Have you heard of Europeana? Or the Collections Grid? If not, take a look. You'll find that collaboration between thousands of diverse cultural heritage institutions as well as aggregators, universities, big players like Wikipedia and Google, national and international government is alive and well and currently building an infrastructure (not simply a search portal) on which other stuff can then build. Hooking up to other broadly comparable initiatives (CAN, CHIN etc) and furthering integration with commercial search operators would be the obvious next step. To return to the start of the thread, standards play a necessary part in this but so do intelligent processing, analysis and semantic enrichment.
Cheers, Jeremy
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 07 September 2011 23:16
To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; Jeremy Ottevanger
Subject: Re: [MCG] How about a Museums-only search engine?
On 07/09/2011 15:38, Tim Trent wrote:
> Assuming it to be desirable then one of two things has to happen, either is imponderable:
>
> 1) Every museum sets a yet to be defined meta tag on each page that says "Hey, I'm a museum, search me!"
I was thinking more of a tighter, page-specific or "div"-specific tag
saying "Hey, I'm an individual Museum Exhibit listing, search me!" ...
but basically, yes.
> 2) Every museum submits their xml sitemap (which many do not have) to a centrally administered function
>
> Each of those two solutions have to be indexed by something with grunt, bandwidth and serious storage.
It'd only be serious grunt and bandwidth if it was popular. If it was
popular, it'd maybe be worth supporting. If it wasn't popular, it might
not be worth doing.
As for storage, I'm not sure how many "museum exhibit" pages there are,
outside monsters like the Smithsonian and the big national museums. If
we're worried about storage requirements, the thing could be piloted for
pooled searching across small museums only. If a "biggie" wanted to get
involved, then maybe they could consider hosting it with their existing
infrastructure. Maybe little museums could "friend" the Big Museum, and
the Big Museum could then be in a position to apply for a Lottery grant
for the project.
Or a university IT department might decide that it's a good project to
be involved with, because it'd give them a "small" search engine to play
with, with a manageable dataset. It might be a nice testbed for trying
out new search methods.
Many things are possible, assuming that there's actually a reasonable
demand for such a thing, which, as you point out, might not be the case.
> Something has to pay for that. That sounds like option 1, Big G and advertising owned by them paying them, assuming you can present them with the business case and they accept it. And just who is going to add the meta tag? And how many are going to add it correctly? And what form should it take?
Big G might be willing to do it for kicks, PR and goodwill (they
already run things like Google Scholar). They could produce a "shiny"
Google Museums widget, you add it to every exhibit page that you want
indexed, job done. I imagine if someone organised a sit-down meet
between a couple of Big Museums and Google they might be keen. But
perhaps not all museums might want to get in bed with Google.
A widget would probably be easiest for a small museum to implement,
because it'd provide the tag and the "Search for more items like this"
button in one place. But a "class" identifier embedded in another tag
would be more powerful in that it'd explicitly tag a /section/ of page,
without headers, footers, intros etc, and allow multiple exhibits on a
single page to be indexed separately.
If people wanted a system, if could start simple and evolve.
> In option 2, who runs the central system? who pays?
>
> Are there more options than the 2?
>
> [Did you use "IT" and "marketing" in the same sentence just then? - Wow, brave!]
>
> I'm not even sure this is a "nice to have". What happens if you instruct a search engine to seek thus:
>
> "my search string" +museum
>
> Example:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Nelson+%2BTrafalgar+%2BMuseum&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
>
> Surely that returns all that the search engine has found (and some guff besides)
Yep, but there's still a fair amount of guff, and if we were only
searching pages or page sections that were explicitly flagged as being
about individual exhibits, almost all of that guff should disappear.
You'd lose all the educational background pages, and the mentions of
museums off Trafalgar Square near Nelson's Column, and hopefully end up
just looking at a list of actual items.
I did think of adding "site:museum" to the standard search string, which
would supposedly only returns hits from domain names that include
"museum" somewhere in the title, but although that seemed to work for
".com" museums, it didn't seem to include results for ".co.uk", and it
wouldn't give the V&A or the National Gallery, which don't have "museum"
in their domain names.
/If/ this ability would be genuinely useful, the technical and funding
issues wouldn't seem to be too difficult to overcome, and we could all
get togther and start working out the details. If it wouldn't be
genuinely useful, the other issues are probably irrelevant.
Eric
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
This message has been scanned by the IWM Webroot Service.
This email and any attachments are confidential. It may contain privileged information and is intended for the named recipient(s) only. It must not be distributed without consent. If you are not one of the named recipients, please notify the sender and do not disclose or retain this email or any part of it.
Unless expressly stated otherwise, opinions in this email are those of the individual sender and not those of the Imperial War Museum.
This email has been scanned by the Webroot security service. We believe but do not warrant that this email and any attachments are virus free: you must therefore take full responsibility for virus checking.
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
|