>> The end-user doesn't need any of those museum computers to be talking to each other, as long as there's a search engine button or widget that can be launched from any of the sites that gives access to pooled results for all of them.
But why on earth, would I, as an end-user want results that only come from museums, rather than results for what I'm actually looking for from museums, blogs, photo pools, and other places on the web? The only people I know who are generically interested in what 'museums' have to offer are people who work for museums.
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eric Baird
Sent: 05 September 2011 19:33
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MCG] How about a Museums-only search engine?
I've been pondering the current push for standardised terminology in Museum classification so that different Museums' IT systems can be interfaced, and I'm wondering how much of this is really thought-through ... Our vision for the "future" of Museum IT seems to be based onthe needs of ecommerce systems, or on how information technology was taught in the 1970's.
Museums don't usually need to be able to bulk-exchange data with each other, because they're not wholesaling or retailing each others exhibits, or buying and selling in bulk from each other and expecting their inventory to be automatically updated. They're not Amazon or iTunes. The reason for making information available online is usually for the benefit of end-users, and those end-users are primarily interested in finding out about exhibits and finding other similar information. They don't need to add or remove exhibits from the system, or transfer entries to a different museum's site. If they're not moving entries between systems, then deep data-compatibility isn't really a requirement. If your museum is going to be taken over or merged with another, then it's handy if the organisation that takes over your collection can integrate your database with theirs, but otherwise, it's a bit difficult to see the immediate payoff.
If what we want is search and discovery, then structured XML databases become less critical, and the specialist dedicated tools for the job are ... search engines. Good search engines look for patterns in the data and find their own sets of associated keywords and cross-references without needing webpage authors to standardise on a specific keyphrase.
If you search for "747 aeroplane", Google will report Wikipedia's page on the Boeing 747 as the highest ranking result, even though one of the two selected words, "aeroplane" doesn't actually exist anywhere in the page. Google knows from context that different pages that include "747"
seem to use "aeroplane", "aircraft" and "airplane" in the same way, and it makes the association that, in this type of search, the words are probably interchangeable. Google also doesn't need those keywords to be explicitly structured in the source text (although it probably helps).
Google also has access to semantic structures via sites like Freebase that can tell it that "747" is a type of "airplane" / "aircraft" / "aeroplane", which is a type of "transport", and which is associated with a "manufacturer" called "Boeing", so it can draw on these logical associations and use them to guess at the meaning of museum webpages without needing those pages to include their own semantic tagging.
Explicit semantic tagging probably /helps/, but one of the points of teaching Google about semantics separately was that it could then use that knowledge to analyse /any/ webpage, instead of requiring thousands of individual webpage authors to go off and take special training courses in standardised terminology, to be able to write pages that Google can understand. That seems to be the equivalent of what we're asking museum staff to do, with the added downside that once they put all the effort into structuring their data to allow it to be more compatible with some hypothetical inter-museum system ... they find that no such system seems to exist. I'm not even sure that anyone's even planning on producing one, or setting up the organisation to run one, or sorting out what the rules would be if one existed.
So, if our supposed goal is to let people cross-reference and search for similar items across the Museum network, perhaps what we should have been concentrating on is a cross-site "Museum search" project. The end-user doesn't need any of those museum computers to be talking to each other, as long as there's a search engine button or widget that can be launched from any of the sites that gives access to pooled results for all of them.
As far as I can tell, the reason why we haven't done this is because the Museum IT community has been focusing on XML as the exclusive answer to everything, because XML is nice and technical, it lets them impose order, and it requires IT people to understand it so it makes Museums more dependent on IT people (which IT people probably feel is a Good Thing). XML-based initiatives generate IT jobs, and IT training jobs, and IT support jobs, and if you can lobby the standards committees and get your XML based system or scheme made compulsory as a condition for certification, then museums have to keep paying you, indefinitely.
They're locked in, even if your complex system doesn't actually do anything especially useful.
So perhaps the problem with a search engine initiative is that it might work /too/ well. It might be too quick, easy, cheap, effective and popular. If the search engine functionality is being implemented at a single point, you don't need specially-trained IT staff duplicated at every single museum entering data in a special way that the IT system requires. Sure, if you /want/ to use explicit XML tagging, that might give you a boost in the search engine rankings because the engine will have a higher confidence in its analysis of a page, but if you just write a simple webpage about an exhibit, and tell the dedicated Museum search engine that it exists, then there's a good chance that the engine will be able to do a good speculative cross-reference without needing a single line of custom code.
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One way of implementing this would be to have an "Exhibits" widget that a webmaster could embed on any page that's about a single Museum exhibit, which would then register that page with the search engine when it's loaded, and give the user "Search for similar items on this Museum"
and "Search for similar items in other museums" options. Maybe also an "I like this exhibit" button, a button to look for the current ranked favourites in the site, and a star rating based on how well that exhibit is ranked on the site.
From the Museum's point of view, this wouldn't seem to have to be any more difficult than embedding an existing social media widget, and for many museums it might work well enough with existing content to make more ambitious semantic tagging projects unnecessary. If someone's looking at a page with "Steiff" and "teddy bear" in a heading, a dedicated "Museum search" for pages with similar content probably doesn't need those keywords to be semantically tagged to be able to find other Steiff bear exhibits. Additional structure would be nice, but usually unnecessary.
If you want to get more fancy, you could have a Class="Exhibit"
identifier that could be put into the enclosing div or table code, to say that only the contents of that particular panel are relevant, so that the search engine doesn't try to index all the surrounding navigation bars etc. If you wanted multiple exhibits on a page, they could have their own widgets and isolating panels. But that could be a later development if people wanted it.
I do like the idea of having everything XML-tagged on principle, and I think it's a good goal to aim for. But if we're serious about wanting to let users do cross-museum searches, XML seems to be the foundation work for a very sophisticated house that nobody's intending to build. If we honestly do want cross-museum searches, we can have it without a lot of work, but the limiting factor is people, not technology.
OTOH, if we actually don't care too much about the ability to do cross-museum searches, feel that maybe they won't be all that useful, and aren't too bothered if the feature never appears, then that's okay ... as long as we're honest with ourselves about it.
Eric
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