Hi James
I've done some fairly extensive looking through the various RSS feeds and you are by no means alone!
We are set up to take fair amount of information about events: I can give you - or anyone who'd like it - a full list of possible fields, but it's in excel so mail me off-list. If there's enough interest, I can post it as a downloadable doc on Keep and Share.
The fields that we absolutely cannot live without are:
Title
Description
Start date (in DD/MM/YYYY format)
End date
Start Time (in hh:mm format, 24 hour clock)
End Time
Admission charges and booking information
Venue/place
Our system also requires the following fields, and usually I add and append these manually:
Is the event free to attend (Y or N)
Is pre-registration required (Y or N)
Event type (from a pre-defined list)
Subject tags (from the Culture24 taxonomy)
Nice-to-haves that I tend to add manually:
Target audience (from a pre-defined list)
Short description
Kind regards
Ruth Harper
Network Officer, Culture24
Direct Line: 01273 623278
Main office: 01273 623266
Follow: @culture24
About: www.WeAreCulture24.org.uk
Supporting the cultural sector to reach audiences online
Enjoy: www.culture24.org.uk
Your arts & heritage guide online
Museums at Night: www.museumsatnight.org.uk
Annual festival of arts, culture & heritage 18th-20th May 2012
Culture24 is the official cultural data provider to the BBC
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of James Morley
Sent: 18 June 2012 15:09
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Events aggregation
I'll +1 that, not least because I was just about to fire off a proud response saying we have an rss feed with all our event information in it, only to discover that because it uses our standard rss template it doesn't actually have the event dates and times in it, just the publication date! Ooops, that's a bit of a fail.
So, I'd be interested to hear of what data and formats such feeds should contain.
James
----------------------------------------------------------------------
James Morley [log in to unmask]
Website Development Manager +44 (0)20 8332 5759
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew www.kew.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Ruth Harper
> Sent: 18 June 2012 14:48
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Events aggregation
>
> Hi everyone,
>
>
>
> We've got some questions for you, but first here's a bit of context:
>
>
>
> Culture24's working with a range of data-sharing partners to get the
> word out about what museums and galleries offer the public. Our BBC
> partnership is our most high profile - we sign venues up as partners
> then feed selected events listings through to www.bbc.co.uk/thingstodo
> (and via that site to all regional bbc news & other pages). It's a
> great opportunity for free promotion but relies upon those events
> being listed in our database.
>
>
>
> For smaller (and some medium-sized and larger) museums, this means
> individual engagement with our online database and extensive use of
> everything else that we offer including best practice work etc. many
> of them log in and enter their info manually on a regular basis, which
> is much appreciated.
>
>
>
> For some larger museums, and local authority-run venues, there just
> isn't the capacity to get this involved with Culture24 as they're
> dealing with so many events. So our database ends up a bit skewed
> towards smaller organisations.
>
>
>
> We've started doing bulk uploads of information, straight into the
> database, for those venues dealing with hundreds/thousands of events
> each year.
>
>
>
> We've spent a lot more time hunting for large data sets and found a
> few, but actually not nearly as many as we expected. Instead, we've
> found ourselves scraping websites, transferring information from
> locked PDFs to excel and then to the DDE system, cutting, pasting and
> rearranging spreadsheets to fit our format, and generally jamming
> round pegs into square holes...
>
>
>
> So, the issues are:
>
>
>
> There isn't a standard way to collect and distribute events data
>
> A strong focus on collating and publishing events via printed media
> often excludes effective digital distribution. This also means that
> often, local authority and larger museum websites' events pages are
> being powered through the least efficient method (entering information
> into a standard CMS, and using HTML mark-up to make it look like it's
> data-driven).
>
>
>
> I'm hoping the museum tech community has the answers.
>
> I'm beginning to wonder if this data isn't, in fact, available - just
> not in a way that's immediately obvious to the press, marketing and
> events people with whom we usually have dealings.
>
>
>
> Are there room booking systems collecting info? Or ticket booking
> systems? What about exporting it from the website? Is there an
> administrator somewhere who has had enough of pdfs and is using
> spreadsheets to manage their own workload? Does your venue publish an
> events API (we haven't found any yet)?
>
>
>
> Who is actually making the decision about how this information is
> collected, stored and shared in-house, and how do we begin to approach
> them?
>
>
>
> Do you know of spreadsheets or data feeds of events that might be
> kicking around and shareable? How are you storing events data in your
> organisation?
>
>
>
> A special mention (and possibly a bottle of something) does go to the
> team at National Museums Liverpool who have set up a structured CSV
> feed on their website that we can pick up once a month (or more often,
> if there's a lot in the feed), fit to our format and upload. It's been
> an absolute revelation - and if anyone else has the capability to do
> this, we'd like to know about it!
>
>
>
> We'd really, really love some help and feedback on this issue. What
> has your experience been? Where do we start with getting this to work?
> Email on the list, or email Ruth Harper (um, that'd be me) directly.
> Any help or feedback you can give will be hugely appreciated.
>
>
>
>
>
> Kind regards
>
>
>
> Ruth Harper
>
> Network Officer, Culture24
>
>
>
>
>
> Direct Line: 01273 623278
>
> Main office: 01273 623266
>
> Follow: @culture24
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
>
>
> About: www.WeAreCulture24.org.uk <http://www.weareculture24.org.uk/>
>
> Supporting the cultural sector to reach audiences online
>
> Enjoy: www.culture24.org.uk <http://www.culture24.org.uk/>
>
> Your arts & heritage guide online
>
>
>
> Museums at Night: www.museumsatnight.org.uk
> <http://www.museumsatnight.org.uk/>
>
> Annual festival of arts, culture & heritage 18th-20th May 2012
>
> Culture24 is the official cultural data provider to the BBC
>
>
>
>
> ****************************************************************
> website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
> Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
> [un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
> ****************************************************************
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
|