Thanks again. I also have got work to do, so this is my last one. But
it needed a reply :-)
> After much thought we deliberately decided to display all results sets
> in
> their entirety without breaking them up into pages of 10, 20 or 50 -
> exactly
> so that people can scan them at their leisure. We did decide on an
> arbitrary
> limit of 500 records for reasonable speed of response.
> For any number of records up to 499, you would have seen them all on a
> single page, with the option of a print-friendly format as well.
Wow, sorry, but in terms of design and usability this is pure madness
:-) I cannot find more polite terms to describe this, really sorry. If
someone goes there with a low spec computer you would hear from her.
> Of course my time has a cost. I don't want to boast, but I think you
> are
> making unwarranted assumptions about our project. and how we ran it:
> in fact
> we got remarkable value for money. Some details: we got around ?12000
> to
> celebrate Whistler 2003, and to develop more sophisiticated Web search
> tools. Two thirds of this of this was for image capture, and to edit
> and
> upgrade the Whistler catalogue records on our standard in-house
> computer
> catalogue. The remainder paid for a shiny new PC, and about ?1000 of
> software (in fact we didn't use MySQL or PHP), and ?2000 paid for a
> programmer to work with me on the Web coding.
>
> I'm a curator of geology, not an IT person,and while running this
> project, I
> organised talks programs, exhibitions, did fieldwork, took some
> holidays,
> and even did some curating. A small amount of Whistler project funding
> was
> used to produce tools which are usable across all our collections,
> usable at
> other sites using our computer catalogue, and which are almost zero
> maintainence: automatically picking up weekly updates from the standard
> in-house computer catalogue. I did devote a lot of time to thinking
> about
> this - and it certainly wasn't free, but we did leverage a lot of long
> term
> museum goals out of a small amount of funding.
Again, plus your time. That's money, isn't it? I think we now have an
answer why there aren't more collections online.
Please John, do not take this personally or against your project as
it's not, but yo raised a very good generic question and in my opinion
gave non really accurate justifications for collections not being
online. It's, as usual, down to time and money, which your museum had
and other don't, or don't consider to being their main priority. As we
here make our money from putting collections online, I would be
incredibly happy if things were different, but I would not go round
museums and claim that anyone who normally works in Microsoft Word can
put a collection online. You would not be happy if someone came to you
and said that curating an exhibition only takes some picture, a few
nails and some adhesive labels, hand written, would you? What the
Internet bubble has taught people is that publishing on the web, as
well as curating digital assets, is a professional activity, which
requires specific competence and skills. Not just Dreamweaver.
End of my ranting now.
Have fun in your weekend :-D
Cheers, Cristiano
------
Cristiano Bianchi
keepthinking
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m +44 7939 041169
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