Dear Claire and all,
You may like to take a look at a system installed at the Scott Polar Museum
in Cambridge :
www.deepvisuals.com/demo (Silverlight version) or
www.deepvisuals.com/demo/?version=JS (non-Silverlight demo)
This system allows the visitor to explore digital collections simply by
selecting images related to an initial image of interest. The image can be
"turned over" to see textual descriptions.
The Scott Polar Museum are currently using the system to allow exploration
of one single
collection, but the system is also ideally suited to aggregated collections.
The visitor will naturally explore across all of the various collections
based on the asset relationships and the visitor's personal interest and
curiosity.
Alan W Payne
Director
Peter Fry
Director
Deep Visuals Ltd
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Mod: +44 (0)7710 139 640 / Tel: +44 (0)1223 437 162
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Claire
Hudson
Sent: 23 December 2010 12:04
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Briefing for a 'portal' tender ... any tips?
Dear Linda
I was very interested in your post about aggregating projects. I've had a
good look at the Black Country site and it seems to me a very good example
of cross-domain co-operation - combining museum objects and archive
materials in a creative way. I'd really like to refer to it in a piece I'm
writing on digitisation in museums if you have no objection.
I specifically make the point that this type of collaboration is so valuable
for associating related materials held by different organisations in the
museum, library and archive domains.
Another point I'm going to make is about the lack of funding to support the
digitisation of museum collections, especially when compared with the HE
sector. You say that you had a lot of photography done for your aggregating
projects and I wondered
a. how that was funded, and
b. if you feel, more generally, that there have been adequate opportunities
to apply for external funding for digitisation, either in your own museum or
in your region (if you feel that you can comment on its behalf).
I'd really appreciate any feedback you can give me on this.
Best wishes, and Season's Greetings.
Claire
Claire Hudson
Head of Collections Management
V&A Theatre & Performance
Blythe House
23 Blythe Road
London W14 0QX
Tel: +44 (0)207 471 9860
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
www.vam.ac.uk/theatre
Treasurer & Membership Secretary of TIG - the Subject Specialist Network for
the Performing Arts
http://www.theatreinfo.specialistnetwork.org.uk/
>>> Linda Ellis <[log in to unmask]> 08/12/2010 13:04 >>>
Hi Helen
Here is my contribution to the excellent comments already made around
this subject.
Here in the Midlands we have just developed two searchable, collections
aggregation websites - Black Country History www.blackcountryhistory.org
and Geology Matters www.geologymatters.org.uk
The websites take the data from 8 collection databases - four archive
services and four museums - and aggregate them on-line so that users can
search our collections, as part of the project we had a lot of
photography done of museum objects but by no means do all objects have
digital images.
In my experience the technical side is relatively easy (in as much as
you can leave the worry of that to the techies! - we had spectrum
compliant collections management systems so we mapped our data to
Spectrum and thence to Dublin Core and apart from a few anomalies it
worked OK) the hardest parts are (in no particular order):
a. Deciding on an audience - because what we have produced is
essentially an online catalogue to our collections (which has variable
quality of data in the individual records but more about that later) we
reckon this appeals more to researchers than 'general public'. With our
Geology Matters website we are trying to appeal to anyone with an
interest in geology - amateurs, professionals, kids, teachers, local
people etc and feel we are more likely to succeed with aiming that at a
wide audience as we have more targeted resources that we can put into
that to write interesting content but we just don't have the resources
to do that for the Black Country History website. I have yet to be
convinced that one website can appeal to everybody.
b. Being realistic about what you can achieve initially but building a
system that will allow you to add more functionality as times go on - we
had very limited resources in terms of people to actually do research
about objects or groups of objects so have just had to rely on the
information that was in the databases - hence BCH website is "simply" an
online catalogue. Where we have got some resources to actually write
content (geology related only) we decided to go for a blog approach as
we needed to be pretty open with respect to what people wrote about - we
didn't have enough man power to actually get content written up front to
populate a website with deep content on various re-defined topics. If
you have plenty of resources then plan accordingly, if not try and
decide what is the one thing you want to deliver and do it well.
c. Data quality - the records we have in our collections database have
been input for collections management and not necessarily for general
public use - don't underestimate the time and effort needed to get
records up to scratch - there are obvious things like spelling mistakes
or the inclusion of names and addresses or comments that you don't want
to make public in fields that you are going to include on the website to
tackle - for us the data is sometimes sketchy or missing and because the
data belongs to 8 different partners there are wide variations in the
breadth and depth of information on the databases - for some partners
adding collections information to an electronic system is new and they
may only have less than 5% of their collections in electronic form to
then subsequently go on the website which may give the public a
misleading picture of what we actually have in our collections.
d. Data consistency - again because we have eight partners there are
inconsistencies of actual terms used or the way the text in a field is
formatted, eg artist names may have been entered as Surname, Firstname
or Surname, Firstname (Dates of Existence) or Surname; Firstname (Dates
of Existence) etc etc which becomes important when you start trying to
offer faceted searching. All of our partners use the same controlled
thesaurus (UKAT) for keywords but even still there is huge variations in
the way they have been added to records (or not). And don't even ask
about dates - our collections systems let us use dates in all sorts of
formats; 1850, mid 19th century, circa 1850, 1855 - 1865, 1850s etc, etc
which becomes a nightmare when you want to aggregate and search the
data!
e. Getting people to use your new website - we have had a really good
response to our Black Country History website as we were able to tap
into our local history societies and publicise it that way. Geology
Matters is slowly getting traffic but is going to need a lot of work to
actually get the message out to the core audience for that website. You
can also turn this around and ask the question why build another
website, why not put your stuff on websites where people already go? -
so definitely look at feeding data into Culture Grid and thus to
Europeanna, but also think about use of Flickr and other social
networking sites - hence as well as creating our new websites we have
also put a selection of images on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackcountrymuseums/ with links to the
websites for more detailed info.
This is getting too long now for email - if you want to talk about what
we have done please contact me off list.
Linda
Linda Ellis
Project Manager Black Country Collections Online
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Lichfield Street
Wolverhampton
West Midlands
WV1 1DU
tel. 01902 552 048
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Bleck, Helen
Sent: 07 December 2010 16:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Briefing for a 'portal' tender ... any tips?
Thanks, Mia and Mike.
Our target users are 'general public' - everyone from
pupils/students/teachers to academic researchers, to family history
researchers, to people just wanting to find out more about East Lothian,
and about what we have in our collections. So the search tools will need
to be very intuitive. Currently none of the databases is online, we
respond to queries, so we don't really have much information about how
our potential users might use the search tools. We do have a clear idea
of the kind of information they want though, and who the current users
are - though we hope to 'grow' our users with this portal.
The Historic Environment Record uses a map interface, and we will
definitely want to retain that for a map search. We'd also like
timelines and browsable themes/subjects - anything that will help people
explore our material.
So we've got a lot to ask of our future contractors! Especially as there
has been no mapping between the databases yet. I'm trying to look at
this as something to really get stuck into, rather than quailing in
front of ...
Thanks again,
Helen
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Ridge Mia
Sent: 07 December 2010 16:17
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Briefing for a 'portal' tender ... any tips?
Helen Bleck wrote:
> Here at East Lothian Council the heritage services (Archaeology,
Archives,
> Museums and Local History) are teaming up in a new centre currently
being
> built in Haddington - the John Gray Centre. We'd like to be able to
make
> their individual databases (Historic Environment Record, CALM
catalogue,
> open source database and various small databases, some on Access,
> respectively) all searchable online through a single 'portal' or
gateway,
> and we'd like users to be able to choose an individual database to
search,
> or to search all simultaneously. I've recently joined the Museums team
to
> try and help make the portal happen, and I'm looking for any advice or
> tips from others who've done something similar.
A question that might help clarify your list to Santa - who are your
users? There's no point creating a highly structured search if your
users are the general public, and possibly even if the audience is
researchers. Do people who currently use the resources refine their
queries in any way - by source of material (e.g. library, archive,
museum) or by record type, or are they searching for a term (e.g. a
person or place name) and happy to work with what comes back?
Also, are you looking only at text searches, or can visitors browse via
subjects, indexes, timelines or maps?
> One of our main concerns is that the databases and their tables/fields
are
> all quite different, and the different services have over time used
> different thesauri for classifying content - it will take some fairly
> sophisticated search methods to search them all effectively.
And it'll require resources to map terms (thesauri as well as field
names) between them, if that hasn't already been done.
cheers, Mia
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