On 06/09/2011 09:15, Birchall, Danny wrote:
> But why on earth, would I, as an end-user want results that only come from museums, rather than results for what I'm actually looking for from museums, blogs, photo pools, and other places on the web? The only people I know who are generically interested in what 'museums' have to offer are people who work for museums.
Hi Danny!
Yep, That's a good point. As far as I can see, the people who'd want
to specifically search across /only/ across museum collections would
tend to be researchers and other museum staff. But people keep telling
me that cross-museum searching is the "holy grail" of Museum IT, and
that this is the final ambition and ongoing justification for all these
central software initiatives that are being handed down by the UK
standards bodies.
And this confuses me, because it seems to me that if we really /wanted/
the ability to do cross-museum searches, then we should have already had
it by now. It's not difficult, and it doesn't need deep structuring to
be effective. The main thing we'd need is an agreed method of tagging
the broad webpage areas that correspond to "exhibit info", which isn't
exactly rocket science.
So I'm wondering whether we're serious about wanting this feature, or
whether it's just IT marketing guff.
If we /want/ cross-museum search, we can have it, right now, without any
special technology or systems.
If we don't, I think we should probably stop using the idea of x-m
search as a justification for all these top-down standardisation
initiatives, which sometimes look suspiciously like a bunch of software
people abusing their influence with standards committees to get their
pet systems made compulsory, so that they can sell services off the back
of them to a captive market.
Eric Baird
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