Why I blog

Lorcan Dempsey cited an article in The Atlantic Why I Blog. Now, I don't really blog in the sense that Andrew Sullivan means, inasmuch as I don't have much of a relationship with those few readers I have (most of whom currently arrive through searches about the IE7 prompt bug-by-design, or web services for OSGB to lat/long conversion), and I recognise that this intercourse is a key part of what makes blogs a stimulating evolution of (self-)publishing. So there's lots that he says that doesn't apply to me, but I blog all the same, and I'd already been thinking about my motivations for it when that article appeared, so here's my bit.

As the blurb here explains, this is a research diary firstly, intended for me to jot down links and reactions to things I've come across when Delicious won't do, and to explore a few ideas as they develop in case they're useful for my doctoral research. There are reports on conferences and the like, all written with the knowledge and vain expectation (vain in both senses, usually) that other people with my interests will stumble across them and find something interesting or useful, as well as being for myself. Writing for other people like this came later, after I opened the blog from its private status, and it has changed the nature of the blog a bit. In fact opening the blog has been negative in one respect, because I can no longer write about things that need to remain private for the sake of the institutions I want to write about - I have to go back to keeping this stuff in Word, or saving it as draft blog posts that you lot can't see.

I have found myself tempted into using this place for other purposes, too. I've never kept a proper diary - the implied need to write daily is too much for a lazy arse like me - but have sometimes wanted to jot down particular thoughts, accounts or memories, which do occasionally end up on stray bits of paper or notebooks, or perhaps in e-mails or letters, albeit somewhere else in the world. I have, in fact, an almost pathological attachment to memories and my personal past, perhaps rooted in having a happy childhood that's often acted as the key to a happiness in the present. If you twin this with a collector's disposition you have someone who

1. collects Incredible String Band LPs (the ultimate band for those who yearn for childhood in the years of hippy fallout, and the collector geek's format of choice), and
2. spends probably too much time trying to capture moments, sometimes at the expense of experiencing them.

Perhaps it's also some foolish lunge for some kind of immortality, for freezing my acts, thoughts and experiences in something "permanent" that might outlast me (as if this were the least bit likely with a blog!). Since our children were born this has changed slightly. I now have the only kind of extended existence I want: I can't live forever but I've had a hand in making something better than me, in making three new universes that by natural law should outlast mine, and who could wish for more? At the same time, the memories are more valuable than ever, and the urge to hold on to every last moment stronger than ever. I keep an occasional journal about the kids' development, and I've also discovered that shedding this urge to leave some amazing, permanent legacy has given me a new freedom to actually do stuff. I'm one of the cursed billions that have the desire to create - music, prose, art, whatever - but lack talent. If you have some need to create for other people, this is a problem, but if you are doing it for yourself it's not, and you can get on and do stuff. Well, now that's how I feel, and I can get on and write songs or whatever with no concern that actually they're pretty rubbish by anyone else's measure: the act of creation and of capturing those memories in a different fashion is the reward in itself.

So I've occasionally used this blog to stray off topic, but I do sometimes wish to go further. This is why lately I've been mulling over why I blog: there have been big things happening at work or at the school where I'm a governor, for example, that I can't necessarily write about, although they may get their chance in future. More importantly there have been very important family things that I want to write about, but which aren't for here - health things, family history, stuff that's not just about me and not yet resolved. They're the sort of thing to share face-to-face with friends and family, but the authoring box on this web page is so tempting for just telling it all to, because writing is such a good way of straightening your thoughts and sharing worries or excitement. Fortunately I've said and written some of this stuff to several people now so it's out of my system, but it had me musing on the limits of what I should blog. It's out there for good once you let it go.

Concluding thoughts? Well as usual I don't have a nice wrap-up for this, but I've splurged my thoughts onto the page, and that'll do for me. Perhaps that says it all.

International projects in the international legal minefield

This is but a (delayed) note to remind myself about the challenges that projects like Europeana face in integrating assets from, and providing services to, several countries with only partially-harmonised legal systems. This was brought home to me by a recent German ruling on use of thumbnails by search engines. Amalyah Keshet (on the MCN mailing list) cited the following snippet from Arc Technica's post on the ruling:

"As much as people complain about the challenges of balancing copyrights and fair use in the US, overseas courts have been happy to provide examples that remind us that some aspects of US copyright law are actually fairly liberal. The latest such reminder comes courtesy of a case in Germany that revisits an issue that appears settled in the US: the right of image search services to create thumbnails from copyrighted works to display with the search results. The German courts have now determined that this is not OK in Germany, where Google has just lost two copyright suits over image thumbnails..."

MashLogic: worth hooking into?

This article on RWW about MashLogic suggests one more tempting possibility for Europeana to distribute itself more widely and get itself integrated web-wide, for those users in love with culture (in the widest sense). MashLogic is a Firefox extension that tries to create links between the page you're looking at and resources that you've chosen, built on web services and soon to become open to developers and partners. Some sort of semantic processing is presumably at the heart of it, and it sounds as though you can effectively help to teach it. Evidently it's in a similar space to Adaptive Blue, amongst others, but offering considerable scope for the user to tailor their experience and for content owners (like Europeana) to hook into it.
I guess people are much more likely to install a plugin that can do the same for a variety of providers in preference to one that's only good for one. So if Euroepana can piggyback on something like this, its appeal could made much broader.

Oh. And there was me thinking Thomson were cool, what with OpenCalais and all.

Thomson suing Zotero. Bummer. If the outcome goes the wrong way it's not great news for quite important stuff like interoperability and doing stuff with your own data. Thomson Reuters are definitely not being cool here.

Courtesy of Danny Weitzner's "Open Internet Policy" blog.

The End of the Road

Not some dire news, but a long-delayed write-up of the festival I went to on the 12th-14th September. Well, the long and short is that it was fantastic, the perfect reintroduction to (multi-day) festivals since it's been, um, a long time. I went with friend/brother-in-law John, who I went to Glasters with a few times (2-4, we can't really recall) in the '90s and we both felt it was pretty much the perfect festival and the perfect line-up. OK, if it was my actual fantasy line-up there would have been Micah Blue Smaldone and Kaki King, too, and one or two others, but quibbles aside there were so many acts there I'd been longing to see, and a number of wonderful surprises too.

Amongst the acts I was eagerly anticipating were the beautiful Shearwater. They struggled a bit with the sound and we didn't see the set through, mainly due to exhaustion. Micah P Hinson was super intense, looking like Woody Allen in wellies but blasting away any ambivalence I might have harboured about the album I have. Dirty Three! I cannot say enough about how exhilarating they were, another trio with an unfeasible amount of emotional energy in a small package. We were struck by the intimate dynamic you could see in quite a few trios, and the power it could generate, and none more so than D3. Kurt Wagner of Lambchop was an amazing one man show, entertaining and engaging but intense, and raw like a refracted version of the ancient country blues guys I'm listening to so much right now. Mercury Rev were deliriously cosmic. Calexico wrapped up the main stage joyously and mixed new material I'd never heard with favourites I'd yearned to see them do. We caught some of Bon Iver which was lovely. And the surprises? Bowerbirds (who also chimed in with Bon Iver for a couple of tunes), Liz Green, Devon Sproule, Sun Kil Moon (ex-Red House Painter Marc Kozalek), A Hawk and a Hacksaw (I knew them a little before, but they knocked me out). Any disappointments? Well, perhaps Conor Oberst was a little less enrapturing than I hoped, but then I had very high expectations and he gave it a lot. The band sometimes had a bit too much inclination to, um, please themselves, though. And Tindersticks were Tindersticks, but I preferred them in more intimate venues (Moles in Bath, I recall, was great. Way back when.) I had no great expectations of British Sea Power or Richard Hawley, which were borne out. There was a schedule clash which American Music Club lost, so I don't know how they were - I've loved that band so long it seems wrong to have missed them, but there was an embarassment of riches there and I've seen them several times (again, way back when...)

I'd love to write this up properly but perhaps instead I'll put in a Flickr slideshow and if I get around to annotating those photos that'll do for reviews. Oh, there are a couple of videos of Mercury Rev and Calexico too.

All I'd say to end is, lovely festival, great atmosphere and the right size (5,000 people, don't know how they afford to put it on but it works beautifully). Thanks Sofia and Simon!



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

OT: In't the interweb marvellous?

[Apologies in advance, this is a puerile post]

Oh, the wonder of the Web! Useless knowledge of the sort I most adore but which would previously have been simply unavailable, or impossibly hard to gather, is there in all its flawed glory, should you wish to look. Witness the answer to my casual question to colleague Prez, "surely there must be there people out there called Shirley Knott?". Yes, there are (or were). And I doubt they want us laughing about it, either, but hell, there are worse names.



Who wants to go in with me on a social networking site/self-help group? Perhaps http://www.blemishednam.es/ would do it. I'm seeing forums (OK, that's a bit old skool), widgets, dating, maybe a really pointless API. Well, if you beat me to the execution, at least give me a credit on the site.

A quick test of SemanticProxy: what, did you expect it to be perfect?

You can see Thomson-Reuters' newest semantic web leg-up here: SemanticProxy. The idea is great, it really seems to take OpenCalais' proposition further and offer a helping hand in building all sorts of RDF-centred applications. However a word of caution is advised: you'll probably get some pretty funny results so they need to be taken in the right spirit; they're a great first step but not perfect.
Take this page for example: Shakespeare’s first theatre uncovered. Paste the URL into the box on the demo page. If you look at the entities SemanticProxy identifies, some are impressively accurate. For example, it spots Jack Lohman, Jeff Kelly and Willian Shakespeare as people; identifies currency, facilities and companies reasonably well; finds phone numbers etc.
On the down side, quirks include that it considers the Museum of London a "facility" not a company or organisation; designates Chelsea Old Church (mentioned only in the navigation) both a person and organisation; thinks Taryn Nixon is the director of Tower Theater Company (though the text says "Taryn Nixon, Director of Museum of London Archaeology"); and calls Shakespeare a Hackney planning officer!
SematicProxy looks very impressive, still, but this quick test does at least illustrate what a fiendish problem these guys are trying to tackle. The team point out that it's a beta: "No guarantees, no promises", they say, and I hope they stick at it and that I get to play with it properly some time soon!

Boring notes on stuff cribbed from TechCrunch

OK there's lots of catching up to do but not now. Here are three things from TechCrunch that said to me "these might be useful at museums like MoL" or "research material!" Perhaps I can have some actual thoughts about them in due course.

• Google Launches Audio Indexing. The first mainstream search engine to do this, AFAIK (though not the first with the technology), and the implications for search and semantic integration are obvious
• Internet Movie Database adds video footage. This is here in part because (like YouTube etc, I guess) Europeana needs to keep destination sites like this in mind. Is the IMDB a suitable place for any material from museums, libraries and archives? Perhaps not, but on the other hand they may have material that can stretch the role of the IMDB
• Amazon Gets In On the Content Delivery Business. As Amazon's cloud-play grows, MoL and others may be getting a more attractive way of offering media that has previously been quite hard and expensive to host. We await details and prices!

Gathery and Giftag

So here, by the sound of it, is the hProduct equivalent of Gathery, the application I built to collect museum objects marked up with some POSH. No-one was going to support an object microformat, for strong reasons (though I still wish there was a more general object uF for objects than hProduct), but essentially this product is the same thing, but for making a wish-list. Read more on RWW: Giftag: Social Wishlists Using Open Standards . I'm wondering now, though, whether there might be mileage in using hProduct with extensions for museum collections - it's still better than the nothing we have at present.

Queen and Open Source

A post by Alan McGee on the Guardian's blog on Tuesday argued that Queen, and especially Freddie Mercury, were actually "punk". He hung his case on the assumption that punk meant "never being boring". The vigorous debate that followed in the comments in part attacked this assumption or definition of punk, and in part added new criteria by which we might identify what deserves that label. For me, I'd say that, given the limited nature of the straw man McGee erected, he's right: Queen were punk. But he's wrong, too, in that punk (to many people) is/was more than simply a good show; more indeed than rebellion or subversion, as some comments argued. To be a useful category that doesn't also include, say, Marcel Marceau, Joan of Arc, Jack Kerouac or a nice crucifixion, we need to bundle these characteristics with others. My bundle of essential punk features might be very different from yours - I'd call the Litter, Faust and, yes, the Creation supreme punks, perhaps only the Pistols and Crass were punk enough for you. The point is that it's helpful to distinguish between the phenomenon or category, and the aspects that define its essence. Otherwise we end up with fun but muddled rhetoric - fine on the blog, of course, but not so fine for serious debate.

This next bit is related, bear with me...

Last week, in a meeting about a new delivery system for collections content, Mia and I had a disagreement which echoed a recent debate on the MCG list (parts of the "CMS specifications" thread here). The issue was Open Source and whether it's something that we should require as part of the system we are planning for (and future systems). My argument was, and remains, that we are interested in certain significant properties embodied by the O.S. concept, but that these may be found elsewhere. To find the ones that are important to use - say, the ability to modify the codebase, or the existence of a supportive community of users and developers - we don't by definition have to look for an OS badge (which relates purely to the licence, after all - definition). Things such as a community of developers that are claimed as virtues of OS software may be there as a consequence (or cause) of the licence, but they are neither required for the label to apply, nor present only when the label applies. Nik Honeysett made a related point the other day, arguing on the Musenet blog that

"the communities that would be best served by Open Source, i.e. small/medium museums, are the ones that can least afford to contribute and participate, so they are no better off whether its open source or not - the crux of selecting software is that it meets your requirements"

Once again, it's not that Open Source is "right" or "wrong" but that we need to think analytically about the aspects of it that matter to us and whether they can be furnished by any given solution, not whether it wears the right badge. Access to source code is good, but it doesn't dictate OSS. Communities of developers are good, but not restricted to SourceForge and the like (GotDotNet has served me well). Freedom from reliance upon suppliers is good, but think about which parts of the technology stack you're most concerned about. In our case at MoL, large parts of our stack are "closed source" - the operating system and web server, the framework (.Net) and the CMS we use are all Microsoft and essentially closed. But I believe that we'd be more vulnerable if we implemented, say, Drupal, because our in-house development skills are with .Net, and it's the ability to develop what we have that gives us power over our destiny. It's limited, yes, because the CMS's core is closed, but (a) the data is accessible and (b) around that core is a cloud of .Net source code that I can and do develop, some sourced in the community, and which underlies the bulk of the functionality on our sites. I can't modify .Net (though there's Mono) but I wouldn't want to, nor can I recode Windows (ditto). But we have access to the code that matters most, and that's what matters most. You could in any case build a CMS in .Net and licence it by OS rules, but the next level of the stack wouldn't be OS - does that matter? Chances are that if you're installing some OSS then there's still a proprietary element in your stack, or at least a bit that you would be unable to fix yourself. And even if you're top-to-bottom LAMP and could dive into the source yourself to tweak Apache or Linux if necessary, you're probably still dependent on patented hardware. Live with it.

Both the Queen argument and the Open Source argument, then, come out of mixing up labels and characteristics that can attach to those labels. OSS is great, but for reasons that aren't always relevant or found only in OSS. Queen put on a great show, but that's not the same as being punk. Significant properties, in other words, aren't The Thing Itself.

New Photosynth release

Photosynth v.2: Brady Forest over on O'Reilly Radar has a thorough post on the new release of Photosynth from MS, which (most significantly) includes the ability to create your own "Synths", all of which are shared with/hosted by the community, and which are built with heavy use of your local machine. Clever, and very exciting as far as creating views of museum objects goes. Obviously I have yet to try it out, and who knows, it might turn out to be cheaper and easier to spend a few tens of thousands on a 3D scanner instead, but somehow I doubt it.... Coolcoolcool

Rollin' along with the tumblin' tumbleweed

Well I know it's been pretty quiet on this blog of late, something to do with too much going on at work to think much, and too exhausted in the evenings to do much (aside from fill up the new iPod). And now it's going to get a level quieter still as I'm on leave for a few weeks. Just watch that tumbleweed roll by. Adios for now.

Why Gnip caught my eye: a bit more depth (just a bit)

Eric Marcoullier commented on my last post on Gnip and I wrote him the following e-mail because, as I say, it's about time I worked through a little bit the reason why his baby caught my attention (not that it's a particularly worked through working through, but hey, it's a start). It was a bit much for a comment but enough for a post, so here you go.



*******************************************************************

Many thanks for taking the time to look at my brief notes, you must be a busy man so I really appreciate it. It's definitely time I tried to put some flesh on the bones because it's true, I've barely sketched the link between Gnip and my own preoccupations.

My research is looking at how museums keep their digital stuff useful; in other words, how and when we keep on trying to squeeze value out of the digital stuff we've invested in. I'm trying to put a particularly museum-y spin on it because it would be all too easy to look, for example, at general questions related to digital preservation (yawn). Hence I'm exploring the specific conditions and challenges that museums have to face, as well as the way in which they value what they hold - as a "memory institution" with a remit to preserve and to serve the public, a museum has potentially got a slightly different way of valuing what it holds, though arguably this won't really apply to digital material except in special cases (like digital art). So that's the basic thread of my research: looking at how museums can and do decide a strategy for maximising value from their digital assets, and for planning new ones.

Of course, no museum is an island (that's kind of the point of the 'net, right?) and I'm inevitably thinking a lot about the relationships between museums and other parties that might provide or use services and data to/from them - this is key to extracting value, but it's also a dependency for which we need to understand the risks. In the museum community, a lot of the talk (for a couple of decades or more, now) is about how we share our most obvious USP: our collections data. Loads of work has been done on this and yet we still seem to be a long way from the dream of a way of effectively integrating the collections of more than a few institutions. This is why I've been working with the European Digital Library/Europeana project. The reason that Gnip caught my eye was because it suggests another model for data interchange. It may be not be appropriate for the scenario of sharing collections data, and one could argue that in some ways other museum initiatives share some of its characteristics (federated search, metadata harvesters etc.), but I was interested in whether we could learn from the model of a neutral mediating agent as rather than a central pool of data. We're not short of standards but we are short of co-ordinating mechanisms that we can all trust and feel we leave us with some control over "our" data.

The actual purpose of Gnip as an exchange for social data was probably of secondary interest to me, but of interest all the same - it's just an area I don't know much about. I think that on the whole museums won't need to concerns themselves directly about how whatever it is they do will relate to Gnip: I presume that if they incorporate a third party service in their site, or perhaps have an installation of WordPress, then a lot of the mechanics may be dealt with already (or will be in due course). But concern about interoperability and data portability may well be a reason why many museums (my own included) haven't yet done an awful lot with social software - although there are some notable exceptions. If Gnip helps to address these concerns then all that will still be lacking is our imagination!

One other possibility is that museum applications could indeed work with Gnip to integrate individuals' public information with their own services - say, by drawing links between a person's list of interests or music preferences, and what's in a museum's (or a library's)collection; or by suggesting events to attend based on user location, age and interests. I don't understand Gnip well enough to know if this is plausible, though, but it's an intriguing prospect.

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Thanks again to Eric for taking the time to contact me, I think it speaks well of new ventures like this (OpenCalais was another) when the key people go out out of their way to make contact with the people that are talking about them.

IMLS looks to the future

Once again, kudos to Nina Simon for her latest post, Notes from the Future: Reflections on the IMLS Meeting on Museums and Libraries in the 21st Century. I have to admit I've not read it thoroughly yet but (a) there's lots going on in the IMLS study that overlaps with my research interests and (b) as usual, she has a pretty strong take on it and interesting things to say, and it's productive perhaps to triangulate between her strong perspective and the equally strong conservative perspective she cites. Have a look. If I have time I'll try to digest it properly and give a proper response - both here and on her blog since they want our thoughts (perhaps even non-US thoughts...)

O'Reilly Radar on Gnip

As I mentioned last week, Gnip looks to be at least of tangential interest to use in museum tech, whether because we may be involved in social software, or as a model for addressing the sort of data interchange problems we face (though of course there are alternative approaches). Jim Stodgill has written an article on O'Reilly Radar of which I understand about 30%, but which looks at how Gnip compares to enterprise service bus, in the problems it's tackling and the solution it offers. It's worth a read.

Delayed post #1: aspects of [web] preservation

[[this post never got finished but I'm having a clear-out of my drafts and they're getting published or deleted, ready or not]]

Brian Kelly just blogged [[hmm, well, back in July, I think....]] on the JISC-PoWR site about "three key aspects of web preservation": experience, information, and access. I have a fourth, but I've been using it in the context of "sustainability" (the subject of my thesis), and so first I want to say a couple of words about this vs preservation, since although I've been writing papers for Ross for a couple of years arguing about the distinction between the concepts, I've not really rehearsed this in public before.


For the last couple of years I've been arguing that the problem of sustainability (S) is distinct from that of archive-style preservation (P). I won't go into the details of the distinction here but in essence I see P as concerning the persistence of a state, and S as the persistence of a process or activity. Recent work by Chris Rusbridge and others has been blurring the boundary ever more, although in a useful way: by questioning the purpose of preservation and weighing up what are the important aspects ("significant properties") of resources, they have been starting to argue for an approach to preservation that looks a lot more like what I was previously describing as sustaining. I still sort of believe that it is useful to distinnguish between the two concepts, but there's a lot of overlap.


The aspect that I think is especially pertinent to sustaining is "purpose". I don't think this is the same as the "experience" that Brian cites Kevin Ashley on (although experience and information may feed into purpose). It's focused on the objectives of the resource, which may be attainable through radically different experiences; for example (in the case of the environment in which KA operates), the learning objectives that an educational resource was created to serve. For a museum, perhaps a resource was prepared for use in a temporary exhibition, with the objective of enriching the experience visitors to that physical space by illustrating relationships betweeen objects, and providing media resources to bring them to life. When that exhibition closes, the original objective is partially voided - there is no physical visit to enrich - but aspects of it may still be viable - the objects probably still exist and the tales about them are still worth telling, perhaps more so than ever since we've stuck them back in the store-room out of easy access. Brian was talking about web preservation, of course, and I've taken a non-web resource as an example, but my interest in the question of sustainability extends beyond the web and the point applies regardless.

In any given digital resource that we're talking about preserving/sustaining, experience and information at least (perhaps access, too, sometimes) will have contributed to the original purpose to varying degrees - sometimes the experience is the whole purpose, sometimes it's an unimportant side effect of providing access to information. And sometimes it's important to the preserver regardless of its significance to the original purpose.

So if the original purpose is no longer served by a resource, what then for our "preservation" plans? There are still often reasons to preserve (freeze) or sustain (keep alive) an application, or aspects of it - in other words, some sources of value, ranging from historical interest to new uses, which may let a resource adapt and survive. The "significant properties" idea fits in to this. For me, if you are trying to maintain some quality of the original it's more of a preservation activity; whereas if you are more fundamentally interested in continuing to extract value through maintaining utility of whatever sort, we're talking sustaining.

Short cuts

Little more than bookmarks from today:

Short URL/snapshot/citation/bookmarking apps:

• bit.ly http://bit.ly/go
• WebCite http://www.webcitation.org/ (courtesy of Seb Chan)

Google's new VW lively. Is it cool or does it suck? Some debate. RWW techcrunch Raph Koster

I need to find out more about Lexara and Project SILVER: http://www.lexara.com/lexara/project-silver/ and http://www.silvereducation.org/

EDLocal >> EuropeanaLocal

Fleur says: EDLocal becomes EuropeanaLocal. I'm looking forward to hearing what else came out of the recent launch of the project, which will hopefully help to smooth the process of participating in Europeana for institutions of all sizes. I'll keep you posted (but I expect Fleur will do a better job so keep an eye on her blog!)

Two interesting ReadWriteWeb stories

Just a quickie. Two things caught my eye on RWW:
Confirmed: Microsoft Acquires Powerset. So MS moves into semantic search with the acquisition of a promising startup. Yahoo! will have to fight ever harder for survival if MS is really determined to do this. Anyway, it may be time to start talking to MS about how to work with all the yummy structured data we have in MLAs (yes, that means you EDL)
Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web. This is all about tackling the myriad interfaces and data formats of social software APIs. It's a comparable problem to that faced in our sector and the solution of a mediator is interesting mainly for that reason. It's also potentially directly relevant where we're working with data in social sites.

Showing us the way

I presume it's uncontroversial to say that it would be useful to have terminologies available as web services. Right now, you can browse various sources of reference terms that are useful to museums (amongst others): sources like the british & irish archaeological bibliography (including its approved term lists); the National Monument Record Thesauri; and the museum codes and SPECTRUM terminology termbank maintained by the Collections Trust (to highlight some UK examples). I'm certain it would be useful to have these available as web services (some more so than others); likewise other thesauri that AFAIK aren't available to programme to: ULAN and AAT, for example, which are collected under the CCO initiative.

There's every chance that I misunderstand some or all of these "services" in terms of how they're used and by whom (I'm very shaky on the status of CCO and its relationship to AAT, for a start). But I'm sure that there are many ways in which a programmatic interface to their contents could be used. Which is why (to get to the point of this post) the service that OCLC's top geeks have come up with here is a great example for us in the museum world to look at (blogged here on Hanging Together). This is a collection of esssentially library-related thesauri onto which they have created web services. I like the look of FAST best of all; it could be really useful for us in the dusty bones world too.

Lorcan Dempsey also blogs today about the WorldCat identities API and other cool services. I fancy the name look-up service: aside from anything else it gives us a URL to refer to for those individuals in the WorldCat database. Here's a not-so-random entry.


So once again we can learn a lot from libraries leading the way. One of the cool things, though, is that OCLC are a cross-domain organisation, and people like Dempsey think constantly about breaking down the barriers between libraries, archives and museums. If they've sprinkled their magic onto library terminologies, I'm sure they'll be only too happy to help the museum world to take similar steps.