Hi Tehmina,
Just to come back to you about PATHS, Collections Trust hasn't been involved, but there's a handy little video at http://www.paths-project.eu/ which might help.
The demonstrator seems to be down at the moment, but from the video it looks as though the idea is to use semantics to provide an interface which allows users to explore your collections data.
I imagine they've got to the bit of the project where they've made a prototype and now they need to show it to museum people to get your feedback. I know it can be hard to get people involved in the testing of these things, so if anyone did happen to be free for them to come in and demo the prototype, I'm sure they'd be very grateful.
I'll probably be flamed for saying this (and I know that some of our products haven't been perfect from this point of view) but my feedback would be that it's really hard to get a proportionate sense of the functionality and value of a technical demonstrator without better user experience and visual design.
I think all of these potential applications of semantics to improve user experience are great, but if they are to have the maximum impact they need to be (a) embeddable within your existing web publishing (b) given a back-end management interface so that you're not depending on 'pure' semantics to provide a reasonable quality/coherence of experience and (c) silky smooth/a joy to use. I understand that the prototype currently on the website is last-generation, and there are some interface upgrades planned.
I'll be interested to see how this one develops from here, and looking forward to hearing how people get on with the testing.
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tehmina Goskar
Sent: 08 May 2013 09:55
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Fwd: FW: Invitation to participate in the EC funded PATHS project
Anyone know more about this? Nick P?
Is this trying to do what Creative Spaces in the UK failed to achieve with Europeana content?
There's so much verbiage to read through, it's not exactly clear what it's all about so could be accidentally missing something good.
Any ideas?
Tehmina.
n
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jack Kirby <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 8 May 2013 09:07
Subject: FW: Invitation to participate in the EC funded PATHS project
To: [log in to unmask]
Dear all - please find below details of a research project in personalizing access to digital cultural heritage collections; if anybody is interested, please get in touch with Jill Griffiths [log in to unmask] .*
***
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Kind regards, Jack****
** **
Invitation to participate in the EC funded PATHS project
My name is Jill Griffiths and I am a consultant with MDR Partners carrying out research as part of the European Commission funded PATHS project (the PATHS project consortium is made up of 5 partners from 4 countries, including a cultural heritage organisation, 2 universities and 2 technology companies). PATHS is an exciting project developing a new online system for personalising access to digital cultural heritage collections, enabling expert and general users to create, share and follow 'pathways' through collections, as a means for sense-making, learning and collaboration, around themes, ideas and stories. We are not a commercial company, we are researchers seeking to develop new ways to help people access cultural heritage information digitally. I attach a paper which outlines the PATHS system and approach in more detail.****
****
We would like to invite cultural heritage organisations to participate by allowing us to demonstrate our prototype system to a small number of colleagues, and for feedback to be provided to us via a questionnaire and discussions. The Prototype is using a test collection from Europeana. The Project ran a number of demonstrations with our first prototype last year (in the UK, Italy and Spain) and included medium and large sized museums, photographic archives and general user groups. As a result of this feedback we have further developed our system and are inviting cultural heritage organisations to view this new Prototype. The UK demonstrations are being coordinated by myself and I will be running these throughout June (possibly into early July), we would work around a date and time that best suited different organisations. Our partners at Sheffield University are also doing some evaluation work in their computer labs and additional demonstrations are taking place in Spain and Greece. The groups include a range of people from the cultural heritage community and include general users/visitors, students, and experts in both curation and interpretation of collections.
The total activity will take about 1 hour, and would be conducted on site. We would only need to have about 5-10 participants at each organisation, preferably a mix of curators, archivists, education staff, digital media, communications and gallery staff, (although if more were interested in participating then we would be delighted to include them). It will not be an onerous activity, in fact I think you would find it very interesting and enjoyable. The demonstration sessions we are running are to enable us to have feedback from real potential users (both experts and
visitors) so that we can develop PATHS into a system that is useful and usable by the whole of the cultural heritage community.****
****
If you would like to speak with my directly my number is 07816 170047. I have also attached a PATHS leaflet for your information and you can also find out more at the project website http://www.paths-project.eu/.****
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My best wishes to you, ****
Jill****
Reply to: Jill Griffiths [log in to unmask] PATHS Website: http://www.paths-project.eu/ MDR Partners website: http://www.mdrpartners.com/****
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*More about PATHS
*PATHS (Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces) is funded by the European Commission under FP7 Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation Programme, bringing together partners from academia, technology and cultural heritage. The PATHS team hopes that you are able to participate in this critical stage of our research, and looks forward to receiving your response.
****
** **
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Dr Tehmina Goskar, MA AMA
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Heritage Consultant & Historian -- Industrial Heritage -- Digital Heritage
-- Collections Management -- Interpretation -- Research http://tehmina.goskar.com/
Twitter: @tehm <https://en.twitter.com/tehm>
Join History 51: Unveiling Women in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly:
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Read about my research on copper: http://copper.goskar.com/
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