The point about Europeana and its ilk not being just a search portal is that the oppotunity arises to channel the content into people's workflow - the places they already go to do the stuff that interests them. Of course that could well include Google, but it could include everything from travel websites to virtual learning environments to Ancestry.com. So this isn't (just) about explicit search but implicit search, by which I mean the end user finding themselves presented with contextually relevant content.
If you were, say, Ancestry, and you wanted to surface rich cultural content that was relevant to your users, you could try using Google's search API but I think you'd soon give up. Yes, it can make some good guesses at what is meant by a search term, but it's not going to be great at suggesting archive materials that relate to someone's granny's hometown. If you're a student looking at history learning resources in your school's VLE, it's potentially useful if you're also presented with relevant artefacts, literature, recordings or film. It would perhaps be less useful (or acceptable to the school) for you to be presented with a mixture of cultural objects, eBay listings, DVDs of historical films, and relict Tripod sites of World of Warcraft fans. The power of an index of more structured data from a more select set of resources makes it possible to present people with relevant content with less effort and explicit searching on their part, in the place where they happen to be. 

I think that Google has its place (a huge, huge place), and will doubtless continue to get better and better and also bring to the mass market cool stuff like Goggles and the rest, and for explicit search it may well continue to be the main channel to CH content for years to come; but I believe at the same time that initiatives like Europeana open up big possibilities for end-users, for content providers, and for whoever has the vision to build applications on top of massive indexes of multilingual, structured, quality-assured data. They have different roles. But one of the biggest advantages, I would say, is that we finally have something like a reference point or flag to rally round. Because it's always been a question of building momentum, whether that's for establishing "good enough" data standards, for trying to get a critical mass of content to do something useful, for co-ordinating digitisation efforts or for changing the licencing regime. And as you say, James, hopefully it really will encourage museums, libraries and archives to plan some judicious digitisation because they can see a channel that will get that content, not just onto a search engine, but into apps, onto websites, into classrooms everywhere. It will be a few years, I think, before we can see if that pans out. 

In the end, findabikity is much more than just search, it's things finding you, and SEO will only get you so far.

Cheers, Jeremy

________________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 08 September 2011 22:10
To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; Jeremy Ottevanger
Subject: Re: [MCG] How about a Museums-only search engine?

When I tweeted that I wasn't actually thinking of it in the context of this discussion (which I confess I've not quite caught up with as yet) but it does actually have interesting overlap with my thoughts on the whole topic.

If twitter had allowed me more characters it would have read "what use the feature might have for *users of* museums".  And by inference how, if at all, it might affect their access to collections. But to be honest, after a quick look I'm not yet convinced it's more than a nice little experiment rather than something that will become a part of their core offering, and users natural behaviour.

As far as search goes more broadly, I have to be brutally honest and say that for all the good work that is going on with things like Europeana (but also backing up Jeremy's point about it not being just a search portal), surely the thing that is going to have the greatest immediate impact is if those projects improve findability and ranking in Google, the users' museums search engine of choice?  And that's not ignoring the more fundamental +ve impact, that of actually encouraging organisations to get their collections digitised and online.

Now, what would *really* work is if we could get Google to have an extra option ...
Web | Images | Videos | Maps | News | Shopping | Cultural Collections

----------------------------------------------------------------------
James Morley                       [log in to unmask]
Website Manager                    Tel. +44 (0)20 8332 5759
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew         www.kew.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
________________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mar Dixon [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 08 September 2011 21:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How about a Museums-only search engine?

From Twitter:
MT @jamesinealing: Thinking what use the new Google 'Search by Image'
feature has for museums, http://bit.ly/j5F4uZ

Mar
@MarDixon
www.mardixon.com

On 8 September 2011 21:17, Jeremy Ottevanger <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Have you heard of Europeana? Or the Collections Grid? If not, take a look.
> You'll find that collaboration between thousands of diverse cultural
> heritage institutions as well as aggregators, universities, big players like
> Wikipedia and Google, national and international government is alive and
> well and currently building an infrastructure (not simply a search portal)
> on which other stuff can then build. Hooking up to other broadly comparable
> initiatives (CAN, CHIN etc) and furthering integration with commercial
> search operators would be the obvious next step. To return to the start of
> the thread, standards play a necessary part in this but so do intelligent
> processing, analysis and semantic enrichment.
>
> Cheers, Jeremy
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 07 September 2011 23:16
> To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; Jeremy
> Ottevanger
> Subject: Re: [MCG] How about a Museums-only search engine?
>
> On 07/09/2011 15:38, Tim Trent wrote:
> > Assuming it to be desirable then one of two things has to happen, either
> is imponderable:
> >
> > 1) Every museum sets a yet to be defined meta tag on each page that says
> "Hey, I'm a museum, search me!"
> I was thinking more of a tighter, page-specific or "div"-specific tag
> saying "Hey, I'm an individual Museum Exhibit listing, search me!" ...
> but basically, yes.
>
> > 2) Every museum submits their xml List-Help: <http://jiscmail.ac.sitemap (which many do not have) to a
> centrally administered function
> >
> > Each of those two solutions have to be indexed by something with grunt,
> bandwidth and serious storage.
> It'd only be serious grunt and bandwidth if it was popular. If it was
> popular, it'd maybe be worth supporting. If it wasn't popular, it might
> not be worth doing.
>
> As for storage, I'm not sure how many "museum exhibit" pages there are,
> outside monsters like the Smithsonian and the big national museums. If
> we're worried about storage requirements, the thing could be piloted for
> pooled searching across small museums only. If a "biggie" wanted to get
> involved, then maybe they could consider hosting it with their existing
> infrastructure. Maybe little museums could "friend" the Big Museum, and
> the Big Museum could then be in a position to apply for a Lottery grant
> for the project.
>
> Or a university IT department might decide that it's a good project to
> be involved with, because it'd give them a "small" search engine to play
> with, with a manageable dataset. It might be a nice testbed for trying
> out new search methods.
>
> Many things are possible, assuming that there's actually a reasonable
> demand for such a thing, which, as you point out, might not be the case.
>
>
> > Something has to pay for that. That sounds like option 1, Big G and
> advertising owned by them paying them, assuming you can present them with
> the business case and they accept it. And just who is going to add the meta
> tag? And how many are going to add it correctly? And what form should it
> take?
>
> Big G might be willing to do it for kicks, PR and goodwill  (they
> already run things like Google Scholar). They could produce a "shiny"
> Google Museums widget, you add it to every exhibit page that you want
> indexed, job done. I imagine if someone organised a sit-down meet
> between a couple of Big Museums and Google they might be keen. But
> perhaps not all museums might want to get in bed with Google.
>
> A widget would probably be easiest for a small museum to implement,
> because it'd provide the tag and the "Search for more items like this"
> button in one place. But a "class" identifier embedded in another tag
> would be more powerful in that it'd explicitly tag a /section/ of page,
> without headers, footers, intros etc, and allow multiple exhibits on a
> single page to be indexed separately.
> If people wanted a system, if could start simple and evolve.
>
> > In option 2, who runs the central system? who pays?
> >
> > Are there more options than the 2?
> >
> > [Did you use "IT" and "marketing" in the same sentence just then? - Wow,
> brave!]
> >
> > I'm not even sure this is a "nice to have". What happens if you instruct
> a search engine to seek thus:
> >
> > "my search string" +museum
> >
> > Example:
> >
> >
> http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Nelson+%2BTrafalgar+%2BMuseum&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
> >
> > Surely that returns all that the search engine has found (and some guff
> besides)
>
> Yep, but there's still a fair amount of guff, and if we were only
> searching pages or page sections that were explicitly flagged as being
> about individual exhibits, almost all of that guff should disappear.
> You'd lose all the educational background pages, and the mentions of
> museums off Trafalgar Square near Nelson's Column, and hopefully end up
> just looking at a list of actual items.
>
> I did think of adding "site:museum" to the standard search string, which
> would supposedly only returns hits from domain names that include
> "museum" somewhere in the title, but although that seemed to work for
> ".com" museums, it didn't seem to include results for ".co.uk", and it
> wouldn't give the V&A or the National Gallery, which don't have "museum"
> in their domain names.
>
>
> /If/ this ability would be genuinely useful, the technical and funding
> issues wouldn't seem to be too difficult to overcome, and we could all
> get togther and start working out the details. If it wouldn't be
> genuinely useful, the other issues are probably irrelevant.
>
> Eric
>
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