"To get live, we need APIs; they are, of course, the way forward as Richard  
Light, Mia and Mike Ellis all say. API's need standards, and the  
Collections Trust work with DACS and towards new BSI data standards is  
excellent."

I've noted the emphasis on APIs on this list not just in discussions around Creative Spaces, but almost every time the topic of sharing data comes up on this list.

To my mind, APIs are a wonderful thing because they allow for the kinds of mash-ups which create something utterly new out of two (or more) streams of data. They are great for plugging one institution to another (or a couple of other) data sources. Moreover, they send a powerful signal about an institutions commitment to openness and sharing. For that reason alone I would want all 2,500 museums in the UK, and all the 17,500 museums in the US for that matter, to have one, and I rejoice the news that the Brooklyn Museum just launched theirs.

On the other hand, if your goal is to create a collective collection of a significant subset of those 2,500 or 17,500 or whatever other figure you'd like to toss around, how useful are those APIs? (This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one - I aim to expand my horizons!)

This may be where the conversation veers into the distributed vs centralized data store arena. As I understand it, APIs allow you to execute a distributed search, which may scale to the 9 national museums in Creative Spaces (I assume they use an Open Search API), but they usually don't allow you to take possession of the data. Does this approach scale to even all of the London museums (241 as very empirically counted on http://www.londonnet.co.uk/ln/guide/about/museums.html)?

What's the mechanism you envision for a collective collection beyond the 9 national museums to flow together? I'd be curious to hear how folks on the list think the API approach will scale...

Günter

P.S.: I wrote a blog about Creative Spaces as well, in case anybody cares to hear more opinion on the matter: http://hangingtogether.org/?p=636.

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jon Pratty
Sent: Thursday, March 05, 2009 5:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re 'Creative Spaces' - reposted

[An MCG person asked me to repost this in full, to keep things on the list,  
rather than off list on blogs...fair enough.]

I think this has been one of the best ideas threads we've had for a long  
time. Yes, it's been passionate, and that does indeed get people thinking,  
and firing up laptops in reply.

I think voices who advocated tact in the exchange (Nick Poole, myself via  
Twitter, and others) did so because we're already engaged in working with  
museum people all over the regions, not always in the most glamorous  
places; we're all working for peanuts, doing about ten million things at  
once, including managing that puzzling interface between museum directors  
and the onward march of digital technology...and so, not surprisingly,  
people are sensitive about projects they put lots of time into.

To me, that's one of the reasons there needs to be some tact in the way we  
review each other's projects; if you'd been behind the scenes of projects  
like NMOLP you'll have seen the sort of passion it arouses. I saw people  
(like Terry and Carolyn, and the teams of writers like Rachel and Rowena L)  
working like absolute stink to get the project done, and ploughing through  
all sorts of effluent to manage relationships across and through the  
project. Those who stuck the course deserve medals.

I think the emotionality was also caused by the big fees funding the  
project - big ticket jobs like this cause a certain amount of envy, and  
that too, leads to comment that doesn't always please. One gets a picture  
sometimes of vast (National museum) battleships manoevring around a  
smallish patch of sea, each one guarding it's own flanks, carefully manning  
the bulwarks, in case a stray shell cuts the rigging, or someone jumps ship.

Best things coming out of the Creative Spaces debate for me?

A) The emerging discussion about 'the plumbing' (nice metaphor from Paul  
Walk) being the first job to tackle when working on these complex  
cross-collection projects. Yep. Of course the data scheme underneath is  
critical. The website (if there needs to be one!) should be sat on top of  
the database well down the line of projects like this. Sorting out how you  
get the data, on what (copyright) terms it's given, and how the data is  
related and relational is the first key task.

B) Another plus has been the thread (from Frankie, Mike Ellis, Kate Fernie  
and others) about how social nets work in reality, and why you might want,  
or not want, to play for a while, culturally. This stuff needs to be  
explored more. Already one or two culture orgs have made abortive attempts  
at trying to get things going, and they mostly failed 'cause they didn't  
spot that sites get massive visits when they get the bigger publishing  
picture about mass audiences, massive budgets and massive human resources  
and tech support. That insight mainly comes from expertise that's mostly,  
at the moment, outside the museum sector.

C) We're starting to get the idea too, that the cool culture venture we  
dream about here might not be a big project, but smaller-scale,  
evolutionary, more experimental, more informal. There aren't any more big  
pots of money (like ISB) now for this kind of work. We've got to be coming  
up with sustainable and scaleable ideas, so some wisdom about the scope and  
depth of project concepts needs to be found when ideas are still at the  
back of an envelope stage.

My interests in this?

I've long evangelised (and written about, in 2005) 'the inside out web  
museum.' At my former workplace, my enthusiasm for a more 'datacentric'  
publishing offer drove quite a bit of our re-design thinking, though the  
final realisation of those ideas is still in the pipeline. But look  
outwards at recent tech trends and think about how near we are to some sort  
of breakthrough. We're wrong to expect a 'killer app,' but continuous  
development and playful experimentation like the (Mike Ellis) Mashed Museum  
sessions at UKMW08 will get us nearer to some sort of nirvana.

Where to go now, post-Creative Spaces? We ALL need and deserve (as a  
sector, everywhere) access to data channels that come to us, and do the  
necessary spidering and data mining to make the most of all the content we  
might choose to expose and share. And, importantly, let it be live data  
exchange, not a day old, or a week old, or some such OAI-harvested old hat.  
The next culture web must be live; after all we have come to expect that  
through our day-to-day fun with Twitter and FB.

To get live, we need APIs; they are, of course, the way forward as Richard  
Light, Mia and Mike Ellis all say. API's need standards, and the  
Collections Trust work with DACS and towards new BSI data standards is  
excellent.

Sharing freely and offering culture content to others for their own use  
opens doors to commerce and business models, so some movement there gets us  
towards a more commercially-geared culture web.

And finally? The success of #hashtags on Twitter (check #fakeanimalfacts)  
proves people can come up with vocabs and impromptu syntax that bind  
humour, culture, conferences and news together using simple XML. My  
research interest now is to see how we can map some simple #-like tagging  
and vocab structures (and maybe the National Curriculum) so we can have  
cultural fun without needing to build big and expensive portalised web  
projects...

JP

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