I think b) is a terrible idea - and IMO a) is clearly the way to go.
The majority of non-researchery people are likely looking for images and
as Nick says they'll start with a Google Images search, not a
museum-specific one.
So essentially b) becomes "competing with Google" which is probably not
a good idea. Actually - it becomes "competing with Google, Flickr,
Photobucket, etc" - an even worse idea.
However...
Without a clear value proposition (shoot me) - in other words, A Thing
That People Can See, this becomes a very much tougher game - and by
"People" I mean the museums that you want to participate.
So if you've got stats that are tangible, real things that (for
instance) hit museum KPIs - I dunno - number of visits to collections
pages increases X% on average for museums on culture grid - then I'd see
these as being the value, and would be an easier "sell".
I know you're doing this with your hack days and stuff - which are
excellent I think (although I suppose some would argue that developers
aren't necessarily your core audience to convince?) - but maybe a really
strong set of calls on the site would help. This -
http://www.culturegrid.org.uk/about/benefits/ - forgive me - is pretty
waffly. I'd be thinking about this in much stronger benefit terms - say:
"We got our collections online in half a day with the help of the
culture grid team"
"We've reduced calls to our enquiry desk by 50% because we've got all
our items online now with the help of Culture Grid"
"It was easy, we sent them a DVD and the collections were there!"
...I'm really going too far, deliberately, but you know - this sort of
thing?
cheers
Mike
ps..
I'm interested by the way in pages like this:
http://www.culturegrid.org.uk/search/1799775.html
..which are clearly well SEOd and visible on Google Images - but you
don't get to them from the search results page - is there another route
in or are they just for ranking purposes..?
..also the search results pages are doing something weird - what -
loading in some jquery or something to display the results grid? View
Source is kind of...sparse...? This could well be doing bad things to
SEO too..?
_____________________________
*Mike Ellis *
Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital
agency:http://thirty8.co.uk <http://thirty8.co.uk/>
* My book: http://heritageweb.co.uk <http://heritageweb.co.uk/> *
Mia wrote:
> I chose this as my postcard:
> http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/ltm-1984-51-864 (found via CultureGrid).
>
> And my 2c worth: in some wonderful future day, collections management
> systems let people selectively publish collections online via interfaces
> for humans, machines or both to use. Until then, the sector needs an
> service for those without APIs or online collections to supply Europeana
> and other sites. And people should supply other sites with their data so
> that their collections are discoverable in Google, because that's where
> everyone starts their search.
>
> Designing public-facing interfaces that can deal with the many messy issues
> that aggregating an enormous range of data from different types of
> institutions with varying local standards creates, let alone creating an
> interface that is a delight to use, is a huge undertaking. Do a) and let
> someone else have the joy of b)...
>
> Cheers, Mia
>
> --------------------------------------------
> http://openobjects.org.uk/
> http://twitter.com/mia_out
> Check out my book! http://bit.ly/CrowdsourcingCulturalHeritage
> <http://bit.ly/CrowdsourcingCulturalHeritage>
> I mostly use this address for list mail so may not see emails here; my
> open.ac.uk address is checked daily
>
> On 4 November 2014 15:16, Nick Poole<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Dear Trevor, Mike,
>>
>> Thanks very much for your responses about the Culture Grid. I'll respond
>> more fully once we've had a few more, but I wanted to address the 'why'
>> question.
>>
>> My vision for the Culture Grid has always been as a service not a
>> destination. It's a cornerstone of the COPE ('Create Once, Publish
>> Everywhere') strategy that there needs to be middleware that extracts
>> the collections data, stores it and makes it available to 3rd party
>> platforms like Europeana, Google Cultural Institute, Digital Public
>> Space (potentially) and anything else that might come along.
>>
>> So the 'why' is that a museum would decide to promote themselves to
>> online audiences by putting their data into these platforms, but instead
>> of doing it several times for each separate destination, they put it
>> into the Culture Grid and then tell us who we can share it with. In the
>> process, we wanted to take some of the cost and some of the risk out of
>> collections data-sharing so that it is an easier decision for a museum
>> to make.
>>
>> I always assumed that once everyone had an API, the need for this kind
>> of middleware service would evaporate. In practice, one of the key
>> outcomes of this consultation so far is that this is far from being the
>> case - people want the Culture Grid to build out the use case,
>> demonstrate value and actively broker cultural data into things like
>> hacks and new platforms.
>>
>> Which brings me to one of the big challenges with the Culture Grid. The
>> Culture Grid is a free-to-use service (to answer Mike's question), but
>> to get funding for it, we had to build a search front-end (the website
>> at http://www.culturegrid.org.uk). Because this was a secondary aim for
>> us, it's never been promoted as a public-facing destination. However, as
>> soon as you put up a front-end, everyone wants you to make it something
>> the public would really want to use. This is one of the challenges
>> that's faced Europeana all along, and one of the reasons why they're now
>> focusing on improving the end-user experience of their main website.
>>
>> It's a critical question in terms of our future strategy - do we:
>>
>> a) Stick to the vision that the Culture Grid is an enabling service, not
>> a destination in its own right (which makes it hard to pay for), or
>>
>> b) Focus on developing it as an end-user destination (which would
>> involve us getting a lot more involved in quality, standards, rights and
>> metadata enrichment, or
>>
>> c) Both, or
>>
>> d) Neither
>>
>> Answers on a postcard!
>>
>> All best,
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick Poole
>> Chief Executive Officer
>> Collections Trust
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Join Collections Trust's Collections Management Group
>> Follow us on Twitter
>> Like us on Facebook
>>
>> www.collectionstrust.org.uk. Company Registration No: 1300565 Registered
>> Charity No: 273984
>> Registered Office: Collections Trust, WC 209, Natural History Museum,
>> Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
>> Reynolds, Trevor
>> Sent: 03 November 2014 20:15
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [MCG] Consultation over the development of the Culture Grid
>>
>> Hi Nick
>>
>> Some first thoughts.
>>
>> Lack of participation by museums:
>>
>> (I may be wrong) but when I have looked at participation in Culture Grid
>> it appears to require you to have your collection on-line somewhere
>> before you can participate. I suspect this is still a barrier to many.
>> (For various reasons, we still don't have our collections on-line).
>> Many museums have no IT expertise in house and without a button in
>> whatever they use to catalogue their collection they will struggle to
>> participate. What does this mean? In order to increase participation
>> Culture Grid will need to get suppliers to include "export to culture
>> grid" as a function of their collections software and will need to be
>> prepared to host data or find ways of facilitating data hosting (Ideally
>> the UK could do with something like the New Zealand project that
>> resulted in ehive).
>>
>> What is culture grid for
>>
>> I have never really seen Culture Grid as a destination in itself and I
>> am not sure that this should be a focus. For me its focus should be on
>> being the definitive, up to date, source of information about museum
>> objects in the UK. I don't want (or have the time or resources) to
>> provide data to PCF or Europeana or all the other very worthwhile
>> projects that are out there.
>>
>> Trevor Reynolds, Registrar
>> English Heritage, 37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP
>> +44 (0) 1904 601905
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nick
>> Poole [[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: 03 November 2014 15:00
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: [MCG] Consultation over the development of the Culture Grid
>>
>> Dear MCG'ers,
>>
>>
>>
>> Some of you may have spotted that we've launched a consultation about
>> the future development of the Culture Grid (www.culturegrid.org.uk), the
>> aggregator which currently provides access to 3m+ records from UK
>> museums, archives and libraries. We have been running the Culture Grid
>> with the good people at Knowledge Integration for nearly 8 years now
>> (and its origins predate this considerably in the form of the Peoples
>> Network Discover Service) and it is time to step back and develop a
>> clear plan for the way forward.
>>
>>
>>
>> I hope you won't mind if I shamelessly use you as a focus group for
>> this, but as the nation's hive mind on all things digital and cultural,
>> I would like to ask you to share your thoughts and opinions about the
>> value of the Culture Grid, its strengths and weaknesses and your ideas
>> both about aggregation in general and the Culture Grid in particular.
>>
>>
>>
>> I've posted on our blog about our thinking about the Culture Grid - see
>> http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/blog/culturegrid and we are also
>> receiving comments directly via this email address or on twitter using
>> the hashtag #cgfuture.
>>
>>
>>
>> I would be especially grateful for any views you are able to share
>> on-list - we are keen for this to be as open and constructive a
>> consultation as possible, and to ensure that whatever happens next with
>> the Culture Grid it delivers genuine value for the people who expend
>> time and effort participating in it.
>>
>>
>>
>> With many thanks in advance for your ideas and comments!
>>
>>
>>
>> All best,
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick Poole
>> Chief Executive Officer
>> Collections Trust
>>
>>
>> <http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/copyright-seminar/copyright-seminar-
>> 2015>
>>
>>
>>
>> <http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> 7734931&qid=f3e77705-7ec2-44c7-99db-7fe325bb16fc&trk=group_most_recent_r
>> ich-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmr_3280471> Join Collections Trust's Collections
>> Management Group
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>>
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>> www.collectionstrust.org.uk. Company Registration No: 1300565 Registered
>> Charity No: 273984
>>
>> Registered Office: Collections Trust, WC 209, Natural History Museum,
>> Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD
>>
>>
>>
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