Probably an off-list discussion, preferably over a pint :-)
But: personally I think that not having collections data which is
_actually_ part of your CMS content can be part of the "oh, that's the
collection, over there" problem. And that - see earlier rants about how
dull lists of *stuff* can be - doesn't do museum objects any justice.
Part of the point of ingesting the metadata into the CMS itself is that
you can then actually do _rich_ stuff with that content, not just search.
So as examples, you may be..
- writing a web page and want to feature a related object in the sidebar
- developing an online exhibition or game where you want to add related
objects into the flow of the narrative. An example is here:
http://americanmuseum.org/about-the-museum/exhibitions/gangsters/ - if
you scroll down you can see rows of object records, all of which are
selected by simply selecting them from a list: the object name,
description and title are all pulled in automatically (hey, COPE!)
- writing a rich, engaging newsletter for use with MailChimp (more here
if you're interested:
http://www.thirty8.co.uk/2014/06/using-wordpress-to-build-mailchimp-newsletters/)
where you pull in image and description assets for use elsewhere (moar
COPE!)
- developing game-based approaches such as quizzes, mystery objects or
mobile tours, etc. This is where our focus is at the moment; we're
building tools where the museum web editor can quickly put together
these kinds of experiences really easily within a reusable framework.
From a theoretical "we don't like duplicated data" point of view, you
totally have a point. But from a reality point of view where the
metadata in these records doesn't actually change that much - and where
the ingestion takes a few minutes every, what, week? - the upsides are
fairly tangible I think.
cheers!
Mike
_____________________________
*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/> *
James Grimster wrote:
> Mike, All
>
> I might be biased, but 'middleware' aggregation into a common interchange layer, be it via ECK to Dark Aggregator / and or CultureGrid , and then use a common API approach, seems absolutely the best way forward to
> achieve plugging collections search into Content Management Systems like WordPress; make WP *think* the object metadata is a post, and then have all the WP functions wrap natively around it.
> Rather than store the object metadata in the Content Management System itself.
> IMHO
>
> cheers
>
> --
> James
>
>
>
> On 20 Nov 2014, at 10:51, Mike Ellis wrote:
>
>> "Dark Aggregator"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> cool.
>
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