The Reg: no fan of the PSP (I don't mean the Sony one)

The Reg is clearly not a great fan of Ofcom's Public Service Publisher idea!
TV licence fee 'to fund Welfare For W*nkers' The Register
I'd say not a huge fan of the Guardian either...

Cross-post: The web-monkey speaks

Cross-posted for completeness from our MoL blog

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Hi. My name is Jeremy and I’m a museum web developer. There, I’ve said it. I’m a keyboard-jockey burdened (or as I see it blessed) by at least two sorts of geekdom: a late-born pleasure in ‘pooters; and a long-standing love of museums, and of the special sort of residue of our world that flocculates there (especially, it must be said, “real” things).

Seven-odd years ago I thought about setting up a museum-orientated web development company, to be called MuseioNet or some such nonsense. Thankfully it never got much beyond a cheesy name, because now I’m starting at least to get an idea of what I don’t know about the subject of building web-based resources for museums. I would have crashed and burned horribly if I’d tried to go it alone back then. I’ve been at the Museum of London about 6 years now, learning on the job. That’s pretty much inevitable anywhere, I suppose, and certainly in technology it’s a basic requirement owing to the speed of change – no matter how much you are on top of your chosen specialism today, tomorrow you’ll be slipping backwards.

Mia has already talked about her job, and although hers is more database-y and mine more webby, our roles have a fair degree of overlap so I’m not going to say much about what we do in a general sense; I want to talk instead about some current projects.

First thing to say is that roughly half of my time is spent on project-related work. Right now I’m really just wrapping up some odds and ends and catching up with some of the day-to-day stuff that’s piled up – bug fixes, data extractions, style-sheet changes. The odds and ends include a map interface for the London Sugar and Slavery website, which gives another way of exploring some of people and events that feature in the gallery of the same name. The map can be found in the gallery too. Things have been somewhat held up by our attempts to make the interface simpler and more intuitive for users, which often makes things dramatically more complex behind the scenes. I don’t know how many more
such applications we will build: we use ESRI products in-house, and their ArcIMS product powers the LSS map (and this one), but the power and flexibility of free mapping applications out there (Google and Yahoo! are amongst the most prominent) make them increasingly attractive. It would be a bit of a learning curve to learn to do all the things we want to do with these but ArcIMS is pretty complex too. We’ve already used Google Maps here and Yahoo! Maps to show our location map in context.

Another project that I dearly hope will soon be wrapped up is a very cool tool for creating quizzes and presentations, primarily for use within the context of our Learning Online site. The tool is complex and there have been problems with its development and implementation but you can see examples of what it has been used to create in the Black History section of that site. Teachers can use these interactives in a classroom situation on interactive whiteboards or regular desktop computers. The application is being developed by a Brighton company and my role has been as an advisor and in integrating it technically with our systems, as well as testing the darned thing when a fix is applied.

Mariruth Leftwich, who is overseeing the latter project, is also responsible for the recently launched poster maker, built by e-bloc to Mariruth’s brief. We can load up a bunch of images on a theme and visitors can put together a poster with them, print or submit it and finally see it in a gallery. It’s pretty cool. Again, my role was as advisor and in ensuring that it would work with our core systems and that we’d be able to live with it long-term without needing too much support. Mariruth is leading on another project I’m advising on too, which is a site for key Stage 1 kids about the Great Fire of London. This is a partnership with several other London organisations, which will fill a gaping hole of decent online resources on that subject for that age group.

The question of long-term sustainability is a key one to me, and has become so in large part because of another “project” on which I am working, namely my PhD on sustaining digital resources in museums. The museum gives me a great deal of support in this, and hopefully I am starting to return something to them as I develop as a practitioner. It’s not just me, I think that we’re all thinking a little more explicitly about the question of longevity now, bringing to the surface something that was always at least in the back of our minds. There’s a whole host of things going on in the MoL Group that tie into the question of digital sustainability: the projects I’ve mentioned and many others (not least Mia’s social software, including this blog); a review of records management; the evolving plans for IT in the Capital City Galleries that will open a couple of years hence.

Well, I’ve gone on enough for now. I should have said less about maps and more about Capital City but this is a week late already and I’d better get it online. It’ll wait till next time. Bye.

Fotowoosh breaks cover

IIRC, you can download the necessary code to run Fotowoosh or whatever they originally called it yourself, but who wants to do that? Now (I discover, thanks to OUseful) they have made it available through Facebook. I hope I'm not breaking any rules that I've not read about by embedding here an instance that I've made through that site. Here you go, anyway, a view of the Getty Museum with LA in the background. It's evidently not the perfect sort of photo for the job but you get the idea.

RWW's interview with Dr. Paul Miller

A good read. Talis seem a really interesting company (which I'd already gathered from what Keith Alexander was saying earlier this year). Which reminds me, I must find the time to pursue that lead properly... Too much on, dammit! Anyway, RWW are well into SW at the moment, likewise TechCrunch, and they're right, there is a lot going on and some really exciting convergence with social software. Can we keep up?

Semantic Technology In Action: An Interview with Dr. Paul Miller

OpenID in HE

eFoundations reports on last week's OpenID meeting which looked at the situation from the perspective of higher education (in part).

Brooklyn Museum and social software

Nins Simon has posted this interview with Shelley Bernstein on Museum 2.0. Interesting from the POV of museums experimenting with various current social software gubbins, and how they feel this fits in with their mission.

Odds and sods 3

Well what with disease, conferences and various other out-of-office experiences I have had very little time at my desk to do real work, let alone meta-work like this and I have some catching up to do. However real work must come first, so this will have to be super-skimpy.

First, Ross's new book should be out any day now. I can't wait to read it. I just flicked through the proof in his office and know it's going to be a great and stimulating read.

We've opened a new gallery at MiD , "London, sugar and slavery", which I can't wait to see tomorrow when I'm at Museum in Docklands for the MCG meeting. My part has been to do with the ArcIMS mapping application, which isn't yet on the web but is in the gallery. Let's be honest, ArcIMS is a pain in the rear and you need a pretty good reason to justify the effort involved if you choose to use this over one of the free mapping apps, although of course they also have their learning curves and limitations. What they don't have is installation issues; OTOH you can't install them, and hence your client machines must have web access enabled. As our experiences this summer with web access on gallery machines was so dreadful we're keen to avoid this, although from past experience we know it's perfectly possible to do this safely and effectively - we just seem to be lacking the skills at present. On the subject of installation, I should say that the current version of IMS is actually pretty straightforward, perhaps disturbingly so - I think I was looking for all sorts of post-installation configuration changes to do that didn't actually need doing. But there are always complicating factors, and it's still taken me the best part of 3 days to get the thing working on our internal CMS server.
Anyway, our app uses ArcSDE, a new departure for us, and Pete's written some cool queries to make this a little more interactive than some of our previous efforts. We've got some bugs to iron out, to do with our merging and over-riding tool behaviours, but it's reasonably presentable.

Next up, Mia. Our social software torch-bearer has been working hard in all sorts of directions trying to get us off the ground with blogs, forums etc., not to mention organising our chaotic efforts with Flickr and the like. She's now got us going here: http://mymuseumoflondon.org.uk/. BIG congratulations, we're in the 21st century! Now we need to work out our management practices, encourage authors, look at how to embed and integrate this with our main sites, and see how it takes off.

I guess I should mention Jonty, but I'd rather not. If you insist you can check him out on our sites or on YouTube.

CHArt: the conference last week deserves a post of its own. For now, I'd like to give honorary mentions to J Milo Taylor, Tara Chittenden, Jon Pratty and Bridget Mackenzie, Tanya Szrajber, and Douglas Dodds, whose presentations I particularly enjoyed.

EDLNet. Did I write about this yet? I hope so. Watching over the mail list and looking at some discussion documents (so far simply lurking) I have some hope that the project will place the right emphasis on function over interface, given limited resources. Jon and Bridget talked about "Your Paintings" at CHArt, so far just a proposal but one that I would think could be designed to mesh well with EDL. I hope to talk more to Jon about this tomorrow.

Martin Bazley and Nick Poole are keen to get together with some of the people involved in IT in the London Hub so we've set up a meeting at MoL next week to see what we can draw out, initially to help them with a strategy for the SE Hub. I'm interested to see what they come out with for a strategy there. I also know that Martin wants to pursue some of the issues around stats that Dylan and I were talking about before, since he has got the job of writing a report for the London Hub on the question. I'm just a half-blind opinionated fool on the subject but if I have anything useful to offer I'll try.

Kurt Stuchell has put together a widget bringing together podcasts and blogs from/about museums worldwide. I reserve judgement on the thing itself, which I'm sure will be of use to some, possibly me included. The main point is that it's nice to see this happening in museums, full-stop. There must be lots of other imaginative ideas out there for what museum material can be widgetised. The Rijksmuseem's widget is perhaps obvious but effective nevertheless and perhaps we should do something a little similar: push object data out in an RSS feed to be consumed via a client-side JS snippet, perhaps. As I say, not that imaginative but worth a crack.

Micah Blue Smaldone. Do yourself a favour and get some. He may not be your cup of tea but you need to find out for yourself. The more I hear the more I'm ensnared. Follow far enough from the link above and you'll reach this where you can hear some spell-binding live renditions.

What else is going on...APIs again

There's a lot to say about EDL since I attended the meeting of Working Group 3 (which concerns users) last week. I haven't the time right now, but I should note that (a) I was quite taken aback by the way that my arguments for an API ended up sending the whole meeting onto a different track, about which I felt a little guilty, and (b) I am now clearer that an API is the essential thing, but that a portal site really does have a place, and that an API can help ensure that its potential is realised by opening up the possibility that third parties can build widgets etc to work within it, or integrate their applications with the portal. But a lot of the talk was like juggling jelly: so many things are not firrnly established, or at least weren't clear in that context (like data structure, or the location of the content vs the catalogue metadata), and it makes it rather tricky to keep all these unknowns in the air and have a sensible conversation. But it keeps me coming back to the point that concentrating on the functionality, not the user interface to it, is where EDL should expend its efforts.

 

On a very related tip, Andy Powell on eFoundations today mentions the "repository as platform" idea (http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2007/10/repository-as-p.html), in respect of recent ePrints developments. I haven't read a digested this lot properly yet but it's pretty much where I think EDL needs to be at too.

 

Finally, Google's latest endeavour finds them offering as a standard an API model for social networks, OpenSocial. Along with OpenID, we may find that this takes us a good way to standardisation. The next thing is for maps, perhaps. At present you can use libraries to negotiate the different APIs for the various providers, but a standard API would be better. More sustainability for all!

I'm through

Got through my APG transfer. Phew. It wasn't entirely painful (I had a sympathetic, patient and friendly panel) and I came out with some useful suggestions, especially WRT my research plans (ignore small museums), my schedule (give myself another year) and where I might go with this question of value (look into other types of value). Clearly I could have done a better job with my paper and my talking about it evidently cleared up some questions for the panel, but I don't think I gave a very good idea of the amount of theoretical work I've done. In other words I sort of cracked up. I know the paper was pretty crap, though, which has something to do with writing it in a rush after finishing paper 3 at the end of September, meeting Ross to discuss a fortnight later, and getting the APG paper in a week after that. It's also not unrelated to the fact that in 1000 words or so it's hard to summarise the 30,000 words I've written - all I could do was say what I'd looked at, not what I'd found.

 

But hey, I'm through, they said some nice things and made useful suggestions so now I must move on and knock that research plan into shape.

Names authorities

The Virtual International Authority File OCLC project looks like another possible step in the right direction, different from but kind of paralleling this JISC project. I don't really understand either but need to get 'em down here for their relevance to the Semantic Web (which in this context probably merits capitalisation)

The European Digital Library

I've been trying to get to the bottom of what is really envisaged with the EDL project. There seem to be a large number of overlapping or sub-setting activities going on (i2020, EDL and EDLNet, TEL, DELOS etc.), and what you read in one part sometimes seems to contradict what you see elsewhere. There's a bit written in various places about the digitisation and preservation aspects of EDL, but I've had trouble understanding the degree of centralisation that is planned for the access side (will it be a central repository of metadata or a more distributed approach?)Anyway, this FAQs page FAQs page seems to answer some of this, although it's very broad and I'm still unclear on the architecture - if any.
A couple of relevant quotes:
"The Commission is promoting and co-ordinating work to build a common European 'digital library', by which we mean a common multilingual access point to Europe’s cultural heritage."
"Technology is moving fast and there are potentially many different ways of creating virtual European libraries. We should not aim at one single site or structure, but combine efforts in all the countries. What matters is to integrate access. This does not mean that the libraries or digital collections should be merged in a single database or library." [but is there one service behind it all? Or are we talking distributed search?]
"The needs of the users should be central. Developments will be demand-driven, but it is important to take a longer term and visionary view of what the user will get from the library in the way of services. Different users will have different needs and uses: One can imagine researchers wanting annotation tools; other users may wish to develop their family histories and genealogies using the materials in historical community archives." [but who is going to be able to do this development? I want to be able to point to my own sites at EDL and use its searching power and language tools to build my own applications on, which might include UGC or whatever; it would be less satisfactory to have to depend on them to build any such tools. In other words, I would want an API]
I'm still looking for clarity, then, and I've written to find out more. EDL should be fantastic, but the more open it is the more fantastic it will be, and I think that institutions will be keener to provide material if they can then hook into the back-end and really make something of it. That can only foster innovation. Fingers crossed

Adactio on the new paradigm of public/private

Ever though-provoking Jeremy Keith writes in Lock up your data of the clash of paradigms between those who assume that all their data will be public unless they specifically say otherwise vs those he expect the default to be privacy (old skool, like Jeremy and me, I guess). He suggests that this is not a technological question but a cultural one, to be addressed by a conversation between those offering APIs/access to data, developers using those APIs, people creating the data, and indeed search engines that crawl API driven sites. I haven't much to add except that I find the point about the cultural implications being key to be especially interesting.

.Net goes OS (sort of)

Microsoft to release .Net as Shared Source (as in, you can read it but you can't modify it). Still, an interesting development. However I would really like to be able to get into their damn calendar control and fix it, for one thing.

If size doesn't matter, perhaps you're just not measuring it right

Oh thank you Google!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/25/mesopotamian_nil_cubit/

Somewhat relevant: Task force on economic sustainability of digital data

From OCLC via Lorcan Dempsey, hopefully this will deliver half of what it promises:
Panel to address economic sustainability of digital preservation

Digital collections policies

I just discovered from this page that we contribute to a network

"supporting organisations in London that hold collections of moving image material. It helps researchers and the public find these collections and tries to ensure the preservation of important material made in or about our city"

That page notes that "Film and video is barely mentioned in our current collecting policy", which is also true for multimedia more widely. Stumbled over it whilst googling for any digital collecting policies from museums. Few turned up, though of course libraries do, and there are odd statements from museums about digital material, but nothing very concrete.

This despite the fact my own university offers a module on the MA course looking at "particular issues of digital collections and digital collection management". I guess the problem is partly that I'm distinguishing between a lower-case "collection" of digital assets, and acquisition and accessioning of digital material into the upper-case Collection of the museum. Where the MLA have looked at "digital collections" they mean digitised collections, quite a different thing. Well that's not quite accurate (see here) but it's a somewhat different perspective, and certainly not guidance on a digital collecting policy as such. Netful of Jewels was the same: talking about collections of digital assets in the lower-case "c" sense.

A couple of exceptions: Denver Museum of Natural History's policy

Wellcome Trust's Library's preservation policy

And of course these folks at least have a digital collection, even if I haven't found the policy: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/digital-collections/brooklynbridge/

Still reading Karen Verschooren's dissertation which includes others, so I know there are some out there. Google just hasn't got them all in its brain.

Forthcoming: Yahoo Teachers

Yahoo Teachers looks worth investigating, for my kids' school, as a(nother) model for collaborative web-scraping, and as a possible outlet for MoL educational materials.

MS REST interface action

http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/
didn't get far with this, it's been draft for weeks...

Cross-post: SL memorial to 9/11

[also on The Attic]

Museums and memorials both deal with memory (I know, the clue's in the name) and both need sustaining for this to work. Of course many museums act as memorials and sometimes it's not really clear which we're looking at.

The memorial to 9/11mentioned in 3pointDs post sounds like a case in point (I haven't seen it, still no SL account but slowly getting keener on trying it out). "Artworks" in SL are, it would appear, common enough, indeed so are museums and galleries; but something like this memorial seems to be on a level very appropriate to the question I want to ask regarding experience-level resources, and when and how we decide what will happen to them in the future. There are many other questions of a more museological bent: who can feel ownership of this? does that matter anyway? can we be confident of what we see there?

Maybe I'll sign up soon and decide for myself. If it's as powerful as it sounds I hope the memorial is durable, but the chances of that are hard to assess in these hosted virtual worlds. Empty as it may sound, my thoughts go out to those who lost loved ones that day six years ago, and indeed to those who were lost or scarred. The media is doing a good job of memorialising right now, and my mind is quite full of those terrible events; they never seem to settle down into becoming assimilated knowledge, bleached of much of their original emotion, in the way that other disasters so often seem to. The shock is still there.

DAMIA: IBM's "data mashup" editor

Here's IBM's answer to Pipes, Gears and the rest: DAMIA. It looks interesting in itself, and I liked to hear in an introductory video that they use the term "data mashup" to distinguish it from properly user-facing mashups, which might be built using the data produced by DAMIA. It takes the usual inputs - RSS, data as a spreadsheet - plus XML and, soon, database connections.
The other thing that is interesting about the phenomenon of the mashup editor as a whole is that it's an example of a class of application that has totally bypassed the "packaged software" phase. Although one could well imagine, in a previous age, some software company selling a mashup generator for installation on a developer machine and private server, it's only fitting that the sort of development tool that exists purely because of web services (lower case) should itself be born and flourish on the web.
There are of course great benefits arising from letting people build their mashups online, aside from not needing to buy the software (after all, Google et al could in theory charge). There is nothing to do to deploy, there's no need to have hosting for your software etc. The advantages are plain, but since you could see similar advantages for other software it's still interesting that we have entirely skipped the installed phase. Perhaps that's yet to come? There would doubtless be advantages to that approach, too.