JISCMail - MCG Archives

I’ve wondered many, many times how much better digitisation projects would all be if the (back-end) user interfaces were intuitive and usable.

Given that quite often it’s volunteers who are doing the work, it’s a huge shame that the kind of intuitive stuff we now see on the web - stuff like autocomplete, fast and user-centric interfaces, nice design, browser-based - is so often left behind. Instead orgs are having to “install desktop software”. All a bit 1997.

But: museum investment in these systems is huge - not financial investment - but in person years of data inputting. The providers know very well that museums aren’t likely to hop from system X to system Y because of this investment - and thus there is sometimes quite a lot of inertia against making change happen.

Andrew - actually there are some open source tools already which you probably know about - but depends whether you mean “archives” or “collections management” or all of the above - stuff like

AtoM - https://www.accesstomemory.org/

Collection Space - http://www.collectionspace.org/

Archivematica - https://www.archivematica.org

…etc etc

cheers

Mike

ps. Andrew - happy to jump into a group if you need

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On 10 Feb 2017, 09:41 +0000, jon pratty <[log in to unmask]>, wrote:

Hi Andrew

My point of view is as a former funder/stakeholder and now as someone developing digitisation projects with small museums. From this perspective, the big issue (that I see) is ensuring interfaces offered to culture workers are user-centric and accessible.

If an organisation has a number of employees or volunteers with impairments of various kinds, then I'd expect the digital platform to allow them to work alongside everyone else, with a range of accessibility facilities.

I'd also expect the system to be easy to use for all who come into contact with it.

I have worked for an organisation that made no efforts at all to ensure it's systems were usable and accessible, and I feel sure it'll end in tears - or with the legal eagles...

Jon

On 6 Feb 2017 20:19, "Andrew Larking" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello MCG.

How are you all? Carrying on with my AI research I'm testing chat bots and conversational interfaces to interact with digital collections. Happy to explain further.

One of the things I've noticed is that all of the interfaces/tools that I've tried or been given access to that are being used to manage digital archives are terrible. I feel horrified that such things exist. And so I have a secondary project starting which will look to create a free and open source tool for digital archiving.

But I need testers and people to talk to. Would any of you be interested in joining a group outside of this email (to avoid spam, is that ok Mia? Can you suggest one that you'd be happy for me to use?) to help me with the research?

Hell we might also put on a breakfast event to discuss it in London if anyone would want to attend?

Evening all.
Andrew.

Creative Director, Deeson.
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