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Subject: Re: Novel cross-collections interface
Thanks everyone for all the feedback. I've shared it with the Newcastle University researchers on the project. A next iteration already has a number of design questions you mention earmarked. Any further comments/questions you want to send to me off list are appreciated.
To follow up on your points regarding audience, Jon. I agree. This is ultimately a project about expanding audience reach but following patterns of staff usage with the prototype over the past few months has formed part of the user testing study. We want this to be a tool to inspire them. "I cannot believe we have this in the collection" (in both the positive and, occasionally, negative sense) has been something I've heard a few times!
Final report and SDK to follow towards end of Summer. Happy to share.
Cheers
John.
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Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2015 20:49:51 +0100
From: jon pratty <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Novel cross-collections interface
Lovely work, John
Some points from me:
Even though I've now left Arts Council England, it does rankle slightly
when people describe the Digital R & D Fund for the Arts as the 'NESTA
Digital R & D Fund!' Arts Council colleagues from every English region
worked really hard to make the Fund work, and yet it's often credited
wholly to NESTA. The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts was a partnership
between Arts Council England
<http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/about/www.artscouncil.org.uk>, Arts and
Humanities Research Council
<http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/about/www.ahrc.ac.uk> and Nesta
<http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/about/www.nesta.org.uk>.
I looked at both sites you have cited o laptop and smartphone [a 5 inch HTC
M8 running Android 5.0.1]. On the laptop, a low-powered Samsung Netbook
running XP, the site looked great [via Firefox] and worked quite well. I
liked the sizing of the images. On the smartphone all the text was
displaying way too small - a stylesheet issue, I presume.
The 'Explore Connections' facility was the core facet of the project for
me. The ability to show relational connections generated via tags or
metadata seems to me to be a really important thing to be trying to do.
Whether it succeeds at the moment feels less important, to me. It's an
ambitious thing to try to do, because so few online collections try to make
narrative pathways between eras, art forms, curriculum types, names, places
etc.
What seems difficult when exploring this type of connectivity is trying to
work out who it is for. By that I mean, is it for the public, to use as an
interface? Is it for curatorial staff, to use as part of a collections and
content management system? Or both?
To my mind, developing novel online content navigation and discovery
systems might possibly be a red herring, if they are intended only for
public use. The first public are museum staff themselves - they are the
first audience. The biggest challenge, to me, in re-curating collections in
a more data-centric [or semantic] way, is helping museum people make the
connections revealed by projects like yours in the first place.
While I was using and enjoying the sites, I was thinking, 'how would I
re-curate this collection to better suit the capabilities of the new
platform?'
With that research question in mind, I think the project is great. A real
gain, because it's suggested new ways to use it to add further value to
digital heritage practice.
All the best
Jon
Jon Pratty, FRSA
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