that I am now theirs again.
Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-65460601816473405012012-11-16T08:15:00.000+00:002012-11-16T22:01:58.474+00:00The Mystery TrendThis is a little case study of digging into our web stats a bit to understand a recent trend. Doing this sort of digging is pretty addictive and can, of course, throw up some interesting insights.<br />
Recently we noticed a bit of an odd trend in our user stats on iwm.org.uk. Although direct comparisons are imperfect we're happy overall with how they've looked in the year since we swopped to the new site, with decent improvements in all the main crude metrics that might mean, well, something or other that's meant to be good. Last month we exceeded 500,000 visitor sessions for the first time. Here's how things have looked week-by-week from early May to mid-November<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk30_9tLNPTl18ZAlAbJNmVCLZQyl1LSdC4EvDrzvijJ5oVgnJzAKLvHYOH_CA9hNo1Lg1pb_IFgMTu9iDdyPcmrUqrKws-cNFJ881g4yoHpw2HvMaxCDkfjmT1ks3UTbLNZX7/s1600/may-nov_all.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="98" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk30_9tLNPTl18ZAlAbJNmVCLZQyl1LSdC4EvDrzvijJ5oVgnJzAKLvHYOH_CA9hNo1Lg1pb_IFgMTu9iDdyPcmrUqrKws-cNFJ881g4yoHpw2HvMaxCDkfjmT1ks3UTbLNZX7/s400/may-nov_all.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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What with a general above-target performance, an odd summer (a big dip - thank you, Olympics!) and peaks in months that historically haven't been so prominent, the trends have been a bit of a departure from the norm so I thought I'd dig into it. It turned out that direct visits had increased noticeably from mid-September onwards - like, doubled. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSOygCmsFbZ_0r4kbfcYE4gmDMBw1c6Ejp-J7-1_22ACHdtjKXXCQVSVzR5OK_qvHvKlukh-R7gu4MZA5e5-yLEBhRWda3Ocs2BBavcYXGAM_cYTAtpP5fTSqScVbQDPddPoT0/s1600/may-nov_directs.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSOygCmsFbZ_0r4kbfcYE4gmDMBw1c6Ejp-J7-1_22ACHdtjKXXCQVSVzR5OK_qvHvKlukh-R7gu4MZA5e5-yLEBhRWda3Ocs2BBavcYXGAM_cYTAtpP5fTSqScVbQDPddPoT0/s400/may-nov_directs.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
Further, the growth was in the mobile segment and, more specifically, in iOS devices - equally iPhones and iPads. But why? This is weird. I mean, we're seeing the rapid growth in mobile traffic like everyone else, but whilst the numbers of iOS users overall increased by a couple of percent between May and November, direct visitors increased 4-fold just from September to November (whilst direct visits from Android are pretty much flat). Yep, that much. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguyGrtQjUPm6eOWcM2uclFRkjJl55HbNwDjfv0v2JE5a6aoQwGIhCb5CYGL6DUVpMHLSlIcrLUjoyePQ6-eb11QUgNRusJ2byZV2K2uQyITwvhe0NKTJzsF7oICJsCI-YSvLDf/s1600/may-nov_directs_OS.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguyGrtQjUPm6eOWcM2uclFRkjJl55HbNwDjfv0v2JE5a6aoQwGIhCb5CYGL6DUVpMHLSlIcrLUjoyePQ6-eb11QUgNRusJ2byZV2K2uQyITwvhe0NKTJzsF7oICJsCI-YSvLDf/s400/may-nov_directs_OS.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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To me directs from mobile means visits referred from apps, and in this case I certainly doubt that all those Apple fans - and only them - have suddenly bookmarked our site or emailed it to each other. So it's probably about referrals from apps, but which ones? There are few self-explanatory clues, either in where they arrive or in the timing. Plenty land on the home page:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSK5UFQceYCEUHufI7ibxGYv3PdpL2k3NmtDNxfvWSPkfoCCwSYFekyWXtBdsWQB3d5QW3U9CDybj7bUhhx5XRDQA0pA7OmlDZcd4KTznt0btTF3aYKuCE2PCCyNBY-oPKrtle/s1600/may-nov_directs_landing_home.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="98" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSK5UFQceYCEUHufI7ibxGYv3PdpL2k3NmtDNxfvWSPkfoCCwSYFekyWXtBdsWQB3d5QW3U9CDybj7bUhhx5XRDQA0pA7OmlDZcd4KTznt0btTF3aYKuCE2PCCyNBY-oPKrtle/s400/may-nov_directs_landing_home.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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our branch pages and visiting info:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghDcNhicZdSXCSCTX5nHe5SyQv0wwBuZIB0rrr-ZGFC1F9Dbjbkbx08rKE38tUM5_DPTUyxzGrwSzQmuanednx8zXxAZlqugxe1eJVh_xjRNN90cPOAH25Y8qlNOvLMNVeOADx/s1600/may-nov_directs_landing_visits.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="86" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghDcNhicZdSXCSCTX5nHe5SyQv0wwBuZIB0rrr-ZGFC1F9Dbjbkbx08rKE38tUM5_DPTUyxzGrwSzQmuanednx8zXxAZlqugxe1eJVh_xjRNN90cPOAH25Y8qlNOvLMNVeOADx/s400/may-nov_directs_landing_visits.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
(but not Duxford)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMAvDdPMtinM1GaRxij67MLYjfkd8nnAks61qVEDuP3tQW6n3zRpn9uVGpmpoLwjAkKCtK8562CL4Q558wXLjJIvN6tzRmpzvOaD0RDgFPBHP6bC6HD0VMrqoupLKYak79wTKm/s1600/may-nov_directs_landing_DV.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="95" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMAvDdPMtinM1GaRxij67MLYjfkd8nnAks61qVEDuP3tQW6n3zRpn9uVGpmpoLwjAkKCtK8562CL4Q558wXLjJIvN6tzRmpzvOaD0RDgFPBHP6bC6HD0VMrqoupLKYak79wTKm/s400/may-nov_directs_landing_DV.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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and a healthy number also land on collections record pages: <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX1APGQZfoy-_hPuF2H9o09N3NBX5yy4RTuY6eOpINNwUh3BP5hy6J_7jDoNA4TmUbu-xo3hGeBpoHDT84jn2NSH2GjOePLMm9oRhgJfNvQIcOAEH6pcFqMG0gYfTgXpMz-0Ee/s1600/may-nov_directs_landing_item.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="93" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX1APGQZfoy-_hPuF2H9o09N3NBX5yy4RTuY6eOpINNwUh3BP5hy6J_7jDoNA4TmUbu-xo3hGeBpoHDT84jn2NSH2GjOePLMm9oRhgJfNvQIcOAEH6pcFqMG0gYfTgXpMz-0Ee/s400/may-nov_directs_landing_item.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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If the trend is evident for all of these it can't be from a single suddenly-popular app, right? <br />
Predictably, our site gets healthy spikes of traffic from places like Reddit, the BBC or newspapers, which we shows up in our referrer traffic; perhaps the app equivalent of these websites is responsible for this other trend. But at first look the spikes don't seem to correlate, as for instance this graph of iOS visits from Reddit shows. I'd expect referrals from a Reddit app to be similar and is not much like the "directs" trend:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJXmaVtF5S89WQzCulP0jvXPUzyGksgWh9CwXScvGaJVJqW-xLXt_Kk8aFMY50qde-UlSMfe5H8Yq7E7AaPcg2D1xI6e52IyqKv77nND1d6ZRIWCoPI08UQlMHE1xevvO1I05L/s1600/may-nov_reddit_ios.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="85" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJXmaVtF5S89WQzCulP0jvXPUzyGksgWh9CwXScvGaJVJqW-xLXt_Kk8aFMY50qde-UlSMfe5H8Yq7E7AaPcg2D1xI6e52IyqKv77nND1d6ZRIWCoPI08UQlMHE1xevvO1I05L/s400/may-nov_reddit_ios.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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It just seems odd that there's been such growth in whatever apps are responsible in that period. We have a couple of apps of our own, of course, but again looking in detail at the pages they may link to doesn't provide an explanation. At first I suspected social media apps. Facebook & Twitter have not suddenly quadrupled in users over 8 weeks, but it seemed a plausible explanation for a rise in direct traffic to such a range of pages. Then I thought about search. Perhaps there's a newly popular search app on Apple devices? Aha, perhaps we're onto something:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMNDXcZh_-G5uJD3Ofomvx3ssfUoOEnBMsQJNQbbkEhL6J2Wk40C0ttz1pDZhWeGTS7J5zZEPIC_n30-EdZfZCF9wmf8fUCWv8KOIT5yKj3DAtoQXig8CRt9nGXaL5jQnxdGtX/s1600/may-nov_source_ios_google_direct.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="97" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMNDXcZh_-G5uJD3Ofomvx3ssfUoOEnBMsQJNQbbkEhL6J2Wk40C0ttz1pDZhWeGTS7J5zZEPIC_n30-EdZfZCF9wmf8fUCWv8KOIT5yKj3DAtoQXig8CRt9nGXaL5jQnxdGtX/s400/may-nov_source_ios_google_direct.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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So, referrals from Google drop off amongst iOS users at the same point that direct visits increase. Not being an iOS user I still have no idea of what's caused this, though I assume that there's a new appified version of Google that's being taken up rapidly. I think I'll need to do some more detailed analysis to make sense of this, but it looks like (a) the rise in directs doesn't mean an absolute rise in iOS users, and (b) our overall increase in visitors has nothing to do with this trend. This actually makes things a little worse for us because we now have less information about searches that bring traffic to us. Hmm.<br />
I'd be interested in whether any of you lot seen a similar trend in direct traffic on iOS devices over recent months? Comments please!<br />
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PS if you found this blog post hoping to download stuff by the Mystery Trend, sorry to disappoint you. Interesting band though. More <a href="http://record-fiend.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/mystery-trend-san-francisco-museum-of.html" target="_blank">here</a>.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-21646335600879302682012-10-11T11:06:00.005+01:002012-10-11T11:06:41.836+01:00IWM and the Google Cultural InstituteJust a very quick one. Yesterday Google launched the new historical part of what they now call the <a href="https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/" target="_blank">Cultural Institute</a>*, consisting of object records and media plus a number of exhibits assembled from them. <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/" target="_blank">IWM</a> was amongst a small group of institutions in this first wave. We contributed metadata and media for a few dozen items in our collection relating to the Second World War, and put together an <a href="http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/#!exhibit:exhibitId=gQcirO57" target="_blank">exhibition about D-Day</a>. The exhibition tool is very effective, but what I think is more fundamentally interesting is that this project (like Europeana, albeit on a fraction of the scale) enables the remixing of collections from various kinds of organisation. Some of our material was used in the <a href="http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/#!exhibit:exhibitId=wQi4lSIy" target="_blank">Anne Frank exhibit</a>, for instance. So just like <a href="http://exhibitions.europeana.eu/" target="_blank">Europeana Exhibitions</a>, the potential for remixing allows for new combinations of material culture and new stories to be told. I wonder how the "market" here will shake out...<br />
It was an interesting project to work on. The data standards evolved as we went along and were significantly more useful by the end, and it was really good to be part of that group of GLAMs that could test it out and help to make it more fit for purpose. the process consisted of one of our historians, Mandy, putting together the story and selecting the items she wanted to use to illustrate it, which involved a bit of new digitisation and data cleaning. Then this metadata needed turning into the XML format Google needed. I resisted hand-coding the XML even though it would have been easy enough given the data we had and the smallish number of items. Instead I wanted to be ready to do this lots of times for lots of objects and exhibitions, so we used the <a href="http://k-int.com/products/ciim" target="_blank">CIIM</a> middleware to organise all the object records and add context-specific data and media (such as a YouTube video). Then I wrote an XSL transform for the Solr XML it churned out, so it will be trivial to put together new batches of metadata in the future. Once the data and media were uploaded to Google (still a pretty manual process) my colleague Jesse put the exhibit itself together (with Google working out some of the kinks in the tool as we went along). All in all it was a good process. Perhaps it took more time that we'd envisaged but that is in the nature of doing something new, and some of the bottlenecks are now gone.<br />
I think the end results are great, not just ours but those assembled by other partners too. This first group are very strong in a few areas (the Holocaust and South Africa, in particular, but not forgetting the simply huge photo archive from LIFE), which was an interesting approach. I think it was a good idea in that it facilitated strong cross-institutional combinations of material. Hopefully we'll see a wider spread of subject matter in coming months, though (and keep an eye out for other IWM exhibits there). <br />
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* I think the Cultural Institute now gathers together some of their other cultural projects they've done in the past (Art Project, Dead Sea Scrolls etc) but the historical exhibitions seem to take centre stage. Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-14205232192575888392012-09-19T22:38:00.001+01:002012-09-19T22:38:26.631+01:00Mobile thinking(well, pontificating.)<br />
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So, how to go mobile? Don’t ask me, every time we go around this
one all the same questions come out. One site or multiple? One URL or more?
(these are not the same question.) Is responsive design the way forward? What
about performance? Do different users need different content and IA? Is the device
or the use-case most important, and should we infer one from the other? When
must we resort to an app? Everything seems to depend on something else, so how do
we cut that Gordian knot? At IWM thus far we’ve only dabbled in mobile websites
so we really haven’t settled on our approach yet, but recently we spent some
time with colleagues from the National Gallery and Tate talking it over, and
some things seemed to get a little clearer to me. Not answers, but perhaps a
way through to some decisions. Bear in mind, of course, that given my limited experience of actually <i>doing</i> this stuff it’s possibly just BS, but anyways...<br />
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For starters, I think it’s three knots. Each is a bundle of objectives, factors, constraints and decisions. Some of these decisions will be easy to settle or there may be no choice about, whilst others are our degrees of freedom. The knots themselves seem to me to have limited impact on each other, though there are connections. What I hope is that they help us to address questions of principle and implementation in the right order.<br />
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<h3>
Problem 1: Knowing which mode of display is required</h3>
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How do we decide what version of a site or rendition of a piece of content is shown to a user to allow for their device, and what is the importance of user choice in this? What aspects of the device are significant? Really this is a question about whether we think we can guess what people need in order to achieve their objectives, and what happens if we guess wrong.<br />
<strong><u></u></strong><br />
<strong><u>Informing considerations</u></strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>User choice</strong>: is it important for users to have explicit control over how they see your site? Are the tasks they may want to achieve guessable from the platform they use and does this matter? <strong>Source</strong>: is the source a user comes from relevant (e.g. a social share), and should the URL they request determine what they see regardless of their device? <strong>Technical characteristics of devices</strong>: what are the significant technical dimensions along which devices differ (screen size? (if any) Touch vs keyboard/mouse vs voice interface? Functional capabilities?). User choice and source have a somewhat inverse relationship with the importance of technical characteristics in governing the experience, but aren’t mutually exclusive.
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<strong><u></u></strong><br />
<strong><u>Consequences</u></strong><br />
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Various technical choices depend upon how we answer this problem (the role of URLs; mechanisms for allowing user choice or automatic detection), but maybe even content or the user journey are impacted. And the decisions over user choice, sources and technology will affect each other.<br />
In terms of technology, for instance, unprompted client-side detection of window size (as would be used to perform media queries for a responsive design) is one option, whilst server-side detection of user agent properties is another (perhaps directly determining what rendition is shown; or else offering the user a choice that is saved as a cookie or redirects them to another URL).
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<br />
<h3>
Problem 2: What to show differently</h3>
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Problem1 concerned identifying the important dimensions of difference (devices, tasks) and how much we should try to work this out on behalf of users or leave it to them. Once that choice is made comes the question of what should actually be different about the different renditions of a site to (hopefully) adapt the experience to users’ needs.
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<strong><u></u></strong><br />
<strong><u>Informing considerations</u></strong><br />
<br />
Users and the tasks they wish to accomplish (again) - if we decided in Problem 1 that tasks were important in determining the selecting rendition that probably means renditions will differ along the dimension of tasks too. Form factors & device capabilities. Accessibility. Location (might we change the content according to where the user is?). <br />
<strong><u></u></strong><br />
<strong><u>Consequences</u></strong><br />
<br />
User experience and design. Delivery of media. If we choose to focus on facilitating different tasks for different platforms, then information architecture, content and functionality may also be affected.
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Problem 3: How do we display it?</h3>
<br />
Finally, the bit we usually seem to skip right to: how do we get the right stuff onto the page and get it to look right once it’s there? There are links here back to 1 and 2, because the technical solution to rendering stuff to the display will be some combination of server- and client-side technology that is also going to relate to how (and where) the results of those two decisions are governed.
<br />
<strong><u></u></strong><br />
<strong><u>Informing considerations</u></strong><br />
<br />
Devices; technology; cost; performance.
<br />
Assuming we’ve gone down the HTML rather than the app route, there are (I think) three basic options, which can be combined: get the server to spit out different HTML depending upon what is required (on the basis of platform, user choice or whatever – see above); spit out the same basic HTML and change the lay it out with CSS via fluid design and/or using media queries and the like (which may also load some different assets); or spit out the same basic HTML (preferably HTML5) and remodel it with JavaScript-y goodness, possibly loading in different content at the same time.
<br />
Doing it all server-side may of course be difficult depending upon the technology you use to assemble your web-pages, or it might make a stronger case for a separate mobile site. Using CSS to do the layout is probably the simplest approach but it has limitations and means that with some minor exceptions all content will be loaded, whether it’s shown to the user or not (though I am no CSS maven so may have missed something here). Using the power of HTML5, combined with JavaScript, we can do a lot more, including pull in content only as it is needed. It’s possible to request images to be made on the fly with dimensions that suit the user’s screen, which could be a boon for page load weights. As it depends upon client-side code the results are perhaps a bit less in the hands of the website owner and users of older desktop browsers may suffer, but there are plenty of libraries out there now that profess to make the whole cross-browser thing less of an issue, and recent browsers do tend to play a bit nicer together than once upon a time. I suspect this is a pretty demanding route technically, or it could be (especially if on the server side you need to set up services for dynamically loading content), and thinking about how to make it play nicely with Drupal themes gives me shivers, but it’s got a lot going for it.<br />
To be honest I get confused as to which of these approaches people mean when they say “responsive design”, and no doubt they can be hybridised anyway.
<br />
<strong><u></u></strong><br />
<strong><u>Consequences</u></strong><br />
<br />
The choice here is basically leads us to our technical approach: whether the hard bits of the coding we have to do are client-side or server-side, feeding back to how we tell what type of rendering is required, whether we need to develop content feeds or other services, and so on. All will require continuing maintenance especially if there is some sort of automated detection going on, rather than user choice. And there will be cost implications whichever way, but they will depend upon the complexity of the requirements, the capabilities and flexibility of existing systems, in-house expertise and so on.
<br />
<h3>
</h3>
<h3>
Conclusion</h3>
<br />
Huh? Well basically I wrote this just to rescue myself from all those circular discussions that seem to happen but if I'm talking through my hat speak up!Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-60627002816345101882012-07-13T10:59:00.002+01:002012-07-13T10:59:50.985+01:00Solr replication "invalid version" errorA quick one for googlers: I had this error in my catalina log when trying to replicate a Solr index:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
invalid version expected 2 but 10 or the data in not in 'javabin' format</blockquote>
I first saw it when I moved between versions of Solr, because versions 3+ use a different format. Most things I read were about this issue, and it was easy enough to resolve (I just made sure all my Solrs were on the same version - not so easy for everyone but worth the effort). But in one case I still had the error, and this whole javabin thing turned out to be a red herring. The answer (from <a href="http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/solr-replication-failing-with-error-Master-at-is-not-available-Index-fetch-failed-td3932921.html" target="_blank">here)</a> is simply that the configuration of the slave included "admin" in the replication URL, which is not where the replication service itself exists. Doh! There was indeed something at the http://www.example.com/solr/admin/replication/ address, but it's the admin interface to replication rather than the endpoint itself, which was at http://www.example.com/solr/replication/. I'm not sure how the error crept in for me but clearly I'm not the only one! Perhaps I snipped it from some faulty documentation, but all those false positives going on about javabin format kept me busy trying all sorts of other things before I stumbled across the right answer. Anyway, check your solrconfig.xml on the slave to be sure your masterUrl string doesn't include "/admin" in the path.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-8102184388715966332012-06-20T21:56:00.001+01:002012-06-21T12:40:12.690+01:00What would a European Cultural Commons be?<strong>The motion: “This house believes that all content in the European Cultural Commons should be freely available for reuse”</strong><br />
<br />
Last week’s, um, Uxford Onion debate at the <a href="http://www.europeana.eu/portal/" target="_blank">Europeana</a> <a href="http://pro.europeana.eu/web/leuven-2012/home" target="_blank">plenary in Leuven</a> (all presentations <a href="http://pro.europeana.eu/web/leuven-2012/media" target="_blank">here</a>), on the proposition above, was stimulating and useful but left most of us still scratching our heads about just what it is. I’d been fortunate to take part in a break-out session the day before where Louise Edwards gave us some background on the idea of a cultural commons and we heard about two case studies showing different facets of the idea. Louise then did another version for the whole conference before the debate. I’ve snipped a little from my notes at the end of this post but I can't do it justive. Look at Louise's presentation <a href="http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/1148118/Louise+Edwards?version=1.1" target="_blank">here</a> (PDF), or else go to the source and read the work of the late <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom" target="_blank">Elinor Ostrom</a> and of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_commons" target="_blank">Charlotte Hess</a> and extrapolate from there (I must also do this myself). I must admit I was still pretty unclear how the general idea was meant to translate into an actual <em>thing</em>, and I wasn’t the only one, but it was a very stimulating idea nonetheless and an excellent debate too, spearheaded by Tony Ageh and Nick Poole (for and against) and seconded by Gary Hall and Susan Hazan, respectively, with input from the floor too (and chaired by the one and only Jill Cousins to strict Uxford Onion rules).<br />
<br />
To me, the question appeared moot because it seemed that a fundamental of a commons is that it is free to all – certainly within the identified community, although perhaps in some cases amongst anyone who happens to stumble across the resource in question. But still, it does beg the question of what was required of the Commons or of something that was “in” it. It also threw up many possibilities as to what “free” might mean; whether some sorts of “freedom” might look like restrictions from some perspectives; and whether all dimensions of “free” would be required in order for something to pass muster as part of a commonly-held good. <br />
<br />
One respondent from the floor argued forcefully that GLAMs should not have to allow people to do what they liked with their material, because they were the authoritative source. My immediate reaction was, well, then it doesn’t belong in the commons (also: get a grip). It seemed to me that we could thereby end up with two cultural commons: one the actual culture that people live in day to day (arguably myriad cultures, actually), replete as it is with restrictions both legal and normative but essentially an organically growing thing in which ideas are transmitted, mutated, opposed and which is actually in all but limited circumstances very free (if you think about the number of ideas, memes, fashions, habits etc that get passed around they far outweigh those encumbered by patents, copyright etc); the other a Commons with a C, in which authorised voices in a partitioned corner of that approved “culture” get to control what is said about various ideas, things etc. This is neither common nor cultural (that is, passed between members of a society and evolving along the way), and it would probably be counterproductive, putting a barrier between GLAMs and unauthorised participants by treating the latter as second-class members of the “culture”. OK, that’s how stuff often happens now, and it’s not necessarily illegitimate, but it is nothing to do with the idea of a commons in which participants develop ways to look after a shared resource responsibly.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Degrees of freedom</h2>
Well after my initial reaction to that speaker making the case for museum authority in a commons, I did reflect further. In his closing remarks Nick Poole almost had me voting for the “opposition” by arguing persuasively for the sustainability of a commons to be remembered (I think he may have been arguing against his beliefs but god, he’s a fine debater!) It reminded me that for a commons to succeed it is very likely to have restrictions. According to Ostrom’s model they will be set by the community (perhaps they will even end up ossified into law), complete with sanctions and means for these to be applied, and everyone in the community can participate in rule-making. <br />
<br />
So is a restriction that requires, for example, the respectful use of an image or reasonable attribution of a source necessarily incompatible with a commonly-held good? Would, say, a requirement to give attribution (a BY clause) stop something being “free” and be incompatible with a commons? Perhaps not. A commons is about shared responsibility, so if an organisation contributes something to the commons it gives up the right to dictate the correct use of the item, but the community may still demand respectful use. As we said above, a code of behaviour and system for establishing breaches and applying sanctions are part of a commons too, and rules around respectful behaviour could help to make a cultural commons sustainable, not least by giving museums the confidence to add more material. Free-riders – for example, those that make offensive use of commonly-held media – would need to be identifiable and open to sanction by the community, and perhaps one could/would still need to depend upon legal means (licences etc) for this. This is not the same by any means as a museum being able to impose its own limitations on the use of things it had contributed to the commons. <br />
<br />
Perhaps the deal with the commons, then, is not that restrictions upon totally libre use of an item are absent, but that the contributor must place its trust in the community (if it accepts the item), which will then assume responsibility for setting any restrictions and applying any sanctions. Once it is part of the commons, though, a contributor must accept that it has lost exclusive control and becomes one voice amongst many. By participating as a persuasive member of a commons, a museum might have a stronger voice, but ownership is gone – that just ain’t a commons, and it ain’t culture either.<br />
I wonder if this extends to the other kind of free: does something not being gratis-free stop it also being free-as-a-bird free? Well it does limit freedom, in that it prevents use by certain parties that are unable to pay; but if it is what the community deems necessary for the commonwealth to be sustainable, perhaps again it’s not actually incompatible with a commons after all. I surprise myself.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Yeah, but still, wtf is it?</h2>
So back to the question: what concrete form might a European Cultural Commons take, and what would that mean someone would actually do in order to add material to it, and what role might Europeana play, if any? Some ideas.<br />
<br />
<strong>A badge</strong><br />
It might be as simple as a public domain dedication of the sort that already exists. Perhaps it could be branded in some new fashion, if there was some political or stakeholder rationale for that, but it would basically be nothing new.<br />
<br />
<strong>A place</strong><br />
It might be a place where items badged like this are held, or where an index of them is held. Again, things like this exist already and it could be an extension of what Europeana does. If it was a physical repository for the items it would be more like Wikipedia Commons.
<br />
<br />
<strong>An agreement</strong><br />
...so it could simply be an agreement with Wikipedia Commons to do this
<br />
<br />
<strong>A framework</strong><br />
It could be a set of policies or guidelines to which content contributors could subscribe that vouches for certain beliefs and practices, perhaps including the badge above.
<br />
<br />
<strong>A vision</strong><br />
It could be a concept for policy makers to get hold of, a flag to rally around. But even then you’d think it probably needs something more concrete to talk about otherwise no-one will know what to do with the idea. And if it’s not concrete it can’t be measured, which will be important for many people.
<br />
What this does have in its favour is that it may be vague enough for a wider range of organisations to subscribe to it. If the BBC or Supraphon or Lionhead Games wanted to be a part of this sort of commons, perhaps it could be vague enough to enable it. It would be a commons with a small “c”, perhaps: simply an expression of the shared culture(s) of Europe, with no warranty implied about the nature of the content or how people might use it to “participate” – the ability to use (consume) alone might be enough, not to reuse or repurpose.
<br />
<br />
<strong>PS</strong><br />
Here’s a snip from my conference notes. Apologies for their unusual brevity and inevitable errors.
[edit: now that I've linked to Louise Edwards' presentation I suggest you look at that instead]<br />
<ul>
<li>Principles for a commons (Ostrom):
<ul>
<li>Establish cty boundaries
</li>
<li>& rules
</li>
<li>All can participate & change rules
</li>
<li>A system for monitoring
</li>
<li>Sanctions for breaking rules
</li>
<li>Conflict resolution mechanism
</li>
<li>Polycentric systems better than centralised ones
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Charlotte Hess: what makes a new commons different?
<ul>
<li>Complex, variable membership unknown to each other
</li>
<li>No established norms
</li>
<li>Egs:
<ul>
<li>Libraries
</li>
<li>Educational commons
</li>
<li>Cultural commons
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
What is a cultural commons? Cultures shared by a community. Shares intellectual resources, ideas, creativity, styles. [It’s obviously not new!]Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-91212022513469187812012-06-09T12:49:00.002+01:002012-06-09T13:35:44.313+01:00A memorial postOn Wednesday my great uncle Raoul died, a couple of months shy of his hundredth birthday. It wasn't unexpected really, but still sad. Though I didn't see him nearly enough, he was a lovely man and really unlike anyone else I've met, yet at the same time he evoked many of the feelings and sense of mental orientation common to the eastern European Jewish branch of my family. That evening at Fiona's suggestion we had vodka and smoked salmon for dinner, the perfect way to toast Raoul's passing. The next morning I scrawled some thoughts as they fell out of my head on the train to work. Here they are pretty much unaltered, errors and all (but small clarifications follow).<br />
<br />
<hr />
<br />
<a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7075/7346072516_0521c879ef_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7075/7346072516_0521c879ef_z.jpg" width="320" /></a>It was a hollow day when that last thread was cut, but it ended with salmon and chilled vodka in icy glasses and reminiscence and warm thoughts.<br />
<br />
The last of a generation was the least of what Raoul was, but he was that for our family too, and losing him is losing all those already missing, a little more. But it’s Raoul we’re missing now. Of course, I never knew the baby born in Samara or whatever that far off city was, or the little boy fled to or through Odessa with his family when the Russian revolution came. I never knew Raoul in Czechoslovakia or later in Estonia or Latvia or whichever Baltic enclave where he worked in... was it some printing trade? I never knew the Raoul my aunt Grete knew, who met and married him; I’m vague even on the how or the when. The Raoul who came pre-war to London on business dealings for his father, who by myth or legend seems to have had a slightly roguish, edgy existence, but later became a restaurateur, businessman, landlord, investor; I was no peer or pal of his either. My history is hazy, and I could easily clear it up but it doesn’t seem to matter in a way, except for the pleasure of the tales. I knew – I loved – but a small corner of the man. I knew him as a child knows an adult, perhaps even in adulthood myself. But his long history, all of it, was marbled through him, salted and spiced him, was bound into his manner, his good humoured warmth and generosity. It peppered his parlance and points of reference and if I only heard him talk (hilariously) of his early years in his very late years, I’d felt it long, long before. <br />
<br />
Because Raoul, to me, was the man I knew as a little kid, part of Grete and Raoul with their sidekick Misty, who would roll in with their Peugeot saloon and often as not with Tic Tac Granny to our house in St Margarets, or who we’d visit in Ladbrooke Grove. He was the big hairy hand, those particular fingers, the complicit pat on the wrist and later, very hard of hearing, the waving away of some missed part of a conversation because he knew it only really mattered that we were sharing time. Too little of it, of course, and I wish more than anything that my kids had seen enough of him to know him a little, and vice versa. But I know how he cared for them regardless. <br />
<br />
I can hear his voice now, not saying anything, I just hear the tone, the syllables and prosody and that same layered and weathered, weathered and layered person, complete just in that sound. I wish I could really, really hear it.<br />
<br />
<hr />
<br />
Some factual corrections following a little asking around. It turns out that it was probably Saratov, another city on the Volga, where Raoul was born in 1912, and that as a 7-year old his family fled to Czechoslovakia and came to know my grandfather’s family, especially my great uncle. The little sister, Greta, 8 years his junior, wouldn’t have been that noticeable but when they met again years later in London and she was a young woman, presumably that was no longer true. They married in 1946. Before being sent to London by his father to learn English and business skills and to work for an uncle, Raoul was in Lithuania and I think that’s where he must have worked as a sports reporter. Sports remained important to him. Presumably the family had all gone together to Lithuania, in fact. It's where Raoul's father was killed in 1941, like so many other Jews. His mother managed to bribe her way from the camps to freedom and eventually to London too. Tic Tac Granny was Greta's mother, my Grandfather's step-mother. And Misty? She was a highland terrier, and you know how animals make an impression on kids...Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-1157936150512943692012-05-17T14:16:00.001+01:002012-05-17T14:38:59.325+01:00Off you go, my lovelies: embedding film and sound from IWMOn Tuesday we made a few changes to the website, one of which we've been working towards for a long time: freeing up our streaming media so that you - and you and you and you - can use it on your own websites (subject to the terms of the <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright/licence" target="_blank">IWM User Licence</a>). <br />
Since we launched the new site in November we've offered over 40,000 images for free re-use either by embedding HTML we offer, or by downloading the files, also using this licence, but we weren't quite ready to do that for our videos or (in particular) our sound recordings. There are more complex rights issues around these, as well as ethical issues, and as a consequence we had to think carefully, not only about what to let go of, but what to put on the website at all. <br />
Now, though, we have approval to apply the same licence to parts of our sound and film collections and are applying it bit by bit. We also have new physical infrastructure in place for our streaming media that should be able to cope if something gets popular. We currently have about 660 films digitised and all of them are online, with about half of them cleared for you to reuse. Of the tens of thousands of items in our sound collections a fair portion are digitised but clearing them for the web is a huge job, so we are working our way through, and now there are over 1800 you can listen to, over 1400 of which you can reuse.<br />
How can you reuse our sound and film? We allow you to embed them, for which we provide some very simple HTML. If you go to a page such as <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060021486" target="_blank">this</a> or <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80000380" target="_blank">this</a> or <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060020433" target="_blank">this</a> and look to the right of the media player you will see text that says "This item is available to share and reuse under the terms of the IWM Non Commercial Licence." Click on "share and reuse" and expand the "Embed HTML" to grab the code. Then paste it like I've done below.<br />
Credit for this is due to lots of people. I'd mention particularly Debbie McDonnell and Naomi Korn, whose work on (and advocacy of) the IWM User Licence was fundamental. However the whole of IWM's Copyright Group deserves thanks for its support for releasing our content like this, from our film and sound curators through to those responsible for e-commerce and for the maintenance of our digital assets. Taking this step is no small risk to those charged with the guardianship of our collections or those that need to generate income for IWM, but the evolution of attitudes from our first discussions to this stage showed great open-mindedness and was really encouraging. ICT's work to beef up the infrastructure was another crucial ingredient.<br />
Please let us know what you think. There are various things we know need improving but we are keen to have some feedback first. We are hoping that later this year we'll be able to offer an HTML5 player and much higher quality video too, as well as (with any luck) more media. No doubt a filter for media with this licence would be useful too, so let us know what you're after.<br />
If you want to use our films for purposes outside the IWM User Licence, do please contact us. For film, see our <a href="http://film.iwmcollections.org.uk/" target="_blank">film sales site;</a> for audio, <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/commercial/licensing" target="_blank">get in touch</a><br />
<br />
<strong>"Fit to fight" [<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060008752" target="_blank">more</a>]</strong><br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="430" scrolling="no" src="http://www.iwm.org.uk/embed/?id=1060008752&media_id=382" width="480"></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Tests of the "Highball" and "Upkeep" bouncing bombs [<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060003613" target="_blank">more</a>]</strong><br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="430" scrolling="no" src="http://www.iwm.org.uk/embed/?id=1060003613&media_id=286" width="480"></iframe><br />
<br />
<strong>Recollections of a POW in WW2 </strong>[<a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80031976" target="_blank"><strong>more</strong></a>]<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="430" scrolling="no" src="http://www.iwm.org.uk/embed/?id=80031976&media_id=240471" width="480"></iframe>Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-12568008398245120562012-03-03T14:19:00.002+00:002012-03-03T14:55:30.341+00:00Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview as a virtual machine<a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/consumer-preview">Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out</a>. By all accounts the new OS is a radical departure from the Windows UX paradigm of the last 2 decades and it's quite possibly going to be a very important OS, not least because of convergence it apparently shows between desktop and mobile, with the interface rethought with a focus on touch. I've not played with it yet because I've just completed the installation, but I thought I'd put up a couple of words about that process. So far it's evident that the look is very different indeed.<br />Most of these instructions are explained <a href="http://www.windows8download.co.uk/2011/08/install-windows-8-on-vmware-virtual.html">in more detail and with screenshots here</a> so you might want to consult that too, but that was written for an earlier release and I found a couple of gotchas fow which I've gleaned answers so I thought it worth putting them here. I've used VMWare Player, which is free. There are alternatives, just pick your version carefully as not all will work with Win8. So here's a quick step-by-step.<br /><br /><strong>Step 1</strong><br />Grab the 32 bit ISO from <a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/iso">here</a><br /><strong>Step 2</strong><br />Install <a href="http://www.vmware.com/products/player/overview.html">VMWare Player 4</a>. Version 3.x doesn't work and will give you a "HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED" error (I know, I tried). VMWare Workstation 8 also works apparently, as do some versions of other virtualisation software.<br /><strong>Step 3</strong><br />Create a new VM. Just point at the ISO, wherever you saved it, and VMWare will do the rest. Pick "Windows" and then "Windows 7", don't put in a licence key. Let it go.<br />If you get an error saying "Windows cannot read the <productkey> setting from the unattended answer file", disable the floppy drive in your VM - it's an icon at the bottom right (see <a href="http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-windows_install/windows-cannot-read-the-productkey-setting-from/85f3bd26-f556-49b3-a48a-5f30c3456484">here</a>).<br /></productkey><productkey><strong>Step 4</strong></productkey><br /><productkey>When you get to the licence key screen, use the following: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J (see <a href="http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-windows_install/can-i-run-the-windows-8-consumer-preview-on-a/a2c14221-e724-476a-a7fe-49b09ab43582">here</a>)</productkey><br /><productkey><strong>Step 5</strong></productkey><br /><productkey>Set up your account. I'm not sure how optional this was but I did it anyway. They ask for a lot of compulsory info but it does open up SkyDrive and other interesting aspects of the new OS so it's worth doing, I think. You can always bullshit.</productkey><br /><productkey></productkey><br /><productkey>You're done. Then find your way around. Hint: the Windows key is useful.</productkey>Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-16445014144720454382012-01-25T21:36:00.017+00:002012-01-25T23:47:46.706+00:00Solr to Google EarthThis is a basic how-to you can probably find done better elsewhere, but since I didn't find all the bits in one place myself I thought I may as well put this up.<br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>The task</strong>: show query results from Solr on a map or in Google Earth using the latitude/longitude data in there. Make the results update as you move around, because there may be too many to bring back all at once.<br /><strong>The technology</strong>: Solr, XSLT, KML, PHP, Apache web server<br /><br />This is a pretty common sccenario and for basic needs and people that aren't already into full-blown mapping solutions this is going to be a better choice. That said, for the latter there are plenty of options and you may want to investigate, for instance, <a href="http://www.osgeo.org/">OSGeo</a>/<a href="http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/">OSGeo4W</a>.<br /><br />I had a small amount of time to evaluate out some possibilities for a future project, so I needed something quick and familiar. I'd done some Solr-based mapping a couple of years back so I had some code to nick. So, having turned some OSGB36 data into WGS84 lat/longs (thanks for the help, @portableant!) I got it into a Solr index, which I'm not going to go into here except to say that I used the "tdouble" datatype because a trie field seems like a good idea for efficient searching, and you need something that can cope with all those floating points. I believe there are proper geo data types but I'm ashamed to say I've not even bothered looking at them, I think with them you could do fancier proximity search and the like but basic is fine for me. So here's are the relevant bits from the schema.xml:<br /><pre><br /><types><br />...<br /><fieldtype name="tdouble" omitnorms="true" class="solr.TrieDoubleField" positionincrementgap="0" precisionstep="8"><br />...<br /></types><br /><fields><br />...<br /><field name="latitude" indexed="true" type="tdouble" stored="true"><br /><field name="longitude" indexed="true" type="tdouble" stored="true"><br />...<br /></fields><br /></pre><br />With the index done and queries working it was a matter of getting some KML out. Solr will transform XML on the fly so converting its XML output into KML is really not hard. Plus I already had a transform to cannibalise. It goes something like this:<br /><pre><br /><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><br /><xsl:stylesheet xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" space="preserve"><br /><xsl:output type="text/xml; charset=UTF-8"><br /><xsl:preserve-space elements="*"><br /><xsl:template match="/"><br /><kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2"><br /> <document><br /> <name>Results</name><br /> <xsl:apply-templates select="//doc[double/@name='longitude']"><br /> </document><br /></kml><br /></xsl:template><br /><xsl:template match="doc"><br /> <placemark id="{str[@name='id']}"><br /> <description><br /> <xsl:text escaping="yes"><br /> <![CDATA[ <![CDATA[ ]]></xsl:text><br /> <p><br /> <xsl:value-of select="str[@name='title']"><br /> </p><br /> <xsl:value-of select="']]>'" disable-output-escaping="yes" /><br /> </description><br /> <name><xsl:value-of select="str[@name='title']"></name><br /> <point><br /> <coordinates><xsl:value-of select="double[@name='longitude']">,<xsl:value-of select="double[@name='latitude']">,0</coordinates><br /> </point><br /> </placemark><br /></xsl:template><br /></xsl:stylesheet><br /></pre><br />Put your own preferred fields in here, of course. Some notes: the CDATA bits are because you need to put HTML in your "description" element into CDATA, but outputting this with XSLT takes a little lateral thinking because it needs to see your CDATA declaration as....CDATA. Hence this structure (and the bit for closing the section with "]]>"). Secondly, note that I start by selecting the "doc" elements that Solr returns but filtered for the presence of "longitude", since we only want to show things that have a point. Actually you may do the filtering in the Solr query instead (or a filter query). As we'll get to later on, in fact. Final note: your fields will obviously be different and you'll want to put something interesting into the "description" element, which is what pops up in balloons on Google Maps and the like.<br />Getting KML out like this is just fine for showing this stuff on Google Maps, but this wasn't working for me on Google Earth. The reason is that GE wants the correct content type, whereas GMaps, OpenLayers etc don't care. GE isn't bothered by the file extension AFAIK, but headers? Yes. The other thing I wanted to do was create a network link, which is a means by which a request for KML can be updated to restrict it to a geographical area (a bounding box). With a network link you can specify how the north, east, south and west limits are expressed, which makes it pretty easy to slot those values into a Solr URL. However because of the content type issue this wasn't going to work. <br />So, here's a PHP file that proxies the Solr query and spits it out with the right content type:<br /><pre><br /><?php<br />/*<br />Google Earth wants text/plain or application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml so this script is a proxy that will pass on all parameters to solr and return the results with the right headers<br />Set up a bunch of defaults like the number of points you want and the default bounding box, which is basically the whole world here (I think)<br />*/<br />$rows=100;<br />$start=0;<br /><br />if(is_numeric($_GET["start"])){<br /> $start=$_GET["start"];<br />}<br />if(is_numeric($_GET["rows"])){<br /> $rows=$_GET["rows"];<br />}<br />$lat0=-90;<br />if(isset($_GET["lat0"])){<br /> $lat0=$_GET["lat0"];<br />}<br />$lat1=90;<br />if(isset($_GET["lat1"])){<br /> $lat1=$_GET["lat1"];<br />}<br />$lon0=-180;<br />if(isset($_GET["lon0"])){<br /> $lon0=$_GET["lon0"];<br />}<br />$lon1=180;<br />if(isset($_GET["lon1"])){<br /> $lon1=$_GET["lon1"];<br />}<br />if(isset($_GET["q"])){<br /> $text="text:".$_GET["q"]."+AND+";<br />}<br /><br />$solrbaseurl = "http://localhost:8080/solr/myindex/select/?";<br />$url=$solrbaseurl."q=".$text."longitude:[$lon0+TO+$lon1]+AND+latitude:[$lat0+TO+$lat1]&wt=xslt&tr=kml.xsl&start=".$start."&rows=".$rows;<br />$s = file_get_contents($url);<br />header('Content-Type: application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml');<br />echo $s;<br />?><br /></pre><br />[CAUTION: see below for a note on web server configuration for another necessary step.]<br />This script was written with a network link in mind, so I decided to pass in latitide and longitude start and finish values using the preferred parameters for this, but it's up to you how you do it (see the docs <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlreference.html#link">here</a> but they don't make it clear that you can pick your own format for the bounding bpox parameters). I take them (lat0, lat1, lon0, lon1) and put them into the Solr query so that you end up with something like:<br />q=text:church+AND+longitude:[-1.5+TO+1.5]+AND+latitude:[48.5+TO+51.5]<br />(the "text:church+AND+" part is only put in if a query term was also specified)<br />So that gets you a set of results within a bounding box. So if you can update this with a new bounding box every time the user's viewport changes it's pretty useful. So the next thing is the network link itself. It's another KML file which again I needed to make on the fly so I could call it from a form, and, of course, I had to put it out with the right headers so here's another PHP script:<br /><pre><br /><?php<br />//this script is a proxy to create a KML file for a network link<br />header('Content-Type: application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml');<br />print("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>");<br />?><br /><kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2"><br /> <NetworkLink><br /> <name/><br /> <visibility>0</visibility><br /> <open>0</open><br /> <description>A network link to some results</description><br /> <refreshVisibility>0</refreshVisibility><br /> <flyToView>0</flyToView><br /> <Link><br /> <href>http://localhost/myapp/solrKmlLatlongs.php?q=<?php echo $_GET["q"];?></href><br /> <refreshInterval>2</refreshInterval><br /> <viewRefreshMode>onStop</viewRefreshMode><br /> <viewRefreshTime<1</viewRefreshTime><br /> <viewFormat<lat0=[bboxSouth]&lat1=[bboxNorth]&lon0=[bboxWest]&lon1=[bboxEast]</viewFormat><br /> </Link><br /> </NetworkLink><br /></kml><br /></pre><br />The "Link" element in that KML points at the other file, proxying Solr (in this case located at http://localhost/myapp/solrKmlLatlongs.php)<br />"viewFormat" is the part where you can specify how the bounding box parameters are to be passed into your KML-emitting script. There's other stuff you can look up for yourself.<br />Basically, if you call this script with your solr query it will chuck out the KML with the network link, which you can view in GE (it will be switched off by default). Then whenever you zoom in or move around the query will refresh with a new bounding box. For me, with a pretty big dataset that you can't really load all at once, I may start with a text query that covers the whole of the UK (no bounding box parameters) but, being limited to, say, 100 results, these may be scattered all over the map. As you zoom in and shift round, it will load more and more results according to your current view.<br />The final thing to note is that it's not probably enough to set the content type in PHP. In my case I needed to add a couple of lines to my Apache config (httpd.conf) so it knew what to do:<br /><pre><br />AddType application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml .kml <br />AddType application/vnd.google-earth.kmz .kmz <br /></pre><br />I hope this helpsJeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-34657277009551336582011-12-22T00:00:00.023+00:002011-12-22T18:30:34.549+00:00Three years with Spinal Muscular Atrophy III: one parent’s take<div><em>Since people reading this post are probably not regular readers of ths blog (who is?), a quick word of warning: I don't do concise. I could have split it into multiple posts but that's just cheating, so this is what you get.</em><br /></div><div><hr /></div><div> </div><div>This post could alternatively be entitled 4½ years with SMA type III, or even 6 years, but last month our third and youngest child turned 6 and shortly before that was the 3rd anniversary of our getting the diagnosis of his condition, which had first become noticeable (but unrecognised) when he was about 18 months old. It feels like a good time to talk a bit about what has happened in the interim, not least because I know that as a parent receiving a diagnosis of SMA type III it was difficult to get a grip on what it would mean for our child and for our family as a whole (we have two older children, aged 8 and 10 as I write). Perhaps by putting this out there it might come in the way of some other mother or father anxiously googling the diagnosis they have just had for their beloved child, and maybe reading about our experience will, if not console them, then thin out the terrifying cloud of the unknown that seemed to suddenly appear before us. No two cases of SMA are the same – it is a spectrum disorder (type III is at the mild end), and you cannot take one experience and expect to see the same pattern elsewhere. All the same, hearing about a single case is better than hearing about none. I also wanted simply to celebrate our kid, whose disability is merely a strand of his life and whose character and spirit, experiences and growth are unique, beautiful, special – just like those of our other two children. SMA is not the definition of his life but an aspect of reality for him (and to a lesser extent for all of us). So this is going to be a few snapshots of his and our experiences over the last three years, including a few pictures and videos, to generally illustrate that you too will cope and your kid will thrive in their own way. </div><div>To kick off, and coz I love all three of them, here's a snap of our lot a year ago:</div><div><br /><a title="IMG_6272 by Eyes like a cave-fish, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavefish/5234327662/"><img alt="IMG_6272" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5287/5234327662_42da1d0587.jpg" width="500" height="375" /></a><br /></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong></strong></span> </div><div><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>What is SMA?</strong><br /></span>I need to take short step back first for some explanation of SMA. I would recommend that you do NOT pay this much mind if it is important to you, because I am not a doctor and am writing from memory and personal experience, not from a book (coz I’m on the train). There are also very detailed resources online but it can be hard to know from these what to actually expect for your child, or when, so talk to your specialist. A good starting point, though, is the <a href="http://www.jtsma.org.uk/">Jennifer Trust for SMA website</a><br /></div><div>For those who have not come across Spinal Muscular Atrophy (like my wife, Fiona, and I before we met the consultant for the first time), it is a degenerative neuromuscular disorder. We discovered that there are a lot of these. Some such disorders, such as the various muscular dystrophies, affect the muscles directly. Some affect the nerve fibre, like Multiple Sclerosis. SMA also affects the nerves directly, but by disrupting the junction in the spinal cord to the motor neurons leading to the limbs and thorax. A muscle is made up of bundles of fibres each with their own nerve fibre, and those without a properly firing nerve obviously don’t work and that fibre will atrophy, leaving the muscles themselves weaker. The pattern tends to be of it affecting the upper part of the legs, arms, and respiratory system (in that order). At present there is no known cure for SMA. As I say, the condition presents in a spectrum of severity but is classified into three types on the basis of the timing of its onset, as well as “adult onset SMA” which appears to have somewhat different causes and effects. At the mild end is type III, in which children start to show symptoms around 18 months. They are likely to be walking prior to onset and it is the deterioration of their mobility together with lots of falls and difficulty in getting into a standing position that are the likely signs that will have parents looking for answers. The weakness may affect the arms or breathing too, although probably later and not as severely as in type II. In type II symptoms become evident around 6 months, I believe, and the child is unlikely ever to walk. As it progresses the arms will likely also be affected and later on possibly the respiratory system too, shortening life expectancy. Type I is evident from birth and tragically is generally fatal in early infancy. I feel quite callous writing that, because I know that there might be parents who read this who face that world-shattering prospect and I do not. If this is you, I hope you will accept my sincerest sympathy and most heartfelt wishes for happy times with your child.<br />SMA has a genetic basis with (AFAIK) no significant established environmental factors that influence its onset or its progression. It is recessive, meaning in essence that both parents must be carriers of the mutation. Perhaps surprisingly the mutation is estimated to be present in around 1 in 40 of the population. The maths of this means that on average 1 in 1600 couples will both possess the gene. Assuming that they are both carriers rather than having 2 copies of the faulty gene (in which case they would themselves be affected by SMA), there is a 1 in 4 chance that any given child of theirs will have 2 copies of it. Which is how it came about that Fiona and I have two children without SMA and one with. The result is that around 1 child in 6500 is born with SMA – about 100 kids a year in the UK. Not a trivial number, but not so many that you are likely to have come across many of them.<br /></div><div>Enough background, then. To our story.</div><br /><div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">There’s a problem<br /></span></strong>To start with we just noticed that Kid3’s feet appeared to have turned in and his gait was changing, with his feet moving further apart. This was at around 1½ years old, and on the advice of Fiona’s father (a very experienced GP) we had him checked out. In short he ended up with splints to support his feet. These did appear to help somewhat, but it became clear that his legs were still not doing what they should. He would fall over frequently, often with his legs folding underneath him and his head hitting the ground. He’d get to his feet by walking his hands up his legs (the “Gower’s sign” typical of SMA). He still couldn’t climb stairs by an age where children can usually do this. He also had a hand tremor, sometimes visible, sometimes just felt, sometimes not evident at all, and we associated this with emotional moments – excitement, upset. My father-in-law recommended that we arrange to see a paediatric neurologist, and now I know what his fears were.</div><div><br /> </div><div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Diagnosis</span></strong><br />We went with Kid3 and Fiona’s father to Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge for a consultation, during which the names of various conditions came up, mainly SMA and muscular dystrophies of various sorts, with Duchennes the only type that really fitted the symptoms. I’d read and heard a little about the MD but with its many forms I hadn’t quite registered what the implications of Duchennes might be, but it was clearly a strong candidate. It was clear now that our little boy’s condition was not one of slack tendons or anything other than a serious neuromuscular issue, which I’d not really wanted to countenance before. Fiona was more aware than I of what it meant, and it showed in her reaction. A blood test for a protein would be a first step to confirm whether Duchennes was likely, along with genetic tests for that and for SMA, and we went straight off that day for the blood sample to be taken – in itself a painful sight. We understood that it would take several weeks for the genetic test to be done and left expecting a wait. In something of a daze we went home incapable of doing or thinking much. We had my parents-in-law to support us and gently talk us through what it all might mean, but I think I still didn’t really get it properly.<br /></div><div>The next day at work I spent the morning looking up Duchennes and the horror grew and grew in me. This is a condition that, I learnt, might see our son immobile before his teens and dead by 20. The world was falling apart and I was being hollowed out. But not long after midday, Fiona rang and told me that the protein test had already been done and ruled out Duchennes MD, and that the consultant had wanted to let us know as soon as possible so that we would not go through the agony of thinking that was the likely diagnosis for longer than necessary. He later told us that he really had thought it the most likely candidate. I don’t need to spell out for you the feeling of relief we shared. I didn’t really know what SMA might mean, though it was now the obvious candidate, but I did know things looked markedly less bleak than they had. A colleague came round at about that point to talk about some work thing or other and I just cried with relief on his shoulder. And that was the end of easily the worst few hours I have ever experienced, which ended effectively with a diagnosis no-one would wish for but with, at the same time, an insight into what might have been, and into the feelings of a parent being told their child’s life would be cut short. In some way this has stayed with me whenever things have been difficult. It’s not enough always to say “ah well, it could be worse” when you are brought face-to-face with a new consequence or worsening of your kid’s condition: that still hurts like hell; and yet, I thank my stars for what we and he have.</div><br /><div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Facing it</span></strong><br />There were then electrode tests to understand the strength of the nervous impulses in our son’s arms and legs. The results fitted with the SMA diagnosis, which was confirmed by the genetic test. At our next meeting with the consultant we talked through what type III SMA would actually mean, what research was underway, and what our next steps might be. Perhaps the hardest thing, in terms of understanding the implications of the diagnosis for Kid3, was (and is) dealing with the unknown, because the “progress” (degeneration of the nervous connections) varies so much and you’re desperate to know what to expect and when. Scratch that, actually. The hardest thing? Powerlessness. You want to be able to do something, anything, to make a difference. To be entirely dependent upon other people (never mind the fact that they can’t do very much, at least in terms of providing a cure) is difficult, but I suppose it was also being able to get to the bottom of the question: is there actually anything I can be doing? Am I missing any opportunities because I haven’t asked the right questions – is there a clinical trial, a scheme, that we’ve missed? I cannot speak highly enough of Dr Verity, the consultant we had, and his advice and the efforts of my father-in-law to discover everything possible about SMA, to interpret it for us and reassure us that we were not missing anything, these were so valuable. Still, we had a long journey to accommodate the new reality. I won’t attempt to describe that journey, and Fiona and I certainly handled it differently at times. I will say that the support of family and friends was immeasurably important, but in the end the only way to move onto a new phase was for us to gradually absorb the idea that this is simply our “normal”, not an acute situation that could be addressed and put behind us. Instead, what our son would regard as the normal state of affairs from his earliest memories needed to become that for us: something where the practical implications and needs of the situation are handled calmly and, without a feeling of crisis or drama, just dealt with. Usually that works.</div><div> </div><div>One of the other things that we just have to feel our way through is how much help to offer. We don't want to make him overly dependent or to interfere when for his own self-esteem and confidence he should be left to, say, get himself upright or try something new that he may well fail at, but equally things are more difficult or tiring for him than for most other children. But with any kid one might push them to walk further than they've done before, but never as far as you could walk, and when your kid has reduced mobility it's a matter of calibrating differently. </div><br /><div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Developments</span></strong><br />What has happened in the intervening time? Well Kid3’s walking isn’t noticeably different: he falls over a little less, perhaps, because he knows better how to support himself on things, so there’s no way you’d expect him to go more than a few yards without a hand to hold. Stairs are usually climbed on hands and knees, although he has handrails on both sides (of very narrow stairs – I never thought that would actually be helpful!) and occasionally uses these to help him up or down. What he does have over other kids is impressive upper body strength, which comes from using his arms to do so much stuff his legs would otherwise do. He’ll climb to his brother’s top bunk essentially using just his arms and with help he’ll take on trees, monkey bars and climbing frames too, and he throws a mean punch. Hold his hand and you get a steel grip you’d not expect from a some sweaty little kid’s mitt. He likes to do acrobatics that use this strength and that other kids can’t do (still looking for a video for that). He'll do a simulated parachute drop too - that was cool!</div><div> </div><br /><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" width="400" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="300"> <param name="flashvars" value="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=109bf02165&photo_id=5018731716"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed height="300" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=109bf02165&photo_id=5018731716"></embed></object><br /><div>He’s been at school a year now, settling in like any kid, and it’s safe to say his very outgoing character and huge energy have put him in good stead.<br />When he was 4½ Kid3 got a wheelchair, which he just loves, and he mastered it the moment he first sat in it.</div><div><br /><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" width="400" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="300"> <param name="flashvars" value="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=f0d5d07ab6&photo_id=6553233279"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed height="300" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=f0d5d07ab6&photo_id=6553233279"></embed></object><br /></div><div>The wheelchair was one of those things where as a parent you are perhaps a little reluctant to accept that it might be necessary. Indeed I was a little worried that it might see him exercising his legs less, which is important because it will help him to make the most of the muscle fibres that are receiving signals and keep his legs as strong as they can be. But of course it’s been a wholly good thing, giving him the freedom to go where he pleases and at speed and to feel like he’s on equal terms with other kids, plus it’s something he can do and other people can’t. We got a massive off-roader beast at the same time from <a href="http://www.delichon.co.uk/delta">Delichon</a> (bloody expensive but so worth it). Check this out:<br /><br /><a title="IMG_5716 by Eyes like a cave-fish, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavefish/4875900367/"><img alt="IMG_5716" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4116/4875900367_a604759fa1.jpg" width="375" height="500" /></a><br /></div><div>This baby has done extreme stuff and it’s beautifully engineered and good for kids up to mid-teens.</div><div><br />Having perhaps 20-25% of the usual amount of strength in his legs (just a guess) doesn’t mean he can’t do anything with them, of course. He has swimming lessons as well as hydrotherapy, and he loves a game of football, although this one definitely involves a lot of support from an adult (possibly swinging him in the air like a croquet mallet). We tried a balance bike, thinking that having no pedals it might work for him, but the act of balancing itself takes both control over the legs and a degree of core stability – another area weakened by SMA. So for his 6th birthday we got him an Ezy Roller, which is like a little go-kart powered by his arms wiggling a handlebar from side to side. Here's a clip of the boys hunting me down on Ezy-roller and scooter:</div><div> <br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="300" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"> <param name="flashvars" value="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=2cac6736d5&photo_id=6555165569"></param> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786"></param> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"></param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=2cac6736d5&photo_id=6555165569" height="300" width="400"></embed></object><br /></div><div> </div><div>So he can now join in as his siblings skateboard, scoot and roller-blade – and we also tried a Micro Scooter, which has two wheels at the front so has enough stability for him to ride, a narrow rear to keep wheels out of he way of his trailing foot, a really low deck so he can reach the floor without having to bend his knee (an action that is sure to cause him to collapse), and steering that is not based on twisting the handlebars but tilting them - all of which seem to help. It was just brilliant to see him ride this. He had a lot of falls (but he’s made an art of that) but I didn’t really expect we’d see him scooting. Both of these came directly from <a href="http://www.micro-scooters.co.uk/">Micro-Scooters</a>’ base on Mersea Island, which is near to us, and I have to say a big thank you to them for letting us try stuff to our hearts’ content. Brilliant company. Below is a clip of him scooting. It's not exciting but it shows what's possible with this style of scooter. It also shows me doing what I talked about earlier and muddling my way through when to help and when not to, for better or worse.</div><br /><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" width="400" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="300"> <param name="flashvars" value="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=b93ba63b1d&photo_id=6554936645"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed height="300" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=b93ba63b1d&photo_id=6554936645"></embed></object><br /><div> </div><br /><div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">My wobbly legs</span></strong><br />One of our early worries was for how our son would handle it when he realised that he couldn’t do things that others could. We could see how his determination and vivacity helped him take on all sorts of things without complaint, but knew that at some point he was sure to think, “why is it just me that can’t do the things my friends can?” Will there come a point where he feels this and despairs, or turns to rebellion or anger? I guess we’ll see.<br />He is aware of his condition, of course, but treats it in a very matter-of-fact way. Sometimes it’s heart-breaking to see how matter-of-fact he can be, in fact. One thinks, “this shouldn’t have to seem normal to him”. He sometimes calmly sits out a game knowing that it’s not something he can do, though he may well recruit someone to help him do things his way. Only once do I remember him making a rather sad remark. I was carrying him down the stairs at a friend’s house where he saw his reflection in a big mirror, with his legs swinging freely as they tend to do, and he told me “I hate to see my wobbly legs when I’m walking”.<br />We’ve had several open discussions with the other children about what SMA is and means (normally on long car journeys), with him listening in. It’s hard to know if that’s the right thing to do, but that’s our approach: be open, don’t make a drama of it, don’t make him feel abnormal whilst being clear that he is naturally going to need help. I don’t think we have a strategy, we just have to feel our way and take our cues from him.</div><br /><div> </div><br /><div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Help from outside<br /></span></strong>Beyond our friends and families, whose support has been so precious, we’ve had a lot of help from outside agencies and it’s well worth knowing where you can look. Actually the first to mention (again) is the <a href="http://www.jtsma.org.uk/">Jennifer Trust</a>, who provided us with a list of the various agencies we could turn to and some of the steps we could expect. The <a href="http://www.muscular-dystrophy.org/">Muscular Dystrophy Campaign</a> is a much larger charity than JTSMA with a wider focus but including SMA in its remit. With a bigger constituency it has quite busy forums where you might find a place to seek advice or share experiences.<br />Various services come through the NHS, from physiotherapy and occupational health, to wheelchair services, to consultations with paediatric neurologists. Our paediatrician helped in many ways other than the clinical, putting us in touch with people and advising on form filling (there’s a bit of that). As far as keeping in touch with research goes, aside from asking your paediatric neurologist you keep you informed there is a research network, <a href="http://www.treat-nmd.eu/">Treat-NMD</a> (it started as a European initiative but has gone global), that is worth looking into. It runs patient registries and a whole lot more besides. Like us you may not feel ready to face thinking about it immediately but do take a look.<br />A child that needs as much help moving around as one with SMA is entitled to (and needs) certain benefits, and you should get this underway. Check out the <a href="http://www.motability.co.uk/main.cfm">Motability</a> scheme too (even if it uses ColdFusion for its website), which has enabled us to get a vehicle big enough for wheelchairs and buggies and also means that Fiona can get to all the many appointments.<br />The primary school and county council have worked together to provide support in class for Kid3 and I recommend pushing for this, especially if the school is an older building where the physical environment may be tricky for kids with “wobbly legs” or wheelchairs and where adaptations may be hard to implement. Getting around the classroom, participating in the playground and in PE all need our son to have help, and he gets that from a dedicated assistant. It may seem overkill but I assure you that it’s not, and because he’s a bright kid who doesn’t need extra help when sitting down at his work it means that the class also gets an extra adult to pitch in and help anyone, which is good for everyone. So whilst there’s less money to go round and it may be more difficult now to persuade your council to provide classroom assistance, don’t be afraid to try.<br />I mentioned swimming lessons, and again this is an experiment that has worked. Having taught our two older children the swimming teachers have been happy to take on the challenge of finding techniques that work for our youngest, giving him genuine swimming skill, confidence in the water, and noticeably improved muscle tone too. It’s exhausting for him, but that’s a good thing.<br />I’m sure there have been other sources of help and there are certainly many people I’m grateful to but I want this to focus on things that could be useful to others and I think this is a good start. I hope it’s helpful.</div><br /><div> </div><br /><div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Conclusion</span></strong><br />There is no conclusion. We carry on, we have a happy life with our kids, there are annoyances and things that we all miss out on or that Kid3 in particular misses out on, but really he's just like any other 6-year-old mentalist. He has no super-powers but he has a big smile, smart brain and lots and lots of attitude. We don’t know what’s ahead of us, but that’s just life. We count our blessings, and then they shout at us, kiss us, draw a picture, run over our feet with a wheelchair. They may even stand there three feet high in a Darth Maul costume, rabbit-punch us and then fall over backwards with the kick-back... And so the blessings pile up, only a little black and blue.<br /><br />So if you've just found out that you are in our situation, with a child that is going to have difficulties you never foresaw, please don't despair. I hope you've seen that there are ways round a lot of things and always, always a lot of fun to be had. All my best to you.</div><br /><div> <strong><em>Postscript</em></strong>. As I got to the end of writing this, I became aware of a blog started recently by the parents of Estrella, a little girl who lost her life to SMA but a month ago at the age of 8 months. Her story, their story, is very different from ours and humbles me. I read the words of people in the midst of grief who are yet trying their very best to do something positive; and now I feel more strongly than ever the sentiment in the title of that blog: <a href="http://smashsma.blogspot.com/">Smash SMA</a>. Amen to that.</div>Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-3120444700211240782011-11-07T21:25:00.010+00:002011-11-08T10:19:13.161+00:00New IWM websites pt.III: the, um, websiteSo, as on the evening before we switch our new website over from beta to fully live status I finally get round to the website part of this series of blog posts. In <a href="http://doofercall.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-that-day-4th-october-2011-pt-1.html">part 1</a> we did brand, e-commerce and hosting. In <a href="http://doofercall.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-iwm-websites-ptii-collections-and.html">part 2</a>, collections and licensing. Here, we'll look in too much detail at building the core <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/">website</a> itself. Sorry, it's a long 'un.<br /><br /><hr /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Why a new website?</strong><br />For the last 8 (I think) years, IWM has used BoxUK’s Amaxus CMS to run its websites. Naturally the sites were getting creaky and the CMS itself has been superseded, IWM itself has changed, and so has how the web works – both technically and in terms of the behaviour of web users and the language of interaction that they understand. A clean sweep was in order, which means a variety of strands of work. This much was clear when Carolyn Royston (our head) and Wendy Orr (our Digital Projects Manager, and so lead on the website project) outlined their ambitions to me when I started at IWM in May 2010.<br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Choosing the platform</strong><br />Research for the new sites had began some time before that May but planning really kicked off in June. For me, the first key deliverable was the selection of a technical solution, but although I had a fair idea which way I would go I wanted to know a variety of other things first. How can you choose a CMS without knowing the functional specification, and how can you really know that without settling the information architecture to some degree, and the ways that people will find content and interact with the site? Decisions on whether we’d be supporting a separate mobile site, for instance (we don’t, at least not for now), and our plans for legacy sites all could have an impact. But of course you can only work out so much of this beforehand, and most questions seem to lead to others in a Gordian knot, so in the end you have to assess the situation as best you can, put together your own set of technical priorities, and make your selection as something of a leap of faith. I had the benefit of advice from various knowledgeable people in the sector who told us of their experiences with various CMSs, in particular IMA’s Drupal mage Rob Stein and the V&A’s Richard Morgan and Rich Barrett-Small, and we also had demos of a couple of commercial CMSs. Most importantly, though, we had Monique Szpak, whose role in this project (and my learning process at IWM) really needs a blog post of its own. Her experience with various open source products including Drupal was key, and after we identified that as our preferred solution she built us a proof-of-concept late last year to confirm that Drupal was likely to be able to do what we needed, and to assess the likelihood that Drupal 7, which at that point was still in alpha, would be ready when we needed it. With this information we took an informed gamble that it would be, and the choice was made.<br /><br /><strong>Development</strong><br />As I already said, we started development work even before settling finally on <a href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a>, as a piloting project, and this continued whilst we were developing our plans for content, IA and design. There were a number of things we knew we wanted, even if the functionality was still hazy – with Monique’s help we’ve instituted agile practices which positively encourage trial, error, testing and improvement. This change, in fact, together with the development environment we’ve gradually (& painfully) pieced together and the implementation of tools like <a href="http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview">Jira</a> and Subversion, has been fundamental to making this project work, and it would have been impossible without Monique. Whilst she worked on prototyping more functionality, I did some groundwork on indexing shop and external sites. Then in the spring Toby Bettridge joined us, fresh from working on the Drupal part of the V&A’s new site. He and Monique worked very closely (with the help of Skype) and long before the design work was complete we had basic versions of the taxonomy, events, multi-index search and collections functionality done, amongst other things.<br />Although I’ve been paying attention to what they do, my hands-on involvement in Drupal development has been pretty much nil and I still understand the CMS far less than I’d like, so anything I say about Drupal development here needs to be read with that in mind! I do get, though, that one picks modules carefully, develops new ones with reserve, and never hacks core. We started developing with Drupal 7 before it was released, and even when it was there were (and remain) quite a lot of modules that weren’t ready to use. We thought the gamble was worthwhile, though, and forged ahead. In time we did incorporate some of them, although unfortunately we still don’t have some of the things promised by e.g. Workbench. Along the way Monique and Toby also did some vital module development of their own, notably a custom collections search module (using <a href="http://drupal.org/project/search_api_solr">Search Api Solr Search</a>), media embedding for authors using IWM’s <a href="http://oembed.com/">oEmbed</a> service, entity lists (old-style Drupal nodes had lists, but new-style entities didn’t), and some administrative tools.<br />My role in development? I’ve often felt somewhat awkward, if I’m honest, about my fit, because having elected to go with an entire technology stack and various development practices that were new to me, I often found I couldn’t really contribute practically, even where I understood some things well. For instance, although I have plenty of experience with Solr, my practical contribution to integrating it with Drupal was negligible; likewise if I knew what was required to fix some HTML/JS/CSS at the front end, I could not implement this in an unfamiliar environment for fear of messing up Drupal or making some Subversion faux pas. I think I’ve made but one single (successful) check-in of Drupal code. I concentrated instead on sorting out development and live hosting, working on getting the collections data right, filling the holes in the spec as we noticed them, and so on. I spent a good while working out how the media streaming worked and how to embed that in our pages, using the DAMS’ web service to build a light-weight SOAP-free alternative (an oEmbed service) that could both serve our websites and potentially 3rd parties. When everything calms down, though, I need to properly get to grips with the codebase.<br /><br /><strong>Information architecture, discovery & URLs</strong><br />Working out the logic for a site that’s going to function for several years is not easy. One can change that logic if necessary, but you really need to know how likely that is to happen in order to give your designers some parameters to work within – how flexible do menus have to be? How directed will the user be, and how much should any one piece of content be located in a specific part of the site? As I said earlier, the brand structure and the 5 IWM branches were a big factor in how we had to organise content, since we needed to make things readily discoverable whatever the user’s journey, but without making them context-free and confusing. Another pair of conflicting priorities were the wish to avoid having too many top-level menu items and the wish to keep the site fairly flat without obliging too many clicks to find content.<br />Sites like the <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/">V&A</a>, which relaunched earlier this year, have taken adventurous routes to delivering masses of content to users (or users to content) – in the V&A’s case, centring around search and introducing a sort of machine-learning to categorise content and indeed to identify what categories might exist. Brave stuff, and a great solution to the huge volume of content they have there.<br />At IWM we played for a while with the idea of a taxonomy driven site, wondering if we could use a set of taxonomies as facets onto different aspects of the site that would let users cut across a traditional hierarchical organisation of content. We’ve kind of gone with a watered-down version of that, wherein the structure of the content is fairly obvious and on the whole quite flat but we’ve used controlled terms and free tagging to help make things more discoverable to users coming from other angles. This is pretty conventional and at the moment of limited power, but in due course we will make greater efforts to align our taxonomies (in particular our history taxonomy) with the controlled terminology used in our collections. This was too much to do in this phase, but when that happens we should be able to make ever-better connections between our collections and pages like our “Collections In Context” <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/history">history pages</a>, learning resources, galleries and perhaps events. A learning-focused vocabulary will do the same, but right now our e-learning resources are pretty much non-existent.<br />Perhaps more important than taxonomy at the moment is search, which has been a key way of integrating content that lies outside our main site. We’ve elected to run 4 separate Solr indexes for this, and to keep them separate owing to the distinctive nature of their content. We have the Drupal index itself; collections data; an index of products extracted from our Cybertill e-shop; and a crawl (using <a href="http://nutch.apache.org/">Nutch</a>) of a number of IWM sites that are outside of Drupal, such as blogs and the “Their Past, Your Future” learning resource. The last one needs a lot more work but as a quick-and-dirty way of ensuring that those legacy sites weren’t left out in the cold it works. And yes, a Google <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/cse/">custom search engine</a> would have been an alternative but then it would not have worked in the same way as the other searches, with deep integration into Drupal and the ability to treat the results as entities and reuse them elsewhere.<br />One obvious change with the new site is that, well, it’s one site. Previously we used a morass of subdomains for somewhat independent branch sites and even for the collections-pages-that-weren’t-collections-search (collections search had its own domain, no less). I for one found it pretty confusing. With the rebrand making the “IWM-ness” of all of our branches more prominent we were able to do the same on the website. I had been through a similar exercise at the <a href="http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/">Museum of London</a>, and though it was not an identical situation some conundrums and dilemmas were shared by both. How to make it easy to access non-branch specific content and information to all users in the same place as branch-specific content, and how to make sure that people are well aware that the latter pertains only to one physical site? How to cross-promote? Like MoL we had no specific digital brand, nor a mother brand to distinguish particular projects or sites from cross-organisational activities. I hope we found a solution that works for our users and not just for IWM itself, but time (and more user-testing) will tell.<br />The expectation that we’d move content around and that the organisation of material on the site, as seen by users in menus etc, would not be forever, prompted me to seek a URL structure that was a little more abstract. I didn’t want URL components necessarily to be the same as top-level menu items, which might disappear, but to relate to more stable concepts of what IWM does and offers whilst remaining meaningful. That doesn’t mean permanent URLs but hopefully relatively long-lasting and predictable ones. In one area – collections – we do aim for the URLs to be “permanent”, though (whatever that means). What I tried to do was put what I imagined to be the most stable aspects towards the left hand end of the URL path, things like “corporate” and “visits”, because I envisaged these as being more stable than even branch names (we might get more branches, or rename them again). I also wanted to be able to put non-branch content under these. The result is that we don’t have branch names at the top of a hierarchy but reappearing in a few places – visist/iwm-london as well as events/iwm-london and others. It may seem messy but I hope it’s reasonably predictable all the same, and it means we never need a catch-all URL to cope with the miscellany that we hadn’t foreseen would ever exist outside branches.<br /><br /><strong>Design</strong><br />We appointed the <a href="http://www.bureau-va.com/">Bureau for Visual Affairs</a>, who were responsible for the <a href="http://www.nmm.ac.uk/">National Maritime Museum’s</a> new website’s design, to do the same for us. Judge for yourself how they’ve done, although good or bad the credit or blame are not all theirs, even when it comes to aesthetics. Design and content go hand in hand, and in some places we’re still working to improve the latter to make the best of the former. Under the covers, too, the HTML that’s spat onto the page is the result of BVA’s HTML coders’ fine work at one end, Drupal at the other, and the best efforts of our devs to bridge the gap. And sometimes the gap was pretty big.<br />The theming process was one area where our plans went somewhat awry. We had two experienced Drupal developers on our team, but as there was plenty for them to do in back-end development we were planning on the theming being handled by whoever we appointed as designers. BVA, however, are not a Drupal house but their design was what got us all excited, so we reached an arrangement with a third company to subcontract to BVA to do this part of the work. Having done it once, this is not something I would recommend - at least not unless you can make it very clear who answers to whom and where the line lies between development work, theming, and HTML development (and who pays who for what). We ended up some weeks behind but got back on track with the help of Ed Conolly of <a href="http://www.inetdigital.co.uk/">http://www.inetdigital.co.uk</a>, who moonlighted as a themer for a few weeks and helped put a spring back in everyone’s step. Bravo Ed!<br /><br /><strong>Content</strong><br />Early in our content planning we decided what we’d migrate from the old sites (not a lot), what we’d need to keep going (a small set of microsites) and, broadly speaking, what we’d want to add to the new site. Killing off content doesn’t usually sit too well with me, who’s a conservationist and archivist by inclination. My instinct is that it’s sure to be useful to someone to have pretty much everything we’ve ever done remain available, but that’s nonsense really and far from helping people could end up confusing them, not to mention sucking up resources for maintenance that would be much better spent on creating new content of real worth. We did have an awful lot of pages that related to old exhibitions and so on, and were very keen to disentangle ourselves as fully as possible from our old content management system, Amaxus 3. In the end we have kept three or four microsites from that. Other content needed substantial alterations to bring it up to date and suit it to the new site structure.<br />However, beyond the core, practical information about visits etc., we wanted to do something that would directly serve the core purpose of the IWM: to tell the stories of conflict through the material we hold; and we wanted to do it in a rich, immersive way. BVA came up with a solution that looked lovely, although we went through a few iterations in order to make it easier to create the content and to draw parts of it from the collections middleware. We wanted HTML that could be generated almost automatically, which opens up other potential uses for the template. This took away some of the visual sophistication with which BVA won our hearts, and I suspect that they were a little unhappy to see this go, but this is a site that we want to add to frequently and without having to use HTML developers to do it, so I think we found a happy medium. Our “Collections in Context” (or simply, “history”) section contains over 100 articles at present, using images, audio and video to tell stories spanning from the First World War to the present conflicts in which the UK is involved. They were written by one of IWM’s historians and put carefully worked into the CMS by our team in a close collaboration that we hope to turn into a rolling programme of content creation, perhaps reflecting current events or notable anniversaries. I hope in due course we can extend the use of the format to other parts of the site and other voices, perhaps enabling its use as a tool for our website visitors. The people who deserve a shout-out for writing, editing, and/or inputting the hundreds of content pages that make up the new site are New Media’s Jesse Alter and Janice Phillips together with Maggie Hills, who has joined us for a busy few months.<br />BVA brought a couple of other bits of bling to the site, with the aim of a more engrossing, immersive experience. First amongst these is the “visual browse”, a slideshow mechanism that underlies many of our pages and is brought to the fore by clicking a tab at the top left. We can make any number of these and surface them on the pages where they are relevant – for instance, each branch has its own visual browse.<br /><br /><strong>Is it any good?</strong><br />When I stand back from whatever details might be preoccupying me on a given day I’m really pleased with the overall effect of what we’ve done, but of course I am not a typical user and what will count will be the feedback we get from our users. But for me, I’m especially pleased with the history pages and the way that our collections are now used there and in the search pages. I am also pretty pleased with the balance we’ve found between the individual branches (essentially, the needs of the physical visitor) and the cross-branch/non-branch activities and content, but because this is necessarily a compromise I expect that it will not work for everyone.<br />I have reservations too. I think the lack of a mother brand is a problem, and I think we need to make the home page work harder to offer a powerful message of what IWM as a whole is. The lack of fly-out menus is galling to me, although the ones for branches work well. It means more of a leap into the unknown and more clicks to find what you’re after. Our lovely, lovely history content is hard to find. Mobile performance is not that great – the whole site is too wide to load full-width with the text legible, and a ton of stuff loads onto the page that is not important for the mobile user. It functions OK, but it’s far from an optimised experience.<br />So, my opinions aside, there’s plenty to do over the coming months. But it will feel mighty good to have this milestone out of the way: November 8th – switchover day.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-51867767832852135602011-11-02T22:13:00.006+00:002011-11-02T23:26:07.964+00:00New IWM websites pt.II: Collections and licensingThis is the second post about our "big bang" and the things we launched on October 4th. In the <a href="http://doofercall.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-that-day-4th-october-2011-pt-1.html">first post</a> I talked about the new brand, e-commerce, and hosting. Here I'll talk a bit about collections and the closely related issue of licensing.<br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong></strong></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong></strong></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>The collections</strong></span><br />So, now we’re getting more into the area I can talk about more knowledgeably. The opportunity to help reimagine how IWM’s collections are brought to the public through digital media was one of the key attractions that brought me here 18 months ago (though there were several other extremely compelling reasons. I think some of them are still in post). I felt I could bring something useful from my experiences at the <a href="http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/">Museum of London</a>, having been part of the team that brought an ambitious new system there just before I left.<br />I hope I’ll be able write it all up properly soon, but I’ll keep it brief here. The collections online project at IWM had two objectives: firstly to build the foundational infrastructure for all future data-driven collections applications; and secondly to build the first public interface onto that infrastructure with the collections search pages in the new website. Only the bare essentials of the infrastructure were to be built in this phase: purely what was necessary to deliver to the web application and to be provide enough of an architecture for us to plug in the planned extra features later on. We have plenty in line for phase 2, but we’ll tie all that stuff in with specific front-end requirements.<br /><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/projectfixer">Simon Chambers</a> came on board with us to project manage this one and he did an incredible job of marshalling the requirements, prioritising them, working with a number of departments and strong-willed people and getting things as quickly as possible to the point where we could deliver the baseline of what the website needed. We ultimately decided to work with <a href="http://k-int.com/">Knowledge Integration</a>, who built the CIIM for us at MoL and who could bring us an existing application that fitted our needs very well.<br />Essentially the CIIM, at least the part we’ve implemented so far, pulls data from the collections management system (in our case Adlib) and remodels it to serve the needs of discovery and delivery as opposed to data management. These are very different things, and that a CollMS may do the latter very well doesn’t make it ideal for the former. This is as much about how the database is used across the organisation’s varied collections as it is about the technical qualities of, say, Adlib specifically, because this architecture allows us to intervene in the data between its source and front-end applications that use it – to remodel and align it, to integrate it with other data sources or enrich it, to prepare associated media, and to optimise it for full text searching, for instance. The big job since February, when things kicked off in earnest, has been modelling the data correctly. I have to admit I seriously underestimated the complexity of getting this right, and we had a series of problems to do with the API it was extracting from and the readiness of some of the data, but in a way this illustrates why it’s a good thing to be able to do all this work away from the front-end.<br />The result is a first-pass at a Solr index that, along with 3 others, lies at the heart of discovery on our new website. Try out the search engine <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search">here</a>, or <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=war%20artist&submit=&items_per_page=10&filter[webCategory][0]=%22art%22">here</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=cody&submit=&items_per_page=10">are</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=first%20world%20war%20interview&submit=&items_per_page=10&filter[mediaType][0]=%22audio%22&filter[contentDate][0]=%22First%20World%20War%22">some</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=spitfire&submit=&items_per_page=10">good</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=bbc&submit=&items_per_page=10">searches</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=%22trouser+press%22&submit=&items_per_page=10">to</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=hms%20victorious&submit=&items_per_page=10&">get</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=kittens&submit=&items_per_page=10">you</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=Vickers+Wellesley+&submit=&items_per_page=10">going</a>. <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/100029091">Watch</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/100027217">a</a> <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/100035389">video</a>. Listen to <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80004010">interviews</a> or momentous <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80030152">radio broadcasts</a> (Czech alert). Oh and if you find an object like <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205189052">this</a> you'll see that it's part of a collection, and can see a complete <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/listing/object-205012096">listing of that collection</a>. Our priorities mean that we’ve deferred implementation of some of the features we want in the longer term but we know we can leap into action soon. In fact, Tom Grinsted, our multimedia manager, has put together a project with UCL and K-Int that gives us a focus for some of this functionality and is just getting underway now, which is rather exciting. Luke Smith and Giv Parvaneh are also busy planning various projects for the next few years as part of the <a href="http://www.1914.org/">centenary of the First World War </a>that will also draw on and feed into the system. So watch this space.<br /><br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Licensing</span></strong><br />All that e-commerce work around collections has also meant reviewing the way we licence our material. Recent developments at national and European level – notably the creation of the <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/">Open Government Licence</a> by the National Archive (TNA) – and the steps that some of our peers have made in offering their assets for creative reuse to the benefit of all, have also had an impact. IWM has now launched its <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/">User Licence</a> (essentially the OGL), which frees up almost 200,000 images, audio recordings and films, for non-commerical use. Regular "fair dealing" restictions apply to others, like this nice <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/24324">Ronald Searle picture</a>. I'm afraid we've not yet got a filter in collections search for items with this licence, but try right-clicking on an image on <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205213157">an item page</a> to see if you can download or embed it.<br />The licence applies to IWM-generated content and data too, so although we don’t yet have a public API to our collections the data around them is up for grabs. Hopefully I'll have more to report on this before too long.<br /><br /><br />In the next post I'll talk through the website itself. Stay awake at the back!Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-54384493766027419262011-10-25T23:06:00.006+01:002011-10-26T11:07:41.369+01:00On [that] day, 4th October 2011... pt 1Tuesday October 4th was a big one for the Imperial War Museum. We in the New Media department had been working towards it for well over a year, but several other parts of IWM also had first-night nerves as the presented something shiny and new to the public. All in all we launched a new brand, the <a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/">beta of the all-new IWM website</a>, a re-skinned image licensing site, overhauled e-shop, redesigned print sales website, and phase 1 of a new system for delivering collections information to our public digital interfaces. We also took the covers off a new licence – the IWM User licence – which applies to lots of data and content and a large number of the images, audio and film (yes indeed) on the new site. The common theme, you’ll note, is that the web is part of all of these, so it’s fair to say we were probably the nerviest of all departments!<br />The timing was no accident, of course: Carolyn, our head of department, was not far into her plotting before it became apparent that we’d be launching our new website along with the new brand, and that we’d be tying in wherever possible with a 3-year e-commerce programme. The brand re-launch in turn was timed to fit with the opening of a major new exhibition coming to IWM London, "<a href="http://beta.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/shaped-by-war-photographs-by-don-mccullin">Shaped by War</a>", and the e-commerce programme entailed some important implications for licensing too, so the dependencies were complex.<br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>The brand</strong></span><br />I can’t report much about the brand except to say that timing was critical, and that what we were most interested in was whether or not the brand structure would have any implications for information architecture and site navigation. We needed to know how we’d be expected to deal with what could be considered informally to be sub-brands (whether that be our branches, e-commerce sites, exhibitions, partnerships etc). To remain uncontroversial I will limit myself to saying that we were not given a recipe-book for how to apply the brand in a digital environment and that evolving its digital expression has been quite a challenging process. Personally I quite like the wedge device, although as lapsed geologist it reminds me of a horst. Or perhaps a graben, I always mixed them up. I think it’s fair to say that reactions have been polarised but the commenters on branding and design websites, at least, appear to dig it.<br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">E-commerce sites </span></strong><br />Over the last couple of years IWM has been using the excellent services of consultant <a href="http://www.alicegrant.co.uk/">Alice Grant</a>, who has led a comprehensive e-commerce programme with literally dozens of projects within it. In particular she has reviewed the way we conduct business around our collections assets, with one vital development being the establishment of a commercial unit. She’s also been co-ordinating a number of activities to try to ensure that when we relaunched the website our B2B and B2C e-commerce offers made sense and worked well.<br />Over on the site at <a href="http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk/">http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk/</a> that you can still see for a couple more weeks, we have split out the image sales and licensing functionality and re-skinned that, and put it onto isl.iwmcollections.org.uk. The ISL aspect of the old site will persist for a while yet because its functionality will remain part of our business processes for the foreseeable future, whereas the straightforward collections search part will shortly be retired, having been replaced by the corresponding part of our new site (of which more later). The ISL site again sports the new brand, was designed by Christian and implemented by Andrew Stephens in our ICT department.<br />I should mention the film sales site, which has been bubbling under for the last year but not really been promoted. We’ve now got a strengthened infrastructure and rely on this to deliver media through the core sites too, so I think it’s worth shouting a bit about film.iwmcollections.org.uk/ too. This B2B-facing site is again a Statham reskinning of the basic site built by <a href="http://www.cambridgeimaging.co.uk/">CIS</a>, whose DAMS we use (Imagen). Looks like we need to get the new logo in there though, Christian...<br />Our consumer-facing print sales site run by Cabinet UK at <a href="http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/">http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/</a> also had a complete facelift and its range multiplied about 10-fold, I believe. Not only that, it links back to our main site’s collection records pages. I reckon it looks pretty slick.<br />Finally, earlier this year we launched a heavily re-skinned <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.iwmshop.co.uk">e-shop</a> in the knowledge that we might be obliged to revisit the whole process when the branding process was complete or when Cybertill launched their long-anticipated new software. The old site was haggard but, working within the constraints of the existing templating system, we were limited in what we could do. Nevertheless, with some imaginative design courtesy of our very own Christian Statham and some creative coding courtesy of Garry Taylor at <a href="http://thebouncingball.com/">the Bouncing Ball</a> we ended up with a really good solution. Actually, that doesn’t do it justice at all. Under the skin, you’ll find quite a lot remains of the minging HTML that the system churns out and which cannot be changed at present, but which Garry’s CSS and jQuery skills have made look 10 years newer than their real age. For the beta website launch we made only small changes, mainly to tie in with the new brand.<br />All of these sites have another new dimension which is not necessarily visible on the sites themselves: they are integrated with the new website. We have built an index for our e-shop catalogue and integrated it into the site, returning results in the global search and enabling us to build carousels or products for promotion and use them anywhere; and images or films for which you can buy a licence or hard copy offer you this opportunity when you look at them in our collections pages.<br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Hosting</span></strong><br />It was time to revisit how we host, to give us more control and at the same time slash costs. From an arrangement where our main sites were hosted on 3 dedicated servers at Rackspace we have moved to a hybrid solution with a beefy dedicated server for databases, Solr and some media, and a variable number of cloud servers to run web applications, including our core Drupal installation. We’ve also virtualised the old CMS to run a few legacy bits of that site. Whilst previously our hosted sites were isolated, we are now in a position to integrate them securely with services running on our own network, for instance with an <a href="http://oembed.com/">oEmbed</a> service that we use to tie the DAMS in with <a href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a>, or for replicating data or connecting to mail servers (things that could be done other ways but which are easier and more secure with the VPN we have in place). Parts of our web offer are delivered directly from our DMZ – our streaming media, the ISL site and our blogs – but again we’re now well placed to change this, if we wish, without huge investment, as the cloud part of our solution makes rapid expansion or scaling straightforward.<br />Having come from a background of essentially Windows/IIS/ASP+ ASP.Net/SQL Server and made the decision that we should go with the full LAMP stack, this was one of several steep learning curves I’ve been on (am still on). I’ve never been a server admin although I’ve picked up a certain amount of knowledge over the last 12 years, but it was pretty much like starting from scratch when I was faced with a bare-bones RHEL server and a Putty window. Fortunately I’ve got several experienced colleagues to put me on the right path or do various thing on my behalf. Together with some help from Rackspace themselves we’ve got there. I still have a long way to go but now that we’ve launched the beta at least it’s looking a bit less intimidating.<br /><br />In Part 2 I'll say a bit about collections, licensing changes, and the main website itself. Then if I get that far I might do a post to say how things have been going in the first couple of weeks.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-2982541033564665392011-10-21T13:16:00.006+01:002011-10-23T16:31:43.295+01:00SOAPhar, so goodAll of a sudden video and sound on our new beta site, streamed from our DAMS, stopped working this week. We embed these using a (currently) private oEmbed service which gets its data from a SOAP service on the DAMS to construct the streaming URL for a given media item, with which it then assembles the embedding code. The SOAP call was timing out and giving the following error:<br /><code><br />Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: </code><br /><code>[WSDL] SOAP-ERROR: Parsing Schema: can't import schema from 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/' in C:\[myfile]:20 </code><br /><code>Stack trace: #0 C:\[myfile](20): SoapClient->SoapClient('http://[DAMS WSDL URL]', Array)</code><br /><code>...<br /></code><br />That schema file is being imported at a namespace declaration in the DAMS SOAP service's WSDL file. It could be accessed just fine with a browser but the PHP soapclient call which loads the WSDL file had no such luck and would just time out.<br />I have no idea why a service that had been running fine for 8 months or so suddenly went freaky, but I did suspect another unheralded proxy change, since these tend to play havoc with our dev environment and at the moment the oEmbed service is running there. Other people have experienced problems with this encoding schema at xmlsoap.org, but since it's going to be present in all proper SOAP calls that doesn't really tell us whether it's indicative of a problem with the URL and xmlsoap.org, or of network issues. All the same, what worked for <a href="http://www.devraju.com/programming/fatal-error-uncaught-soapfault-exception-wsdl-soap-error-parsing-schema-cant-import-schema-from-httpschemas-xmlsoap-orgsoapencoding/">this guy</a> worked for me. Well actually, whilst he simply removed the namespace import element, whereas, I saved the WSDL for the SOAP service that my oEmbed script called and edited it to point at a local copy of the encoding schema at xmlsoap.org. Happily my SOAP call seemed to work just as well with a local copy of the WSDL and everything started working again. Hooray! I had wondered whether I would be scuppered because I couldn't edit the original WSDL file, but since the WSDL doesn't actually <em>do</em> anything, it just lays out the instructions for a SOAP consumer to use, it was aboslutely fine to edit and run it locally.<br />Perhaps this will help others suffering the same grief.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31452346.post-35173119538417070232011-10-16T11:38:00.005+01:002011-10-23T16:19:15.953+01:00Flash 10.2 on Android phones with ARM: partial successImagine my disappointment and annoyance and slight feeling of miss-selling* when I discovered that my otherwise lovely new Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy Ace / S5830) couldn't install Adobe FlashPlayer. OK, it's a low-end device but that's lame. Word is that the ARM chip is less powerful than Adobe would like. However rumour also has it that it's perfectly powerful enough for the job. And without Flash, there's no iPlayer and no embedded YouTube (I can use the YT app that's pre-installed, but not watch videos embedded with the Flash player).<br /><br />So when I tried to install Flash from the Android marketplace and was told I couldn't I did a little looking round and found that some very useful people had hacked the 10.2 version of the official player to make it installable on devices with slower chips. I was a little nervous, of course, about putting an unsourced app on, but although I might have unwittingly installed some well-disguised malware so far there's no sign of that. My success is only partial, however, because iPlayer is still unhappy and wants me to go to the marketplace to download again. I understood it only needed Flash 9 but perhaps it's using some other way to tell that it's not happy with my phone (presumably based on what plugin the browser is reporting). Embedded YouTube clips work now, but videos from our own collections at IWM don't work :-(<br /><br />So I'm still rather peeved that the limitations of the phone were not made clear, and also that as users we are aren't even offered the choice of installing the official FlashPlayer, performance reservations notwithstanding. After all, I can see that the hacked version does work perfectly well on those sites that don't whinge about it, so chip speed evidently isn't a deal-breaker.<br /><br />In any case, if you want to have a go with it, check it out here:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.androidcampus.in/2011/10/adobe-flash-player-102-for-armv6-and.html">http://www.androidcampus.in/2011/10/adobe-flash-player-102-for-armv6-and.html</a><br /><br />I could have linked straight to the APK but that seems a little rude given that you're getting something for nowt so you do have to go through a couple of screens of adverts; keep going!<br /><br />*to be honest, not just a feeling of miss-selling but of stupidity, having forgotten <em>caveat emptor</em> and done sod all research before going into the 3 shop. I leapt at the chance to upgrade considerably for no extra cash, and I wouldn't have paid much more anyway.Jeremyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11209315592056360247noreply@blogger.com0