All change for the Imperial War Museum

...well, me at least.

I delayed this post a while whilst the paperwork got sorted out, but it's not been a secret for quite a while that I'm leaving the Museum of London next month (like, I told the world here). However even today a friend at work came up to me and whispered "I heard you're leaving", so for those other friends I've somehow not managed to tell, well, it's true.
It was 8 years ago in January that I began here in my first paid museum job, though I'd never imagined working with computers before starting my Museum Studies MA. It's very much time to leave now, and as luck would have it the perfect opportunity for me turned up at the right time - or as close to the right time as I could reasonably hope! After all, good digital media jobs in museums don't turn up all that often, and if you're looking for a little extra responsibility the choices are fewer still.
Which makes me feel all the more fortunate to have been given the chance to work as Technical Web Manager at the Imperial War Museum. I will be working for Carolyn Royston, who steered the huge and hugely challenging National Museums Online Learning Project through. She was appointed a year ago by the then-recently-installed director, Diane Lees, and since then she's been busy planning how to "put digital at the heart of the museum", assessing what the IWM has and how to move forward, and building a team fit for purpose. I feel lucky to be about to become a part of that digital team, which benefits from a strong vision and backing at the most senior level - not to mention an exceptional collection (both "real" and digitised).
My role, as I understand it (and I guess being new it will evolve plenty) will be some combination of programming and planning, developing a technical strategy to compliment the overall digital strategy, specifying infrastructure and so on. The IWM has some of key factors in place already (a decent DAMS, recently centralised collections databases), but the opportunities are plentiful for doing something fresh. I know that it also has a team of people that are itching to make that happen and I'm so looking forward to getting to know them and finding my place beside them.
I can't leave it at that without also saying how sorry I am to be leaving my friends at the Museum of London. I'm going to miss them. We have been through some real trials but somehow, despite unfair winds, we have managed to do some pretty good stuff, I think. I also regret having to take my leave at this exact point in time (well, in May) before I can fully see out two of the most significant projects I have been part of, and without a single in-house web developer to hand over to. I know that this will make life difficult for some of my most valued colleagues (as well as for the people who are responsible for the previous statement being true).
But whilst a couple of things may have to, well, not happen or not happen for some time, I should be around long enough to see our Collections Online system completed. If not then it won't be far off (thanks to Knowledge Integration), and the first public interface for it in our glorious new Galleries of Modern London should be in testing (thanks to Precedent).
So with only limited handover possible, I'm spending the last few weeks working on this project and wrapping up a few things that have been hanging on forever. Fingers crossed I can leave a few people happy that yes, it finally did get done.

Did I never blog this? Eejit! Here's the LAARC API

I have a feeling I never blogged about the existence of the LAARC API. Currently this is only simple search and we've not as yet "eaten our own dog food" i.e. rebuilt the LAARC catalogue site itself on top of this - that's waiting for the advanced search API, though I couldn't guess at a delivery date for that...
I think I'd meant to do a big explanatory post and since I didn't get round to that just never mentioned it. So for now I'll just get the word out and say, this is the work of Julia Fernee who re-engineered the whole back-end of the LAARC system to make it work sweetly, fixed stuff broken by a change to Mimsy XG, got digital downloads behaving again and ironed out various other un-noticed bugs. Ultimately it's all still based on the work of Sarah Jones and later Mia Ridge, but Julia's work now puts the database in a place where we can build from. Play with the API and let us know what you think.

LIDO references

I've had cause to send links about LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) to a bunch of people and every time struggle to find them because they don't float to the top in Google and, being PDFs, the Delicious bookmarklet doesn't cope with some of them so I hadn't put them there.
So anyway, if you're looking for a way in to LIDO, here are a couple of good references:

• Introduction to LIDO by Regine Stein (a slideshow for a workshop giving the background and fundamentals of LIDO. PDF)
• LIDO - Lightweight Information Describing Objects (the specification as at 11/20009. PDF)
• CIDOC CRM Mappings, Specializations and Data Examples (includes a link to a Word doc explaining the mapping of LIDO to the CRM)

If you know any other resources worth adding, let me know. Also, your thoughts on where LIDO fits in and what its strengths and limitations are would be very welcome! The documents stress that it is a harvesting format rather than a full data exchange format, but is it actually perfectly good for this in many circumstances? If I choose to use it as the format for records coming out of our (forthcoming) API, will I be missing something important?
BTW I have now added these to Delicious the manual way: http://delicious.com/jottevanger/lido

Linked Data meeting at the Collections Trust

[December 2010: I don't even know anymore if this was ever published, or if I simply edited it and it went back into draft. If the latter, duh. If the former, well, in the spirit of an end-of-year clearout here's something I wrote many months ago]
[UPDATE, March 2010: Richard Light's presentation is now available here]

On February 22nd Collections Trust hosted a meeting about Linked Data (LD) at their London Bridge offices. Aside from yours truly and a few other admitted newbies amongst the very diverse set of people in the room, there was a fair amount of experience in LD-related issues, although I think only a few could claim to have actually delivered the genuine article to the real world. We did have two excellent case studies to start discussion, though, with Richard Light and Joe Padfield both taking us through their work. CT's Chief Executive Nick Poole had invited Ross Parry to chair and tasked him with squeezing out of us a set of principles from which CT could start to develop a forward plan for the sector, although it should be noted that they didn’t want to limit things too tightly to the UK museum sector.

In the run-up to the meeting I’d been party to a few LD-related exchanges, but they’d mainly been concentrated into the 140 characters of tweets, which is pragmatic but can be frustrating for all concerned, I think. The result was that the merits, problems, ROI, technical aspects etc of LD sometimes seemed to disappear into a singularity where all the dimensions were mashed into one. For my own sanity, in order to understand the why (as well as the how) of Linked Data, I hoped to see the meeting tease these apart again as the foundation for exploring how LD can serve museums and how museums can serve the world through LD. I was thinking about these as axes for discussion:

• Creating vs consuming Linked Data


• End-user (typically, web) vs business, middle-layer or behind-the-scenes user


• Costs vs benefits. ROI may be thrown about as a single idea, but it’s composed of two things: the investment and the return.


• On-the-fly use of Linked Data vs ingested or static use of Linked Data


• Public use vs internal drivers

So I took to this meeting a matchbox full of actual knowledge, a pocket full of confusion and this list of axes of inquiry. In the end the discussion did tread some of these axes whilst others went somewhat neglected, but it was productive in ways I didn’t expect and managed to avoid getting mired in too much technology.

To start us off, Richard Light spoke about his experiments with the Wordsworth Trust’s ModesXML database (his perennial sandbox), taking us through his approach to rendering RDF using established ontologies, to linking with other data nodes on the web (at present I think limited to GeoNames for location data, grabbed on the fly), and to cool URIs and content negotiation. Concerning ontologies, we all know the limitations of Dublin Core but CIDOC-CRM is problematic in its own way (it’s a framework, after all, not a solution), and Richard posed the question of whether we need any specific “museum” properties, or should even broaden the scope to a “history” property set. He touched on LIDO, a harvesting format but one well placed to present documents about museum objects and which tries to act as a bridge between North American formats (CDWALite) and European initiatives including CIDOC-CRM and SPECTRUM (LIDO intro here, in depth here (both PDF)). LIDO could be expressed as RDF for LD purposes.

For Richard, the big LD challenges for museums are agreeing an ontology for cross-collection queries via SPARQL; establishing shared URLs for common concepts (people, places, events etc); developing mechanisms for getting URLs into museum data; and getting existing authorities available as LD. Richard has kindly allowed me to upload his presentation Adventures in Linked Data: bringing RDF to the Wordsworth Trust to Slideshare.

Joe Padfield took us through a number of semantic web-based projects he’s worked on at the National Gallery. I’m afraid I was too busy listening to take many notes, but go and ferret out some of his papers from conferences or look here. I did register that he was suggesting 4store as an alternative to Sesame for a triple store; that they use a CRM-based data model; that they have a web prototype built on a SPARQL interface which is damn quick; and that data mining is the key to getting semantic info out of their extensive texts because data entry is a mare. A notable selling point of SW to the “business” is that the system doesn’t break every time you add a new bit of data to the model.

Beyond this, my notes aren’t up to the task of transcribing the discussion but I will put down here the things that stuck with me, which may be other peoples’ ideas or assertions or my own, I’m often no longer sure!

My thoughts in bullet-y form
I’m now more confident in my personal simplification that LD is basically about an implementation of the Semantic Web “up near the surface”, where regular developers can deploy and consume it. It seems like SW with the “hard stuff” taken out, although it’s far from trivial. It reminds me a lot of microformats (and in fact the two can overlap, I believe) in this surfacing of SW to, or near to, the browsable level that feels more familiar.

Each audience to which LD needs explaining or “selling” will require a different slant. For policy makers and funders, the open data agenda from central government should be enough to encourage them that (a) we have to make our data more readily available and (b) that LD-like outputs should be attached as a condition to more funding; they can also be sold on the efficiency argument or doing more with less, avoiding the duplication of effort and using networked information to make things possible that would otherwise not be. For museum directors and managers, strings attached to funding, the “ethical” argument of open data, the inevitability argument, the potential for within-institution and within-partnership use of semantic web technology; all might be motives for publishing LD, whilst for consuming it we can point to (hopefully) increased efficiency and cost savings, the avoidance of duplication etc. For web developers, for curators and registrars, for collections management system vendors, there are different motives again. But all would benefit from some co-ordination so that there genuinely is a set of services, products and, yes, data upon which museums can start to build their LD-producing and –consuming applications.

There was a lot of focus on producing LD but less on consuming it; more than this, there was a lot of focus producing linkable data i.e. RDF documents, rather than linking it in some useful fashion. It's a bit like that packaging that says "made of 100% recyclable materials": OK, that's good, but I'd much rather see "made of 100% recycled materials". All angles of attack should be used in order to encourage museums to get involved. I think that the consumption aspect needs a bit of shouting about, but it also could do with some investment from organisations like Collections Trust that are in a position potentially to develop, certify, recommend, validate or otherwise facilitate LD sources that museums, suppliers etc will feel they can depend upon. This might be a matter of partnering with Getty, OCLC or Wikipedia/dbPedia to open up or fill in gaps in existing data, or giving a stamp of recommendation to GeoNames or similar sources of referenceable data. Working with CMS vendors to make it easy to use LD in Modes, Mimsy, TMS, KE EMu etc, and in fact make it more efficient than not using LD; now that would make a difference. The benefits depend upon an ecosystem developing, so bootstrapping that is key.

SPARQL: it ain’t exactly inviting. But then again I can’t help but feel that if the data was there, we knew where to find it and had the confidence to use it, more museum web bods like me would give it a whirl. The fact that more people are not taking up the challenge of consuming LD may be partly down to this sort of technical barrier, but may also be to do with feeling that the data are insecure or unreliable. Whilst we can “control” our own data sources and feel confident to build on top of them, we can’t control dbPedia etc., so lack confidence of building apps that depend on them (Richard observed that dbPedia contains an awful lot of muddled and wrong data, and Brian Kelly's recent experiment highlighted the same problem). In the few days since the meeting there have been more tweets in this subject, including references to this interesting looking Google Code project for a Linked Data API to make it simpler to negotiate SPARQL. With Jeni Tennison as an owner (who has furnished me with many an XSLT insight and countless code snippets) it might actually come to something.

Tools for integrating LD into development UIs for normal devs like me – where are they?

If LD in cultural heritage needs mass in order for people to take it up, then as with semantic web tech in general we should not appeal to the public benefit angle but to internal drivers: using LD to address needs in business systems, just as Joe has shown, or between existing partners.

What do we need? Shared ontologies, LD embedded in software, help with finding data sources, someone to build relationships with intermediaries like publishers and broadcasters that might use the LD we could publish.

Outcomes of the meeting
So what did we come up with as a group? Well Ross chaired a discussion at the end that did result in a set of principles. Hopefully we'll see them written up soon coz I didn't write them down, but they might be legible on these images:

Museums and online logins pt.3: making a better “why” (with a bit of how)

Breaking down collections database silos has long been a dream for me as a user (and consequently as a developer), hence my involvement in and (perhaps unrealistically) high hopes for Europeana. Well, collections-related functions aren’t all that museum sites have in common, and lots of things would work better if a few more walls were knocked over. In Part 3 I’ll suggest some of the things that a service built around universal museum login could offer that aren’t going to happen with the current situation, but could be of value to both museums and their online users.

In the scenario in Part 2 you used your MuPPort ID to log into a museum site that you’d never visited before, and then fiddled around with your profile before using the museum’s thimble freaks’ forum. What else could you do? How about bookmark a few items in the thimble collection’s pages? You could then tag them and put them in a set along with the thimbles you faved on the Framley Museum site, then share this set with a group of thimble lovers on the MoPPort site. Whilst you’re there you put some pictures from the V&A next to others from the British Postal Museum and perhaps use them to build a nice little timeline in Magic Studio (I’d better mention my Declaration of Interest here). How about saving some events listings, filtered to your preferences, from a few museum sites, supplemented with the events listings held in the Culture24 database? This being an OpenID site, if gave it permission to link to your Flickr account you could also see your museum-related groups and contacts here, perhaps filtering new uploads of thimble-related images from known museum Flickr accounts for you to view and comment upon. In short, this would be a service where all your stuff from UK museums would be in one place for you to mix up, share, discuss, tag.

What would be required of museums? Well actually, unless they wanted some function based on registration that the service didn't offer or if they needed access control functionality (authorisation), nothing at all. Imagine then that most of the time you didn’t need to log into museum sites at all, only MuPPort, using the MuPPort bookmarklet to favourite object records and save searches. A museum would be added automatically to your master profile whenever this happened. When login was necessary on a given site – such as for using a forum – it would be semi-automated, much like logging into YouTube when already logged into Google (or like Athens, if you know that). But many services would be much more valuable when run across institutions and would be fit for MuPPort, or a developer building on its platform. And much of the time login is important for tying data to a user rather than for authorising that user, so lots of tools could wrap around sites in just the way that Delicious does: requiring nothing of the site itself, only that the user is logged in to Delicious. If nothing at all is required of the museum, where’s the catch?

Well actually more interesting is, where’s the extra value for museums? Here we’re finally back to recommendation systems, which got me mulling over universal login again. Pretty much any museum isn’t going to learn much from the patterns of their own users alone, whether through their explicit, conscious actions such as favouriting and tagging, or the trails they implicitly leave browsing and searching their site. Put together, though, many users over many sites, hopefully doing more, adds up to a lot of knowledge and a good source of recommendations. This is good for museums and for users.

Well it's late and I've spent too much time on this so I’m going to leave it at that. There’s clearly overlap here with what could be offered by Europeana, but in the UK there are other organisations well suited to the task (of course I’m looking at you, Nick). I wouldn’t want to say really who or what should provide a service like this, but I do think that universal login is only a part: the whole point is to build real value on top of a nexus of users and specialised content which current generalist alternatives can’t really offer. Is there a case for a service like this? I’d love to hear your thoughts. And thanks for getting this far...

Postscript
I’ve put a quick survey up to find out what sort of registration-dependent activities museums run at the moment on and off their own websites. If you work on a museum website it would be really interesting to have your input, which I’ll put on this blog in due course.

Other posts in this series:

• Museums and online logins: the preamble
• Museums and online logins pt.1: who’s doing what, where and why
• Museums and online logins pt.2: making a better “how”

Museums and online logins pt.2: making a better “how”

(or "It's a universal tribulation")
In Part 1, I posited that one reason for museums not to integrate registration and login with their sites must be the hassle for both parties (museum and user). So, what if it wasn't a hassle to give your users a registration facility and a bunch of tools that depend on it? What if it was easy technically and yielded lots of value because it was popular? In short, what if the business case was good (which is incidentally the essence of my perspective on sustainability: sustaining appropriate levels of resources by identifying and sustaining value). If the users liked it because the value to them was higher: the benefits of logged-in actions extended beyond a single museum and let you bring together all your "stuff" from countless museums and galleries? In Part 2 I’ll look at lowering the barrier, before moving on to boosting the rewards in Part 3. First, though, let’s quickly off-road to look at the context within which museums operate online.

A digression: the Modalities of Regulation (from The Digital Sustainability Foundation Course)
I find it difficult these days to think about investment without thinking about sustainability. This isn't just because sustainability should be on your mind when you build something new (doh!), but because the things that make something worth building are the same as those that make it worth your while to keep it going. Or they can be, but that's another blog post.

An organisation’s internal drivers are vital in the question of whether and how they go about "building" and "operating", but these values and imperatives are in constant negotiation with the environment within which they operate. Larry Lessig talks about this in terms of the regulation of behaviour i.e. external factors that affect decisions, amongst them the law, the market, social norms and "architecture", which amounts to the stuff you just have to live with (whether that be the law of gravity, the presence of a mountain in your path, or your inability to see through walls).

An interesting constraint in this discussion is the market, which relates both to the users we have in mind and the ecosystem of competitors, peers and solution providers we operate within (often enough a "competitor" is also a provider of a solution, according to how you come at them c.f. Google, Wikipedia, Flickr, and many more). It's immediately apparent that the market has enabled museums to achieve a lot of social stuff without having to do the tricky stuff themselves, and as importantly tap into a much larger audience as a result. Several brilliant examples of using Flickr make it the most notable case, for me. On the architectural side, OpenID (http://openid.net) is a liberating “constraint” with market-y aspects, being a technical framework that relies on the market for OpenID providers. OpenID hasn't yet seen a lot of museum usage, perhaps because it's a bit technical or again simply because the use case is still too weak for offering logged in sections at all. The Brooklyn Museum lets people use their Google IDs to login (they use this for their famous Posse, which is clearly a compelling use case) but it's not exactly a widespread practice.

Whenever thinking about a solving problem it makes sense to look at the environment, especially the market, and examine what solutions already exist, how they fail, and perhaps how they could be adopted or adapted. For now I'll just say that with Delicious, Google's SideWiki, Zotero and many other relatively generalist, site-agnostic, "wrap-around" tools we have some great foundations to build upon. They form an important aspect of “the market”, and in some cases also the architecture. Before trying to reproduce what they do we should ask the question of whether they fall short in significant ways. I would suggest that they do because, whilst their success is based upon their not requiring anything particular of the web resources they are used upon, there is not much scope for pushing crowd-sourced knowledge back to those resources.

Lower the barrier or De-hassle the users, de-hassle the techs
As a developer, if I were asked to create some functionality that needed people to register I know various ways I could go about it, but it’s not trivial and if you had to deploy it over multiple web apps it could be a bit of a nightmare for a hack like me. Most other museums are even more thinly resourced than my own in terms of developer capacity.

As a user, I’ve got enough logins, thank you, and I’d pause for thought before registering with the Louvre or the BM, let alone Colchester Castle Museum. Another password? Another profile to build and manage? And although I’m going to do much of the same stuff as on all the other museum websites I visit, no connection between them? How useful is a Facebook widget for a my favourite objects from single museum? How many such widgets will I add to my profile? (probably none because I don’t know of any right now, but perhaps that’s due to exactly this barrier: it’s not worthwhile for users nor for single museums to make single museum apps of this sort)

So I’m proposing a UK museum passport – let’s call it a MuPPort for now, so that we remember to change it – a universal(ish) digital login service, although perhaps with an off-line dimension. This would help to lower the barrier for both sides. It would probably be built around OpenID and, to make museum coders' lives easier, would come with a bunch of widgets and code snippets. There would be access level control for those parts of a museum’s site that needed to be restricted to a particular group. Users would benefit from feature profile management tools and from various value-added stuff we’ll look at in Part 3, much of which might not even need the museum to implement MuPPort on their site because it’s not about access control, it’s just about identifying the user and keeping their stuff tied to their identity.

Imagine a scenario where, as a user, you can go to a museum site that you've never visited before and log in using your Google ID, or whatever OpenID identity you have attached to your MuPPort. Before going any further, you decide to visit the MuPPort site and check out your passport master account, where you see individual accounts for three museums you had logged into on previously, together with the stub of an account for the one you just went to. You customise your profile for the new museum, then when you go and contribute to their thimble-lovers’ forum MuPPort will ensure that the right avatar and username show up and are linked through to your Facebook page and blog.

So logging in could be made easier for everyone, but how about the more compelling case for users? Well that's where the fun starts, because whilst it could simply be a central sign-in system that then relies on individual museum websites to take care of all of the real action, for many functions it would make a lot more sense to run them centrally and gain from the pooled content as a result.

Other posts in this series:

• Museums and online logins: the preamble
• Museums and online logins pt.1: who’s doing what, where and why
• Museums and online logins pt.3: making a better “why” (with a bit of how)

Museums and online logins pt.1: who’s doing what, where and why

It's not happening
Right now, not that many museums let users register and do extra stuff online. That assertion is very unscientific, but looking around the London nationals' websites (but looking no further than the home pages/main menus) I find:

• British Museum: No login


• Imperial War Museum: No login


• National Gallery: No login


• National Maritime Museum: No login


• National Portrait Gallery: No login


• Natural History Museum: Login for NaturePlus (forums, blogs, bookmarking etc.)


• Science Museum: No login


• Tate: No login


• Victoria & Albert Museum: No login

Of these, all but the National Gallery are also partners in Creative Spaces, the "grown up" part of the National Museums Online Learning Project launched last year. This requires you to log in to do much of the interesting stuff, and the need for this and benefits of doing so are pretty self-evident (at least if you buy into the application, and there are others in the museum geek community who don't). The login, though, is not good outside Creative Spaces AFAIK.

I realise that my sample was purely London majors and there are perhaps other UK museums that do have registered user areas, but if this sample is at all representative, why is registration, or more pertinently the sort of activity that would require registration, apparently so scarce on museum sites? I mean, there must be lots of things we'd like to do with museum/gallery content or in museum/gallery contexts (meat-space or digital) that would need you to sign up, and there's always loads of talk about funky collaborative stuff, social media, personalisation... So if the big 'uns don't generally do it there's got to be a reason worth digging in to.

There are plenty of reasons why this may be so and I'll have a look at some later on, but in simple terms I'd put it down to "it's tricky to do" and "is it worth it anyway?" (that last referring to the value that both museums and their users would get for all the hassle). Certainly at the Museum of London we've had the registration discussion more than once. Mia was always opposed, and rightly so I think, on the grounds that it's exclusive and off-putting with little to gain from it; yet the temptation is there, especially if you're considering value-added features that depend upon registration to be effective - say, favouriting objects or saving searches. In fact, the redesign that we’re currently engaged in on the MOL sites is another reason why registration has been on my mind again, since it always brings up the suggestion of a special area for the Friends. Quite what they’d get in that area I couldn’t tell ya. It does bring up one important distinction between reasons for “doing” login: it can be for access control, or it can be for identifying the user and associating them with their stuff (or both of the above).

Of course, doing some of this stuff needn’t involve logging in to our sites at all. So the nest question is, what sort of things are museums doing with third party services that involve people using (optionally or otherwise) registered identities? And would it ever make sense to try to go it alone instead?

Social media basics: Twitter, Facebook
The whole point of participating in the likes of Facebook or Twitter is to become part of a wide existing social network. Whilst museums might sometimes have specific narrower audiences in mind for some of what they do here, there’s surely nothing to be gained by doing it anywhere but where the people are. For richer but more targeted social networks, Ning is a popular alternative hosted solution.

Blogs, forums, and comments
Lots of museums run blogs, some of them on hosted services like Blogger, others on their own installations (MOL, for example). These may have their own login system (Wordpress, for example) but they often hook into OpenID too, so if users want to make comments they can use an existing identity. Forums, too, can be installed and run without having to run a registration/login system, or you can use hosted alternatives like Google or Yahoo! groups (for all their failings). And of course, people feed back to museums through “contact us” forms. It would be a fool who made these accessible only to logged-in users, but one can see how it could be useful to link together contact forms with known users.

Wikis and Wikipedia
Installing MediaWiki or using the likes of PBWiki can involve some sort of user management, although you don’t have to build your own system for this. Perhaps in some cases you can use OpenID? If users currently have to register to edit your wiki, one can see how it might be easier if this was tied to other things they might have to register for.

Wikipedia, of course, is not under your control and nor do you need to be registered to edit it, so although plenty of museums use it for their own purposes it doesn’t really fit into this discussion. Wikipedia is socially produced but is not a social space in the same way as other sites, although discussions can grow up around topics.

Sharing media
YouTube, iTunes and Flickr are the classic places for sharing media, and this is for a combination of pragmatic/economic reasons (free hosting, unlimited bandwidth, no real technical challenges, easy embedding, a UI dedicated to that medium) and because of the ready access to a user base, many of them registered, who can favourite, tag and comment on your assets. Museums’ use of Flickr is much more sophisticated overall than with, say, YouTube, owing partly to the simple fact that photographs constitute a large part of many collections (and can represent most of the rest). A recent flurry of tweets and bloggage on the relative merits of Flickr Commons and Wikimedia Commons brought out the value of the social aspect of Flickr.

Bookmarking
Take your pick here, but Delicious is the big social bookmarking app, and as a user it’s more important to tag your bookmarks than pretty much anything else. This makes it a great source of user generated data on bookmarked pages, although whether any museums mine the info on how their pages are bookmarked and tagged I know not but if you’ve got time you can do it (here for example is a search for how people have bookmarked the MOL home page). If people bookmarked using a museum’s own app instead of Delicious (or Digg, Stumbleupon, whatever), what would that do for them or for the museum? Well, for users I think I’ll leave that until later, but for museums patterns of use and tagging would be a potential goldmine.

Museums exist in social contexts all around the web. Sometimes they put themselves there – on Facebook, through blogging, via Flickr – and other times they simply find themselves or their content there – mentioned on Twitter, faved in Google Reader or tagged in Delicious, written up in TripAdvisor or Wikipedia. Doubtless I have some of the details of my little environmental scan wrong but that’s not really too important: the point is the multitude of interactions and the fragmentation of the information – no, the relationships – that result. All that wealth of knowledge and opinion, all that social capital, spread all over the shop. It makes you wonder if there’s more we could be doing to marshal it for the good of all museums, because rich as this ecosystem is, it can be pretty hard to learn from it.

Other posts in this series:

• Museums and online logins: the preamble
• Museums and online logins pt.2: making a better “how”
• Museums and online logins pt.3: making a better “why” (with a bit of how)

Museums and online logins: the preamble

I was recently asked for my thoughts on recommendation systems and cultural heritage organisations and it set off a train of thought that took me back to an old idea, one I'm sure I must have discussed with many people and which perhaps someone's working on right now.

The idea is universal login. OK "universal" might be a bit strong, so let's just start with UK-wide, museum website login. For whatever reason (possibly coz it's a rubbish idea) it's not happened yet and I want to think about why, and whether there's a way it might happen successfully. I thought I’d do a quick post on it but it needed some background and rapidly ballooned, with the result that I’ve split it into three posts (four if you count this one).

The first post looks briefly at what museums are doing with registration and login to their own site, as well as touching on some of the other places they encourage “identity-tied” user engagement without having to build their own mechanisms. Then I talk about some of the ways these fall short and speculate on why login is still pretty rare amongst museum sites.

The second post proposes “universal login” as a way to tackle one of the barriers to doing this: the effort involved.

The third post is really the first one I wanted to write, but that would have meant skipping straight to a “solution” without framing the “problem” or describing universal login, which is a necessary (but insufficient) intermediate step. It’s about the more important barrier: the lack of value in creating another login silo.

Finally, there's also a survey to find out what other museums are doing and what you think. If you're involved with a museum website I'd very much appreciate your input, which I'll wrap up into a further post in the future.

Other posts in this series:

• Museums and online logins pt.1: who’s doing what, where and why
• Museums and online logins pt.2: making a better “how”
• Museums and online logins pt.3: making a better “why” (with a bit of how)

UKMW2009

Yesterday the V&A in London hosted first the UK Museums on the Web 2009 conference, run by the Museums Computer Group (MCG, spanking new website here), and then the Jodi Awards. both of which I attended and both of which I found immensely stimulating. As always, it was fantastic too to catch up with various peers, some of them old friends (or indeed supervisors!), others people I knew only from Twitter or their blog, or not at all. I only wish we'd had a week to spend so that all the discussions I found myself in could have flourished fully, but that's the nature of events like this. Hopefully those nascent conversations started with @janetedavis, @psychemedia, Dave Patten, @gsturtridge, Carl Hogsden and so many others will continue elsewhere, soon.
UKMW09 had a very lively back-channel on Twitter. Check out the tag #ukmw09 to see what I mean. I had enough of a job keeping up with what the people I follow were tweeting but I dropped in every now and then to see what others were saying and would find 60, 80, 100, new tweets: too much to follow and still pay attention, so I may do some catching up today. Some papers really seemed to get people excited, though, notable Paul Golding's, and perhaps this showed how well the organising committee had identified what MCG people needed to hear about.
In the middle of the conference there was a break for the MCG AGM. The Group has had a major constitutional overhaul and the changes implied by this are only beginning to be evident, starting with that website and new logo. A very exciting research partnership is in the offing, and together with membership rules that now include mail list members as formal members of MCG, plans for sandboxes and evolving relationships with strategic bodies, it looks like the MCG is getting a real shot in the arm, thanks to an imaginative committee and valuable facilitation by Flow Associates.
This stuff is the notes I took down live at #UKMW09. I'm not planning to edit it*, that will only slow it down so much I never publish this, so naturally you'll find it somewhat impenetrable and full of bits of that amount to straight transcription coz you don't know where the speakers leading you, and other parts lacking enough context to make any sense but hey, if you find anything of interest I'd urge you to look deeper into that speaker's work because all of these papers were way more fascinating than my notes could ever convey - even if I did edit them!
* but you never know.
Enough preamble and caveats, here you go. Oh, any stuff in [square brackets] is my own interjections [or is it Someone Else?]

UKMW 2009
Ross Parry, chair
[...basically I missed Ross pt. 1. Shame, he sets this stuff up so well but if you've heard him before you'll know this.]
Mike Ellis
Today's experiment: QR codes on delegate badges so we can stalk each other. Will get e-mailed vCard of whoever we scan (or key the number in for). Done through Mike's onetag.org service

Session 1: Social (Bridget McKenzie, chair)
BMcK intro: Social is deep: connected with museological issues of contested ownership, authority etc. Web can power a civic society.
Matthew Cock (British Museum) & Andrew Caspari (BBC)
A History of the World partnership (AHOW) BM+BBC, 2010-2012 and beyond. 100 episode Radio 4 series, involving 350 museums, local radio stations, website, kids' programmes, plus 100 objects from BM. Radio rather than TV for speed: story rather than visual focus. MC: opportunity for a social site and engagement.
AC: 100 BM objects woven into a history of past 2 million years by Neil Macgregor on R4, 13 then done for CBBC. 600 objects from round the country telling regions' relevance to story of UK & world. Beyond that, UGC: public invited to upload their objects to weave into the story. World Service will overlap with this. Hope to encourage conversation off AHOW i.e in Twitter etc.
Forcing partnerships, encouraging wide participation, building new audiences for digital, museums and history. Pan-platform. "Permanent" collection [very interesting to see how this will work]. Each object has own page, journeys through geography and time via objects.
MC: priority for BM object pages is to get people to listen again to radio show. There will be video, 3D for some, related objects, other contributions, (requested) comments from others as well as open for public comments and, for limited time, questions.
Other museums and public can tag their objects in the same way as BM has done for findability, a simple uploader with variable levels of detail. This open to people worldwide, moderated too.
Launch January.
Qs
BMcK: will the collections gathered through this feed into Culture Grid? MC: not decided, governed by BBC T&Cs at present.
Denise Drake (Tower Hamlets Summer University): Staying social online
Small independent charity. Free summer courses to all young people (11-25) in TH. Actually year round. 26 staff. Have helped set up similar summer uni in every London boro, coordinated but independent, 50k places in all.
2 websites, active on 13 social network sites/accounts. Bursaries for film/photo projex, blogs for these.
Asked for a vote for an award, got some strong negative responses but regarded as an opportunity to react positively, quickly. -ve comments left visible. Tries not to do social stuff out of office hours, partly for protection. Child protection issues: don't make "friends" of u-18s; be careful with images (make them small, no name)
Nadia Arbach (now @ V&A)
Wikipedia Loves Art campaign, a way of generating images for WikiPedia, Feb '09. BMA led 16 museums, V&A only UK participant. Next year V&A will lead a proper UK project, Britain loves Wikipedia, and they're looking for museums that want to take part. [see also Nick Poole's blog here]. BMA encouraged their users to join in, V&A targeted the "London" Flickr group. Each museum had own guidelines and routes to participation, interesing use of existing networks.
Hosted a special day blitzing the museum (though could do any time in Feb). Competitive in terms of numbers uploaded by inds/teams on that day.
Official WLA photopool, museums checking correct data attached to photos. Process changing nect time so that quality priotirised over quality - an uploader?
Museums have had people asking them to photograph particular artefacts for them via WLA, or to add images to Flickr groups.
CC licence required for all contributions.
Session Q&A
Q from Jude Habib: how did BBC engage local museums? A: Local radio has a buddy in each station for museums to contact.
Ruth Harper: [my summary: sounds like C24 want in on AHOW]
Q from Mike Ellis: should we build it or should we use what's there? MC: never considered using e.g. Wikipedia because they had the BBC platform.
From me: the "permanent" collection? MC/AC: no plan yet, too busy getting this ready to support the Cultural Olympiad etc. though definitely intend to find a way to sustain this, perhaps through integration with the offer in the BBC History site and the like.

Session 2: Situational (Loic Tallon, chair)
Clients asking how to create a web-like experience in the museum - is that confusing? Mobile growing, also calls for another experience.
Paul Golding (wirelesswanders.com): Situational web
How you give an experience based on where you are, overview of technologies.
Cells have IDs we use to tell where roughly phones are. Public info which e.g. Google can use. Location gateways queried for this, with estimates of uncertainy. "self location" UI important coz errors can be big, want to override. Dense urban areas 300m, semi-urban:600-1200m, rural up to 10kms.
GPS way better. Devices like iPhone offer this plus cell and wifi fallbacks. Getting location info as a programmer can be done on handset (note: location API in HTML5 JS). Or can ask phone servers for location; then use Fire Eagle, GMaps etc.
Proximity services: RFID and the like; barcode and QRs; Bluetooth/WiFi/SigBee; visual recognition. Wifi works where the network has been mapped and is quite dense e.g. in a warehouse. Visual recognition ie cameras recognising images - good for museums?
AR apps like Layar, Wikitude, Junaio. Markup not necessary. Cd create a "digital fingerprint" for artwork and connect to information record. Camera as "third eye" "Disintermediation" of exhibitor/producer's presentation i.e. can bypass the information you're presented with directly in the space.
VWs: massive growth in the tweenies market, our market of tomorrow.
"Conversation via place": e.g. flook.it. "Leave" a note in a space to be picked up by someone moving into that space.
Trends and predictions: 80% penetration of smartphones by 2015, ready for mass consumption. HTML5 browsers on them. AR will be done via these rather than specific gadgets. Location key "web 3" enabler. Indoor location sensitivity/AR popular for enhancing events, shopping etc by '13. VWs will be the popular UI metaphor for some handsets.
Andy Ramsden (University of Bath - UB): QR codes
UB project: what does QR offer to learning opportunities? What do they offer museums, are they a fad?
QRs connect something physical to something electronic. Souped-up barcode readable by phone. Alternatives coming tho using similar principles. Require an activity/task suited to a small screen device. Will cost users if they aren't connecting thru WiFi. When you read a QR, a URL is decoded, you decide if you want to follow this i.e. perform the action.
Creating a QR code: can do on the Bath Uni site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/barcodes.
Thinking about how QR codes could be used in a more social constructivist approach to learning. Tie to a blog. QRs in library for adding books to your reading list. Subscribing to RSS feed: loads easier than plugging long URLs into phone.
Connecting phys to virtual learning materials, because these can be dislocated rather than obliging learner to perform learning task at a PC.
Students becoming much more aware of QRs, 10% have now used them (UB survey)
Mike Ellis: how's this work in museums?
Convergence of technologies finally making lots of thing possible, at last. Networks getting cheaper and mass-market. Data the norm with mobile devices now. Computing power increasing and APIs flourishing, copyright barriers lowering/easy licencing too. And Google. Highly available services.
"Vastpoint sensing" using massive contribution of content esp location-based. With many consumers' devices as sensors, masses of data can be added in realtime to e.g. GMaps.
Predictions: city-wide wireless networks; increased understanding of the tech into our psyche; less geek, more invisible.
Session Q&As
ME: cost shouldn't be a huge barrier, it's dropping
Linda Ellis: Where should people put their stuff to get it picked up by these services? Paul: wherever there's a public API e.g. Flickr. Mike: where the people are.
Joe Cutting: how have things changed in terms of contract/PAYG phones, replacement of handsets? Paul: contract phones replaced on avg every 18 months, but 80% estimate by 2015 for smartphones.
Gail Durbin: ideas for how to use the QR codes they already have on their object labels. Andy: treasure hunt activities tied to OPAC (UBath library expt). Paul: run a competition to answer this question!

Open Mic session
Linda Spurdle (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery): Pre-raphaelite Online Resource
BMAG-built, JISC and MLA funded. Targetted at HE students and researchers. Audience research indicated low demand for social features, commenting etc. Not about fun! "Wikirage" of lecturers a deterrent to making it social. Instead put objects at the heart with zoomable images (via moderately controversial but beautifully effective Sliverlight interface)
Julian ...(Manchester Art Gallery): QR codes in practice
Revealing Histories display hooked into website, ability to submit content.
Current trial: Manchester public sculptures interpreted via QR codes. There's already a GMap of where the sculptures are. Should they try RFID? Small redesign of pages for mobile leads to questions over main collections pages, which aren't mobile friendly. [if end-points were, say, Wikipedia pages, might it be easier to pull into Layar etc?]
Tim Boundy, JANET UK: Use JANET for video-conferencing! Please!
JANET hooks up museums with schools for VC [including the Museum of London]. Both the infrastructure and the booking system made super-easy; number of registered schools growing rapidly (4k now). You need the hardware, JANET can provide the software.
Andrew @ V&A: blogs
Audience, contributors and plan all needed! Knowing limits of your technology and agreeing a schedule. The plan: if for an exhibition, start well before launch!
Shona (Museum of Hartlepool): Articus
Educational resource aiming to increase footfall in the galleries (specifically, booked school groups), aimed at children and teachers. Various activities include creating art offline and uploading, curating own galleries, gathering images to use on IWBs. Launched February but less uptake than expected - is this because of registration requirement?
[They really want school groups to book visits following from this. I wonder, how is the site positioned to tempt people in rather than do it all online? Are they not encouraged to submit and place value in the statistics of thes sites usage in itself, because it seems a bit C20th to value only the visits to the physical museum that it may encourage. It's treating it a bit like fancy brochure-ware, when really what it is, is a valuable service for schools in its own right that simply needs them to find a workable way of measuring its impact in terms of MH's mission. As for why they're losing visitors, what do the stats say on bounce rates, is there real evidence from there that registration is off-putting? Tweet @snowflakeshona with your suggestions]

Next, Ross does some defragging.

Keynote - Richard Morgan (V&A): Making the digital museum relevant in people's everyday lives
[the following, in retrospect, makes not a lot of sense, which is my fault not Richards! By brain was failing.]
What's people's daily experience of museums? Are they as likely to see the commercial arm as anything else?
Making money is important; our digital presence is scattered, how do we make sense of it for people? Will SW do anything for this?
The Q: "maverick activity" that leads to all this, fitted into the corporate narrative (and defragmenting that corporate narrative too).
Capture your data, tho this requires a leap of faith. V&A's new Search The Collections has got 1M records out there, from a low base. Put focus on relationships between records, to be articulated in UI and underneath, to encourage reuse (API).
Interfaces: browsing; visualising through mapping
Browing continuous variables and topologies? FABRIC, TSB-funded project about content-based image retrieval, variables including colour, "texture" (shape and angles, really).
World Beach Project: bringing world into collections.
V&A Wedding fashion site: data includes where clothes bought, an implicit link.
Lots of curatorial stuff and lots of UGC stuff now. How to join it up with real semantic connections?
Collections of photos/paintings of localities, being places of significance, have a fair chance of being in e.g. Flickr too (and tagged). So can we dynamically hook our content into this?
Museums good at finding strong niches we can build networks around. We can delegate to these what the museum cannot provide. Might this even be a way to make cash, selling services around, say, weddings or fashion?
Moving from niches to "web intelligence and insight", looking for stuff that's not so obvious, the signal in the trends. We do have lots of data after all. Can also identify weaker signals, can we een anticipate trends? Helps us argue to funders about the value we (could) give.
Finding the stories in the data is one of the things a technologist in a museum should be doing. [a key point slipped in right at the end there! I'm really interested in where we might find the boundaries of our work moving, or where we might wish to expand them, as we find that digital media peeps have maybe accidentally found themselves to be information curators, analysts, interpreters, and disseminators. There are professionals in museums trained exactly for some of this, but if the webby people know how to hook it all together, plumb in the visualisation tools and the metadata enrichment tools and so on, are we gradually moving onto that turf too? The role of the information or computing professional is always evolving, whether in large or small organisations; I think it's good sometimes to reflect on where it's evolving to]

Session 3 (Mia Ridge, chair): Sensory
Joe Cutting: Telling stories with games
Company of Merchant Adventurers of York: good-looking teading game [did they refactor the code from Elite?] Instructional and fun, that's what it's all about. So what is a game anyway? JC's practical proposition: given goals in a situation, choices, feedback, make more choices i.e back to step 2. Learning through iteration. "Active prolonged engagement", a term coined at Exploratorium. [think I ballsed up the definition a bit here, sorry]
Need enough info to make a good choice. Success or failure must be gradual.
Game models: lots of console games played obsessively by a small audience. Not really what we're after. Arcade games better. Web-based MMORPGs better still, but 3D makes things harder, not easier.
Anne Kahr-Hojland (DREAM in Denmark): Ego-trap
Ego-trap comes out of her PhD work. Visitors guided by mobiles through exhibition at Experimentarium. 2 narrative layers, three levels. Personality test, questions from a woman who has called you; a level at which suspicion is aroused by another person contacting you; ...
AR gameplay, digital narrative determined by physical setting.
Targeting secondarry students. Objectives: to stimulate interest in science, improve learning in that setting by prompting reflection. Reflection prompted by predictions and evaluations, narrative structure, discussion with others. Works well as an exhibition guide; high levels of engagement and recall of exhibitions after play.
The meta-narrative gets less committment than the personal test; is it coz they know what to do in context of a test? Does this interfere with the critical reflection aspect?
[once again, I couldn't really keep up with the ideas properly whilst tweeting and writing this and this definitely shows! There's a lesson there, but I'm too preoccupied with the personality test to realise it]
Victoria Tillotson (iShed, c/o Watershed Media Centre)
Project to bring together practitioners, researchers and users in immersive experiences. "A space for risk", inspire innovation and share ideas, create market place.
Includes artists, creative industry, IT co's, community etc.
mscapers.com: software to create location-based mobile games, which will be hosted on the mscapers site. Cool!
HP facilitate annual festival: mScape Fest.
mScape only works in iPaqs. Oh. But work underway to port to Android and iPhone. Uses GPS so currently only outdoors, indoors version coming[?], also downloadable versions of games.
Pervasive Media Studio: pmstudio.co.uk will be home to cool stuff in due course...
Pervasive gaming gradually spreading in pockets. Face to face, on the streets, on the 'net, without technology. All sorts of genres and timescales.
Simongames.co.uk: game built around location of a Romany caravan, parked around London. Done for Soho Theatre. Interaction between public and travellers in the caravan. [not too sure what the game part was tho, same old story: too distracted. Oops]
Duncan Speakman: sound to navigate public spaces. "subtle mobs" of people gathering to listen to a set of instructions and act on them. "As if it were the last time": a subtle mob in Bristol, coming to London soon. See http://youtube.com/watch?v=FY6S4GkCZ9c

Final session (Marcus Weisen, chair): Accessible digital museums
Lots physical exhibitions still failing accessibility for people with physical or sensory impairments.
Helen Petrie & Christopher Power: Accessible digital culture
Trying to make this an interesting challenge rather than a burden often tackled as an add-on must-do at the end.
The digital past in large part about about websites. There was a burst of interest (following WCAG) with DRC investigation into web accessibility, eGov targets for govt websites, Culture Online funding dependent on accessibility, MLA audit. Then govt unit closed down, sites got more complex - moving target - DRC merged into EHRC, no legal cases brought against failing orgs. EC push, but have the targets been set too high? "Is it too hard to implement accessibility in digital culture and related areas?". UK gov now has Digital Inclusion Champion in Martha Lane Fox. New EC initiatives will target culture more.
Christopher moves us on to the present: WCAG has aged poorly; technology, interaction and user changes; new WCAG out last year tho not much fanfare. Few tools to address WCAG2 conformance. Is it harder to understand than v1? Guidelines are mainly tech-independent and so "future-proofed", grouped into 4 principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, robust. It's about "transmitting meaning" after all.
Success criteria don't tell you how to test your technology, perhaps this just makes it trickier - you have to go to "techniques" section, dealing with implementation. These only deal with W3C technologies. Often not evidence-based but value-based.
Outcome: WCAG has moved the responsibility for developing the correct tests onto the development community.
The future: interacting with content, focusing on users' objectives not the technology. Communicating meaning is the point. About content, not delivery, whether digital or not. Personalisation of content to match user preferences. How do we measure experience and communication of meaning? [the self same problem we have for assessing effectiveness of our digital media even if we were oblivious to accessibility questions]
Contract soon with EC to investigate this problem in the digital culture arena.

Jodi Awards
I didn't take any notes during the awards, and only part way through did I start to tweet coz I couldn't see anyone else doing it (until I looked at my twitter stream!) It was the first time I'd been along to these awards, perhaps because it was also the first time we'd been up for anything and whilst I can't claim any credit at all for that (or for MOL ultimately winning the award we were nominated for) it felt like I had some small justification for attending what was an over-subscribed event.
I found it all pretty moving. The last year has brought disability closer to home, well, into the home for me and I'm some way through a process where the sort of knowledge and values about disability that I've always known in a sort of factual "of course that's the right way to think" kind of way, are turning into the sort of knowledge that is more internalised, that is felt and truly believed, not simply accepted. There's a difference between that knowing and believing. I guess it's called awakening. Anyway, attending the awards was a privilege and an inspiration and I want now to make sure that I embed a righter way of thinking into my work, rather than doing the things I know (or am told) need to be done and assuming that is sufficient.
I was struck in Helen and Chris's talk before the awards (enough to tweet it in very compressed form) that they had identified the communication of meaning as the core of what accessibility should mean, and that this resonated so well with the way I've been thinking about sustaining/sustainability: the purpose of sustaining is not to continue with the thing the way it is, but with it serving what it's for (even this might change, in fact), and a radical change in form might be the best way for something to carry on serving the same purpose. I like this synergy very much, this fact that perhaps we can focus on what a resource is for and serve both sustainability and accessibility ends.
You can read who was nominated, who was commended and who won here, for this and previous years. What you probably can't read, or relive in any way, was the wonderful Skype moment we had with the Karlovy Vary recipients of the jointly-awarded International Award, who couldn't hear us at all. Turns out that the very excellent Matthew Cock was using the wrong mic. Thank you Matthew for the ensuing comedy on a heartwarming but quite serious evening. Thank you too to Martha Lane Fox, who announced the awards and took us through a bit of her own journey. And finally humble congratulations to all the winners and nominees on that list, not least our own Lucie Fitton and Jude Habib (not our own) who deservingly won the Digital Access Online award.

Unbuggering SQL Server - xpstar.dll fix (Feb '10 edit)

Having spent lots of time googling and going down various blind alleys, trying to fix an error on our live site servers where trying to run a DTS, looking at user properties and various other things all threw up a pretty uninformative error related to being unable to find xpstar.dll. Having sorted it I thought I'd post what worked for me in case it saves anyone else from too much time-wasting.

The root of the problem was the virus and trojan s***storm that hit us a few weeks back, but once that was remedied the SQL Server 2000 issues remained.
Lesson one
For a while I was looking on the wrong server, coz I assumed that the server running the DTS would be requiring its own copy, but turns out that the server it was targetting was the one lacking xpstar. Don't forget to check the other server!
Lesson two
Plopping a new copy of it into the relevant place didn't help. Perhaps it needed re-registering in some way. A couple of threads in Googledom talked about MDAC, and reinstalling it seemed like a good idea, but fooling round looking for Windows Components to reinstall led nowhere.
Lesson three
One of those threads mentioned reinstalling SP4. Fortunately we had copies of the installation media for both SP4 and SQL Server 2000 on the server, but first time we ran the SP4 install it transpired that the virus had actually messed with about with these too, deleting a crucial directory (Binn), not within the SP4 media but the SQL installation media. Once this was sorted out, an SP4 reinstallation was all that was required. It fixed the xpstar error without a restart.
Lesson four
Don't know if there is a lesson four, but if it turns out that we didn't get the virus off properly, or I should have done a restart after all, I'll let you know.

HTH Jeremy

Postscript
January 2010: we had more problems which in part were related to, you guessed it, xpstar.dll "disappearing". All the SQL Server jobs disappeared, for one. Reapplying SP4 once more did the trick: turned out the jobs were just hiding when the server "lost" xpstar. I need to get to the bottom of why it happened a second time, but there you go: SP4 fix definitely works for us.

Google Translate widget: awesome

Some time back I had an abortive go at making a bookmarklet to do various things with Google Translate that weren't that straightforward. It all went a bit off the boil but thankfully it's pretty irrelevant now that Google's done what was needed all along and given us a dead easy widget to drop into your site and do good-enough translations on-the-fly. Links on the page are also appended with parameters so that it will translate subsequent pages too, as long as the widget is on them. Nice.
Have a look at the MOL pages. The layout is not optimal (it's down at the bottom) so I need to experiment with changing that, but it works nicely on the pages where the one footer I've changed is used. Took 2 minutes. I had to refresh the page after its first load to get it to work, which may be because I have the widget at the bottom and the javascript file didn't load properly or something. Wha'evah.
Actually I'd still like a bookmarklet (not G Toolbar) that lets me highlight a bit of text and translate to/from a language of my choice. Got a bit stuck with the whole IE prompt thing but hey, perhaps I'll have another go.

Jennifer Trust outreach programme wins the National Lottery Award

A whilst back I blogged/tweeted about the fact that the Jennifer Trust, which supports sufferers of Spinal Muscular Atrophy and their families, had been shortlisted for a National Lottery Award for Best health Project, recognising the quality of the work of their outreach programme. I'm really pleased to hear that it won the award (Lottery news item here).
Unfortunately the Lottery funding came to an end in May and the award itself brings no cash at all, but I dearly hope it will raise awareness of and support for the Jennifer Trust's work, which offers hope to many thousands of people in the UK, and indeed support to those who have no hope and may have lost their beloved children.

Anglo-Saxon partnership

Not being much of a historian I don't know how much the Angles and the Saxons saw themselves as a partnership or how much they were just lumped together as such by the residents of these islands left behind after the Romans' holiday, or by later centuries of ignoramuses. I suppose it's a question I might find an answer to if the following suggestion ever came to be.

Today I read of a wonderful find from the North-East, where the burial of an Anglo-Saxon "princess" has been uncovered and the rich remains are to be displayed in a new display at Kirkleatham Museum, Redcar. The cross-over with the Prittlewell "prince" that MOL's archaeology unit excavated a few years back is obvious, no less the uber-famous royal burial at Sutton Hoo [tour]. The fantastic Portable Antiquities Scheme has brought many smaller finds to the knowledge of the heritage community and no doubt they all add to the sum of our knowledge about life at that time, whether noble or otherwise. It struck me, as one who often talks about partnerships but is lacking the imagination to come up with many good candidates for it, that this was one such, where the evidence of Anglo-Saxon royalty that's thinly scattered round the country could be united digitally. Not exactly revolutionary, but it shouldn't be too hard to make it happen, at least in part via the magic of machine interfaces. The PAS has Dan Pett's excellent API, the BM (home of many Sutton Hoo treasures, as well as the PAS, as it happens) has it's fab new-ish Merlin system, and we have...oh bugger, nothing at present but in due course the Museum of London's Collections Online system will emerge. Sadly the Prittlewell finds aren't ours, though we look after them for now, but we have plenty of info about the site as well as other A-S riches from within Lundenwic. Perhaps it's a nice student project to bring these all together. Anyone up for it?

Now I'm looking forward to Thursday, for when Dan is threatening exciting news. Can't wait!

Not very news: I won a competition

Well, well, well. Apparently back in March I actually won something, but it's only by stumbling across this blog post today that I found out. It's quite cool, actually, that I get to have a product (an "Open Source animal bones database for use by Archaeologists") named with my suggestion, although I really like some of the others (SQLETON, anyone?). No other prize, but as a latent bones person myself it's really nice (human bones, though). Apparently, looking back at my reply to the Antiquist mailing list, I suggested "zooos" because (obviously) the zoo relates to animals and the "os" to:

bone, as in "os animalis". Short and sweet! And maybe the extra "o" makes
it more memorable in a way. Then again, it could just be frivolos :-)

Mixing my languages of course but never mind. Strangely I didn't make the point Joseph makes, which is that the OS also puns with Open Source, and which is why they've amended it to zooOS. Shame I don't do PHP much, or PostgreSQL.

More important than the name is the idea of the Open Archaeology Software Suite itself, not to mention Oxford Archaeology's Open Archaeology project that sits behind it. I mean to look at these more carefully and to prod our Archaeological Applications Development Manager, Pete, to do the same. Cool idea.

Museum websites aren't down

Just thought I should mention, some time after the fact, that the sites aren't down any more. For a while they were up-n-down like a wh... no, like my eyelids during one of those structural geology lessons back in my undergrad days (mainly down, then), but now they appear to be reasonably stable, so I'll tempt fate by saying as much

That really was a crap week. Looking forward to moving on and catching up now.

Museum of London websites down

...and will be for a bit. Our just-appointed Head of ICT, Adam Monnery, is doing his bit. With any luck things will be running by the weekend but don't hold your breath.

The great escape

Well today I don't feel like moaning. Pretty fecking remarkable, huh? Stuff went pretty well, we're close to finishing a very important stage in the Collections Online project, I unbroke some things earlier this week so I could get on with some actual work, I talked with a curator about an exciting project that's still far enough in the future that we can dream big dreams and not worry about the inevitable slap in the face that reality will give us...
On top of all that I managed to find a few minutes to do some development, which is pretty good by current standards. One thing I wanted to do was simply make a map link from an object record in our Solr index. Now, Solr URLs have their reserved characters as well as normal URL escaping. XSL, too, with which I transform the Solr output, likes escaped characters. Google Maps URLs, of the sort that you make to overlay KML on a map, well, of course they also require characters in the KML URL parameter to be escaped. The end result is a URL for a map with overlay that looks something like this:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.museumoflondon.org.uk:8080%2Fsolr%2Fselect%2F%3Fq%3Dtext:knife%2BAND%2B(start_latitude%5B-1%2BTO%2B1%5D)%26version%3D2.2%26start%3D0%26rows%3D30%26fl%3Dname,caption,start_latitude,start_longitude,site,accNum%26wt%3Dxslt%26tr%3Dkml.xsl&ie=UTF8&z=14

Ugly, huh? [BTW, once I put the new multicore index up this URL won't work]

Escape, escape, escape, and I've had plenty of fun and games in the past trying to escape stuff in XSL the way I want it without XSL then re-escaping or unescaping or otherwise ballsing up the output, so this time I thought, sod this, I'll just make a page to take in a nice simple set of parameters and redirect to the map. This makes it a whole lot easier to write the links in XSLT without worrying so much about the escape nightmare. A link like:

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/scripts/solrgmapredirect.asp?q=knife+AND+(start_latitude[0+TO+*])&s=0&r=30
[the "+" can be "%20" instead]

I don't know how much time I saved but I know it only took 5 minutes. It takes in a Solr query, record count and start index, escapes characters as befits GMaps KML URLs, and inserts them into a Solr query URL (including the KML transform bit, of course: wt=xsl&tr=kml.xsl, in our case). This is put into the GMaps URL and we do the response.redirect (yes, it's classic ASP). It's brittle: it will break if the GMaps URL format changes, or if the Solr URL or output format change; but hey, it's simple and works (for now).
Side benefits
It was only after making the script for these pragmatic reasons did I realise that having such a page is, of course, good for several other reasons, including:

• it will give us stats on people following the map links
• that same brittleness is more of a problem if I'm making links like this in lots of scripts and transformations around the site. This way I only need to point all similar links to one script and change that
• if I decide to scrap Google Maps and use, say, OpenStreetMap, or if I want to get my KML from somewhere else, again, one script to change

I will probably add a couple of other parameters but don't want to make it heavy. Specifying the data source is one (other than Solr we can get KML out of, for example, our publications database); specifying the target service is another, so that we could use GMaps, OSM, Yahoo! and so on. Shit, anything but Streetmap (how much do you not miss having to use that piece of crap? Best thing about the last few years in mapping is the fact that you never see that anymore).

[edit 21/8/2009]

I've done some further work this morning, along the lines suggested above. It now takes in a data source and a target service parameter (though the latter only works for GMaps at present), which means I can pull in the publications KML and may start getting MOLA sites by site code too. Much more flexible now, and a single point for all map requests is going to be handy. More work to do to use more powerful aspects of pubs search.

It may seem odd to blog about a 5 minute job when I've been doing much more challenging and complex things that take months, but it's very satisfying when it works so quickly, plus my belated realisation of the useful side effects made me think it was worth talking about. Here's the salient part of the code as it now stands, for interest.

Here's a link to the new script, looking at publications data:

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/scripts/mapredirect.asp?r=30&q=roman&s=0&t=gmap&src=pubs

Follow that and see the GMaps URL I now longer have to write!

TwitsTwotsBitsBotsDeliciousDosAndDoNotsIfsAndButs

So I've got into using bit.ly for my short links, particularly on Twitter. I'm sure I don't need to explain why, but aside from these serving the obvious need for brevity within a tweet (but never here...), I appreciate the stats, which appear in real time at minute-scale granularity and so are in some ways clearly superior to what you get from Google Analytics. Here's an example: http://bit.ly/info/3NuA3P . I'm going to talk more about the stats later on but before that a brief digression about Delicious, which I think will repeat some of what I saw in a post by Tony Hirst recently, but it's been brewing so gotta get it out.
What's wong wiv bit.ly and Delicious
The problem with bit.ly is that the things I want to tweet I typically also want to bookmark using Delicious, for whilst bit.ly keeps hold of your tasty links it's not got tagging (and why not, I wonder? That would make it a much more useful and social service). It got the the point where I was wondering why Delicious wasn't offering an integrated short URL service, since right now if you want the full benefits of online/social bookmarking and short URLs neither bit.ly nor Delicious cuts it. Or should I say, right then, since about a week ago (and within a week of my tweeting my bemusement that Delicious wasn't doing this), it did. Bookmark with Delicious now and you get the option to share your link, which produces a short URL. Cool, and yet.... it's not good enough for me. You can only do it by letting Delicious e-mail or tweet the links for you, at which point you see the short URL. Bu you can't simply view the short code immediately so that you can cut-n-paste at will. Delicious should create one for every single bookmark, with the option of custom links. To do what bit.ly does and tempt me away from it, it must also create unique URLs for each person's version of a link, so that can be tracked individually (together with the shared one for aggregate data), and it must offer decent stats.
So, that's why Delicious isn't up to snuff yet for me to jump ship from bit.ly, even if that would mean just one operation for tweeting and bookmarking my fave URLs. Hmm, come to think of it perhaps bit.ly could offer OPML output or some simple export or integration with Delicious so you could just synchronise periodically? That might keep me using both services happily. I should say, I'm perfectly aware that there are alternatives to Delicious and that some of them offer better integration with Twitter, but that's my chosen poison and with social stuff the size of the network is vital to its gravity; ain't no bookmarking service with more gravity than Delicious.
Who follows?
But what about those stats about link followers that bit.ly offers? Let's dig into them. What do they really tell us?
I started to get suspicious that so many of the followers of links I tweeted were from the US, and often at a time when normal people would be a-bed across the Atlantic. The real-time stats showed that they were also very quick off the mark, and whilst the streaming nature of Twitter means that you expect responses to be quick or not at all, sometimes the click-throughs seemed to come even before I tweeted (via Spaz, the Air client I normally use). Super-quick, US-based (which only a few of my followers are), and very steady numbers for most tweeted links; were these clicks from real people at all?
Short answer
No, lots of them weren't; a steady residue of link follows came from bots of one sort or another.
Long answer: an experiment
I did a couple of experiments to test this. First I made a page on my own web space just fo' the bots, made a bit.ly link to it, and tweeted it asking humans NOT to click the link. This being a highly scientific an experiment I should here state that an explicit assumption was that my followers deem themselves to be human (though I know this was violated occasionally, including by myself. Doh!). I hoped that the stats from this web page would give me the answer as to how many click-throughs shown in the bit.ly stats were via browsers and how many were bots. Well, yes and no. I forgot how lame the stats on that web-space are. No breakdown by day nor details of users by page, only for the site. Nevertheless I get minimal visits to those pages and a massive peak on the day of that tweet, so I can probably tell enough. All the same I thought I'd better try Google Analytics too, so having set that up for my site I repeated my tweet. Then I thought, perhaps I should have used a new link? So I created a custom name for my URL and tweeted once again.
Some numbers
Of 17 link follows reported by bit.ly (http://bit.ly/info/3wQZ51), 15 were "direct", which would include bots but also most other applications, e-mail clients etc. One was from bit.ly itself (that was me, oops) and one from tweetdeck (Mike, that you?). 10 were from the UK and 7 from the US, and pretty much all of them happened within seconds or minutes of my tweets.
My original "for bots only" tweet on the 8th yielded 6 of the follows, plus that accidental click from me. According to PlusNet web stats package I had 51 hits and 22 visits that day, which were almost exclusively to that page (with some other pollution from yours truly, no doubt, as I clicked round the site setting stuff up). I guess that means that once they'd found the page via the bit.ly link some of the followers came back a few times. Now that's definitely not human.
Once I had my Google Analytics bit sorted out, on the 11th, I sent a second tweet. This resulted I think in one visit, by bit.ly's stats. This tweet used the original bit.ly short URL (http://bit.ly/3wQZ51), so presumably the bots figured it wasn't worth going there again. Looking back at the tweet, actually, I think I left the "http://" off so perhaps that's the real answer.
Anyway finally I did the same thing again but using a new custom link (http://bit.ly/bottest), which to the bots would appear to be a new link (all except bit.ly's own bots, perhaps?). This produced another 7 follows, and the next day there were two more when I wasn't watching. Google Analytics reported one visit to the target page, from a Firefox/Windows user in south London, so I presume that one of those 10 follows was via a browser. According to PlusNet, there were 28 hits and 15 visits on the 11th (1 visit is more normal).
So how many of the visits were bots? Well, putting GA together with bit.ly's stats I'd say only 1 out of 10 follows on the 11th/12th was not a bot, though it's possible that others were humans users that just didn't fire the GA code for one reason or another.
Overall, in August so far 13 hits in the web logs are attributed to the bitlybot user agent, 4 to the Tweetmemebot, 2 to twitturls.com's bot, 4 to Spaz, which I know as a user makes requests to something or other (bitly, or the target URL perhaps) to get some page info. A bunch of other bots and non-browser UAs are in there too but I can't say if they're related to the tweets.
Conclusions
I don't think I can squeeze much more from this paltry sample and the crappy and contradictoty web log stats, but clearly nearly all of the visits via Twitter/bit.ly were, as I hoped, not from humans and most likely came from bit.ly's own bot and that of Tweetmeme and Twitturl. From this evidence, if bit.ly reports that I get half a dozen "clicks" on a short URL I've tweeted then I can assume they're probably bots. More than that and they're probably at least partly human. Whether this applies to other twitterers I can't say, but you can do your own experiments. I'd like to repeat this using a site with a better stats package as bait, and perhaps using a few different twitterers to throw out the link, to see whether there's any relationship between numbers of followers and numbers of bots. Quite likely not, but who knows.
Is this any use? I dunno, but I'm a little better informed about the impact of my tweeted URLs now.

[[edit: ironically, looking for the custom link to this post that I made at the weekend, I found their user forums where there's more discussion of the bot problem e.g. http://feedback.bit.ly/pages/5239-suggestions/suggestions/126917-show-me-if-hits-are-bots-human-or-rss-readers-etc-]]

Spinal Muscular Atrophy links to act on

Yesterday I heard about three separate activities concerning Spinal Muscular Atrophy. This is a nasty disease that kills more infants than any other genetic disorder and in its milder forms leads to varying degrees of disability or threats to mortality. Recently you may have heard about one prominent sufferer of SMA, Baroness Campbell, a commissioner on the Equlity and Human Rights Commission (good profile/interview in the Guardian).

• There is currently a petition on the Number 10 website seeking more funds for research into SMA, for whilst there are according to Wikipedia various "cures" being trialled there's nothing realistic in the offing. If you feel that, amongst the many competing claims on your taxes, this is a worthy cause, I'd urge you to sign up.
• Secondly, the Jennifer Trust is a huge boon to sufferers of SMA and their families and is currently on the shortlist for a National Lottery Award for bst health Project, for the quality of its outreach programme. As well as more exposure the award brings a little cash, which would be nice, and of course recognition for the wonderful people that do this work. Again, there are other laudable health projects in the shortlist but we'd love your support in the form a your vote!
• Finally, I found out that my colleague Adam Monnery (acting head of IT) is doing a charity triathlon which is raising money for a variety of charities, including those supporting ill and disabled children (see the Tri For Life site for more info). Here's his team's Just Giving page. [As an aside, I have to say it perplexes me that the '000s of charities in the UK haven't come up with their own alternative to JG (which takes a slice of the donation), but perhaps the economic benefits aren't worth it.]

Pardon the naked self-interest in this off-topic post, but frankly it's more important than any of the digital heritage stuff I'd usually put up! Thanks for reading.

Another catch-up post

Time for a catch-up. It's been quite a while, after all (umm, not counting the Ithaka post I wrote whilst failing to finish this one), and though I've got a bunch of drafts waiting they'll never come to anything so here goes with a bunch of things that have happend or caught my eye recently-ish.

• Didn't get a job. Went for one, lucky enough to be interviewed, didn't clear that hurdle but did learn a bit along the way. Firstly, I really need to get more structured project management experience. Secondly, gotta calibrate my confidence gauge correctly. Am I accurately putting across what I'm capable of? Do I really know what I'm capable of? I don't want a job I'm unable to perform well but I do want to be stretched; it's a fine line and I think the employer is vital in assessing this question but they need the most accurate information to decide this (rather than bullshit), but equally I need to be able to assess myself objectively. For when the next job comes up.


• Did get some help. Back in June we finally got me some help from Julia Fernee, a contractor (at present) with a museum/art background and whizzo tech skills who's just a god-send (hope that doesn't compromise my agnostic credentials). Julia's been working on the LAARC access system, which is one of those systems that's been broken since our Mimsy upgrade in late '07. She's worked methodically through the system fixing all the routines and various bugs, enabling downloads of digital archives (yay!), auditing, documenting, unf***ing stuff. We're going to look at the whole data access layer next and rebuild it in a proper service-orientated way, so that we can finally start re-using that amazing resource in other places and ultimately offer a public API. All assuming we can keep JF for long enough.


• Got a boss. I posted before about Antony Robbins joining MOL. He started earlier this month and now we in the web team (i.e. Bilkis and I) need to start thinking of ourselves really as part of the Communication department. It's hard - we still sit with our old IT buds most of the time - but they're a good lot in Comms and there's an enthusiasm for e-marketing and social media. At the same time a number of other things are happening that hopefully bode well. These include MOL taking the first steps to a proper digital (or is it web?) strategy; the creation of a "digital museum manager" post to lead our team; and the initiation of a social media group with participants from many departments.


• MOLA and Nomensa. We had a very useful review of the MOL Archaeology website from Nomensa. We were well aware of many of the problems but having some fresh eyes to help develop ideas on how to solve them is really helpful. They also picked up various points we'd not really noticed. Lots of the issues relate to our complicated new brand, which has made confusing messages almost inevitable; nevertheless we can do better.


• Open Repository. I went over to Gray's Inn Road to talk to the folks at BioMed about Open Repository, which hosts a never-realised-but-still-paid-for repository that was intended to provide an OAI gateway for some PNDS data. They were wondering (rather honourably I thought) whether we fancied making anything of the investment. It seemed like a good chance to reduce my ignorance of exactly how repository software fits into the general scheme, its overlap with e.g. DAMS and so on. There's a nest of problems in our Collections Online Delivery System that such software might play a part in addressing, but equally it will be but one part of the architecture and does it fit better than alternatives, or a custom-made "black box" (see below)? I learnt a lot, but haven't reached a resolution yet.


• CODS. So, speaking of CODS, we struggle on. Can I bear to go into it now? Not really. We're getting closer to defining the edges of the bit we can't define (the "Black Box") but whether anyone will want to build it for us, or think we're anything other than insane for proposing it, is another matter. The Black Box, by the way, is the part that takes data from multiple sources and aggregates it, but also enables its enrichment via the creation of new associated content and relationships between entities. It doesn't have to do the discover part or offer many services but it does have to offer a reasonable authoring/management interface. It's not a hole that seems to fit any off-the-shelf software, so as I say perhaps we're simply stupid to dig that hole in the first place.
  Anyway, deadlines loom and something must congeal before then. Should be a laugh seeing what it is. Oh god.
  
• IT dead people. I'm helping to put together a proposal for a project I won't be able to give details of as yet, but it's an interesting opportunity to wed multiple strands of archaeological/historical research with popular interests, notably family history.


• MCN2009. I'm honoured to have been invited to present a paper for which I submitted an abstract, it seems like an age ago. MCN2009 takes place in Portland, Oregon in November - again, seems like an age away but I'd better not leave it too long before I get scribbling in earnest. I'm very excited, both to be asked there and by the paper itself, which I think should be quite fun to write.
  
• Went to Paris in the the spring. Well, June, when I tripped over to IRLIS (next to the Pompidou Centre) for a Europeana meeting to develop API requirements. It was an interesting exercise and I think we made progress with evolving ideas for end-uses and for figuring out priorities. One of the most important things to work out is how to intertwine the API build with that of the internal architecture, so that we can make best use of what's going to be built anyway.
  

I think that covers most of it for now. Still awake at the back?