I'd advise you all also to read Bridget Mackenzie's blog entry on
Creative Spaces as well. http://bridgetmckenzie.blogspot.com/
She makes some good points about the fact that the project costs were
not limited to Creative Spaces at all, but Webquests, which did involve
a lot of content development. Bridget also makes some interesting points
about the relationship between the two sites.
Matthew
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Jon Pratty
Sent: 06 March 2009 01:04
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re 'Creative Spaces' - reposted
[An MCG person asked me to repost this in full, to keep things on the
list, rather than off list on blogs...fair enough.]
I think this has been one of the best ideas threads we've had for a long
time. Yes, it's been passionate, and that does indeed get people
thinking, and firing up laptops in reply.
I think voices who advocated tact in the exchange (Nick Poole, myself
via Twitter, and others) did so because we're already engaged in working
with museum people all over the regions, not always in the most
glamorous places; we're all working for peanuts, doing about ten million
things at once, including managing that puzzling interface between
museum directors and the onward march of digital technology...and so,
not surprisingly, people are sensitive about projects they put lots of
time into.
To me, that's one of the reasons there needs to be some tact in the way
we review each other's projects; if you'd been behind the scenes of
projects like NMOLP you'll have seen the sort of passion it arouses. I
saw people (like Terry and Carolyn, and the teams of writers like Rachel
and Rowena L) working like absolute stink to get the project done, and
ploughing through all sorts of effluent to manage relationships across
and through the project. Those who stuck the course deserve medals.
I think the emotionality was also caused by the big fees funding the
project - big ticket jobs like this cause a certain amount of envy, and
that too, leads to comment that doesn't always please. One gets a
picture sometimes of vast (National museum) battleships manoevring
around a smallish patch of sea, each one guarding it's own flanks,
carefully manning the bulwarks, in case a stray shell cuts the rigging,
or someone jumps ship.
Best things coming out of the Creative Spaces debate for me?
A) The emerging discussion about 'the plumbing' (nice metaphor from Paul
Walk) being the first job to tackle when working on these complex
cross-collection projects. Yep. Of course the data scheme underneath is
critical. The website (if there needs to be one!) should be sat on top
of the database well down the line of projects like this. Sorting out
how you get the data, on what (copyright) terms it's given, and how the
data is related and relational is the first key task.
B) Another plus has been the thread (from Frankie, Mike Ellis, Kate
Fernie and others) about how social nets work in reality, and why you
might want, or not want, to play for a while, culturally. This stuff
needs to be explored more. Already one or two culture orgs have made
abortive attempts at trying to get things going, and they mostly failed
'cause they didn't spot that sites get massive visits when they get the
bigger publishing picture about mass audiences, massive budgets and
massive human resources and tech support. That insight mainly comes from
expertise that's mostly, at the moment, outside the museum sector.
C) We're starting to get the idea too, that the cool culture venture we
dream about here might not be a big project, but smaller-scale,
evolutionary, more experimental, more informal. There aren't any more
big pots of money (like ISB) now for this kind of work. We've got to be
coming up with sustainable and scaleable ideas, so some wisdom about the
scope and depth of project concepts needs to be found when ideas are
still at the back of an envelope stage.
My interests in this?
I've long evangelised (and written about, in 2005) 'the inside out web
museum.' At my former workplace, my enthusiasm for a more 'datacentric'
publishing offer drove quite a bit of our re-design thinking, though the
final realisation of those ideas is still in the pipeline. But look
outwards at recent tech trends and think about how near we are to some
sort of breakthrough. We're wrong to expect a 'killer app,' but
continuous development and playful experimentation like the (Mike Ellis)
Mashed Museum sessions at UKMW08 will get us nearer to some sort of
nirvana.
Where to go now, post-Creative Spaces? We ALL need and deserve (as a
sector, everywhere) access to data channels that come to us, and do the
necessary spidering and data mining to make the most of all the content
we might choose to expose and share. And, importantly, let it be live
data exchange, not a day old, or a week old, or some such OAI-harvested
old hat.
The next culture web must be live; after all we have come to expect that
through our day-to-day fun with Twitter and FB.
To get live, we need APIs; they are, of course, the way forward as
Richard Light, Mia and Mike Ellis all say. API's need standards, and the
Collections Trust work with DACS and towards new BSI data standards is
excellent.
Sharing freely and offering culture content to others for their own use
opens doors to commerce and business models, so some movement there gets
us towards a more commercially-geared culture web.
And finally? The success of #hashtags on Twitter (check
#fakeanimalfacts) proves people can come up with vocabs and impromptu
syntax that bind humour, culture, conferences and news together using
simple XML. My research interest now is to see how we can map some
simple #-like tagging and vocab structures (and maybe the National
Curriculum) so we can have cultural fun without needing to build big and
expensive portalised web projects...
JP
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