Social media and its impact on curators...

Late last year Erica Dicker of the Powerhouse undertook an international survey on the question of 'social media and its impact on curators'. The results are now in and make for interesting reading. In her paper she discusses how the Powerhouse built up a 'team of curatorial bloggers' to create the museum's first blog 'Object of the Week'. She then goes into some detail about how the blog was conceived and executed and what lessons they learnt along the way (lessons for us all).

The second part of the paper is focussed on presenting the results of the survey which includes insights into curators' understanding of social media, the reasons they do/don't use it and the ways in which it is changing the traditional role of the curator. The paper is longish but I think it's worth reading.

Erica will be presenting her paper in April at the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado.

Caz

PS: The second anonymous quote in the paper is from me!

Online Collections - Opening the Floodgates

As a follow up to Rowena's post below you should check out this interesting post from Brooklyn Museum which helps to explain the philosophy behind releasing all possible records even if they are of varying quality.

Caz

Demystifying the Collections

For over a year we have been trying to get some momentum behind a new Intranet site for the Collections catalogue, and it looks like we are getting very close now!

Our aim is to create a simple online search environment (google-style if you like) that will enable the rest of the organisation to explore the contents of our collections without the need to use the relatively complex EMu interface and without using up our limited number of licences.

Significant resources were put into establishing a basic catalogue of skeleton records during the Electronic Cataloguing Project. We've now got alot of basic information about most of the collection. This approach - a little bit of information about the majority of things - has been a major shift from our previous focus when it came to electronic cataloguing - earlier web projects had focussed on creating complete information about a few selected things.

So what exactly is a "skeleton" or Collection Management record?

• Who did it come from? (Collection Name, link to full Accession Lot details)


• What is it? (Classification, Type, Name, Title )


• Who, What, Where does it relate to? (Keywords)


• What does it look like? (Description, materials, dimensions, reference image)


• Where is it? (Current & Permanent Location)

In a nutshell, the skeleton record should provide staff or researchers with enough basic information to know if an object is relevant to their needs, and provides a path to find out more detailed information about an item should you decide it is relevant.

Having a dedicated web environment for staff to browse a read only limited view of our catalogue will help to demystify what is held down in the archives. Another aim of the Intranet site is to test our skeleton data on real users. Only a few fields will be published through the closed staff network, which helps reduce copyright complications as we are not making images available to the public.

Knowledge Engineering, (aka KE) have developed some really useful new features in the web package that we'll be implementing - they've also jumped on the bandwagon and called it iMu (aka Internet Museum). The most useful change in functionality is the overall use of the Narratives Module to link records together and provide a context. So rather than just publishing individual catalogue records and expecting them each to contain enough information to stand-alone, records can now be grouped into relevant themes for browsing using the Narratives Module. Much more useful from a users perspective...



I'm hoping to have a demo version up and running soon to show you all what is possible.

Mashups

Is this term still troubling you? Does the word 'mashup' still conjure up images of inappropriate heads stuck on inappropriate bodies? Well think again. There are lots of different types of mashups and these are just a few examples.

This project by VJ Sustenance was part of Allsorts Online: the collecting sector, academia, the arts and the media in Adelaide last year. VJ Lynne Sanderson used the Australian Newtork for Art & Technology Collection to create a digital work inspired by and shown in the Mortlock Chamber of the State Library of South Australia.

Another exciting site for mashup artists is the ABC Beta site 'Pool'. 'Pool' is a participatory site where the public can upload, download and mashup their own content with that of the ABC to make interesting new work. It is a bit hard to describe but if you have a bit of a poke around on the site it will slowly start to make sense!

The other site that has interesting mashup projects is the Federal government site MashupAustralia. This site was set up to encourage people to make use of the datasets which government are currently putting on open access. Check out the Powerhouse's Flip Explorer on this page. I put 'dance' in as a search term and ended up with some lovely 1930s glass-plate negative images of Sydney ballrooms.

Some of the other mashups on this site include a collating of various datasets to create a map you can use interactively to find your nearest toilet, doctor or school so you can see that once the basic data is released people find all sorts of interesting ways of using it!

Caz