>Hi John
>I have to reply to this to explain why the waters are so murky. This is a bit of a rant as well.
Sarah's CD query raises an interesting point - why are so few museum
catalogues available online?
>The simple answer is because we lack the skills, knowledge, technical support, budget, status, time etc.
Apologies for the length of this post/rant, but it's a topic dear to my
heart.
As Tom says, it is technically almost trivial, and a lot of the very best
software technology (eg Apache or Xitami webservers, MySQL, PHP etc) is
freeware.
>Ok so that means it doesn't cost anything but what are these things?
Hardware requirements are also trivial. There are plenty of Council,
University and ISP webservers around for free, or low-cost hosting.
>Yes but controlled by IT depts & others and not by the museum.
Hosting your own is easy: most small and medium-sized museums, and probably
most large ones, could easily run a Website including dynamic catalogue
searching, on the cheapest PC it's possible to buy just now, or an old
redeployed one. The only non-trivial requirement would be a permanent
Ethernet or other broadband connection.
>Yes but only if you are empowered within your organisation (council) to do this.
Security on a Webserver sounds like a big problem, but is not actually any
worse than any other internet-connected activity, such as reading email.
Acceptably securing a server is not hard. For the paraniod, don't have your
webserver logged on to your in-house fileservers.
>We would like to allow public internet access at the museum but we are told it is too risky by our IT dept. Wouldn't it be nice if museums could access the People's Network.
Again, any half-competent IT person, and a lot of people who are not, know
this, and can do it. Why are these things not being done?
>They don't work in museums or they are too busy doing something else.
Maybe our catalogues are full of technical terms and boring info. So what?
They are just that - catalogues. Nobody expects a library catalogue to be
exciting. Making them searchable and available "as is" would still be a
massive step forward in public access to collections. This is not a
substitute for other kinds of resources, but an invaluable adjunct or first
step.
>As a natural history curator I can only agree with this but winning the argument with education, design and other visitor services staff that any of this stuff is accessible or meaningful to anyone other than a handful of specialists is difficult.
Maybe our computer catalogues are not complete. Again, so what? Doing
something is better than nothing. And, if you do it right, your
web-seachable dataset can be updated automatically (eg weekly) as you add
records to your computer catalogue. The setup work can just as well be done
now as later.
Maybe people are worried about storage locations, valuations or the DPA?
Just omit sensitive info from the on-line database. A single simple query
will usually be enough to do this prior to export. Bingo! Most of the useful
and interesting information will still be there for the public.
OK, you do need a bit of programming expertise to use things like PHP, ASP
etc. However, these skills are very widespread, and compared with most other
kinds of programming, very easily learnt. Very simple searchable search
pages for an existing database can probably be done in less than a day. OK,
after that, you can be as fancy as you like, and spend as much as you want,
but the basics are easy. Computing students may be able to assist as part of
eg final year projects. Again, any museum, University, or Council IT
department should have people who can do this, or supervise it - why is it
not happening?
>Council IT departments aren't going to help you because they are busy on important projects! Museums aren't social work, finance or schools education. They're also not going to let students loose on their IT systems. The last programming I did was in Pascal in 1986 when I was a student. What is PHP and ASP?
These waters are often made out to be deep and murky. They are not: come on
in - the water's lovely!
>Sorry this email is a bit tongue in cheek but it does highlight some of the difficulties that we grapple with everyday in the real world. In spite of all these difficulties we do have the herbarium catalogue availabe online at www.pkc.gov.uk/herbarium
Visit the searchable database and you will discover that page is hosted not by the council but by SCRAN. When the council IT department didn't want to know SCRAN did us a favour.
Cheers
Mark Simmons
Perth Museum
John
PS The Hunterian's relatively cheapo efforts can be seen at:
http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk <http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk> hosted on a PC in the corner of my office.
The data are far from perfect, but they are still useful and popular with
users.
I'd recommend the Whistler dataset as being nice and image-rich with
well-edited records. Image capture, and record editing of the Whistler
dataset was more expensive than all the hardware, software and programmer
time required to set up the Whistler search tools, and all the other search
tools here.
Dr JW Faithfull
Hunterian Museum Annex
University of Glasgow
13 Thurso St
Glasgow
G11 6PE
Tel:0141 330 4213
Fax:0141 330 8001
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