Hello Alasdair,

I noticed your site had gone when I was trying to find it last week -  I 've
emailed a complaint to Moray council!

Resources are clearly an issue: and obviously for you, a critical one. This
is obviously not the fault of museums themselves, at least not small ones.
However, plenty of rather lavishly resourced institutions seem to spend a
lot of good money on IT, and make relatively little progress on this. It's
these larger bodies, rather than poor smaller museums which puzzle me most.

I think that just putting it down to a global lack of resources or expertise
is too easy. There is a lot of money being spent on museum IT, but a
surprising amount of it is invisible to the public. Data capture is actually
the expensive part of these projects: delivery via the web is relatively
cheap, and at least in some circumstances, subsequent recurrent costs can be
negligible.

This might be a dangerous allegation to make on a computing list (sorry in
advance!), but I suspect that even more than a lack of resources, the
rigidity and authoritarian instincts of many large host IT departments may
be the issue.  This,  together with a widespread lack of management
expertise, enabling them to tell the difference between good and bad IT
advice stifles progress. The interesting question would be how this might be
addressed.

I was really impressed with what SCRAN have done in hosting Mark's
Perthshire plants catalogue (www.pkc.gov.uk/herbarium ). This seems like an
excellent precedent. Why aren't larger museum groups and bodies such as MDA,
Regional Museum Councils, or national museums providing the expertise and
cover to enable more of this to happen? I don't see that it should be
difficult for similar organisations to deliver this kind of support, and
more importantly, the expectation that such delivery is achievable. Which it
is!

Cheers

John


-----Original Message-----
From: Alasdair Joyce [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 11 December 2003 12:20
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Why are so few museum catalogues online?


It makes no difference how easy it is - if the organisation has neither the
time nor resources (human) to do it - then it won't get done. Simple as
that John! Unfortunately not all museums are in institutions with large
numbers of 'tame' ICT consultants at their fingertips.

We did have our catalogues online for a while. It stopped because our ICT
staff had not the time to carry out the maintenance required, and museums
service staff cuts (33% of staff and budget in 1997) resulted in no human
resources to maintain the museum end of it.

This may be cheap, simple and easy in the academic environment. I beg to
suggest it is no so elsewhere in the sector.

Alasdair Joyce, Moray Council Museums Service.

On Thursday, December 11, 2003 11:26 AM, John Faithfull
[SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
> Sarah's CD query raises an interesting point - why are so few museum
> catalogues available online?
>
> Apologies for the length of this post/rant, but it's a topic dear to my
> heart.
>
> As Tom says, it is technically almost trivial, and a lot of the very best
> software technology (eg Apache or Xitami webservers, MySQL, PHP etc) is
> freeware.
>
> Hardware requirements are also trivial. There are plenty of Council,
> University and ISP webservers around for free, or low-cost hosting.
>
> Hosting your own is easy: most small and medium-sized museums, and
probably
> most large ones, could easily run a Website including dynamic catalogue
> searching, on the cheapest PC it's possible to buy just now, or an old
> redeployed one. The only non-trivial requirement would be a permanent
> Ethernet or other broadband connection.
>
> Security on a Webserver sounds like a big problem, but is not actually
any
> worse than any other internet-connected activity, such as reading email.
> Acceptably securing a server is not hard. For the paraniod, don't have
your
> webserver logged on to your in-house fileservers.
>
> Again, any half-competent IT person, and a lot of people who are not,
know
> this, and can do it. Why are these things not being done?
>
> Maybe our catalogues are full of technical terms and boring info. So
what?
> They are just that - catalogues. Nobody expects a library catalogue to be
> exciting. Making them searchable and available "as is" would still be a
> massive step forward in public access to collections. This is not a
> substitute for other kinds of resources, but an invaluable adjunct or
first
> step.
>
> Maybe our computer catalogues are not complete. Again, so what? Doing
> something is better than nothing. And, if you do it right, your
> web-seachable dataset can be updated automatically (eg weekly) as you add
> records to your computer catalogue. The setup work can just as well be
done
> now as later.
>
> Maybe people are worried about storage locations, valuations or the DPA?
> Just omit sensitive info from the on-line database. A single simple query
> will usually be enough to do this prior to export. Bingo! Most of the
useful
> and interesting information will still be there for the public.
>
> OK, you do need a bit of programming expertise to use things like PHP,
ASP
> etc. However, these skills are very widespread, and compared with most
other
> kinds of programming, very easily learnt. Very simple searchable search
> pages for an existing database can probably be done in less than a day.
OK,
> after that, you can be as fancy as you like, and spend as much as you
want,
> but the basics are easy. Computing students may be able to assist as part
of
> eg final year projects. Again, any museum, University, or Council IT
> department should have people who can do this, or supervise it - why is
it
> not happening?
>
>
> These waters are often made out to be deep and murky. They are not: come
on
> in - the water's lovely!
>
>
> John
>
> PS The Hunterian's relatively cheapo efforts can be seen at:
>
> http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk hosted on a PC in the corner of my
office.
> The data are far from perfect, but they are still useful and popular with
> users.
>
> I'd recommend the Whistler dataset as being nice and image-rich with
> well-edited records. Image capture, and record editing of the Whistler
> dataset was more expensive than all the hardware, software and programmer
> time required to set up the Whistler search tools, and all the other
search
> tools here.
>
>
> Dr JW Faithfull
> Hunterian Museum Annex
> University of Glasgow
> 13 Thurso St
> Glasgow
> G11 6PE
>
> Tel:0141 330 4213
> Fax:0141 330 8001
> Email: [log in to unmask]


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