KE Software Global User Group Meeting

Having timed my holiday to coincide with the inaugural global EMu User Group Meeting in London, I've come home with lots of inspiration and enthusiasm from the community of EMu users to share with you all.

The papers focussed primarily on the various implementations of IMu that are now in their infancy at a number of institutions. What is clear is that IMu is incredibly flexible and provides a powerful set of tools to manipulate and work with EMu data.

Here's what some institutions are using IMu for so far:

The University of Pennsylvania Museum used IMu to facilitate a massive program of image uploading and web publication - with over 25000 digital images ingested using an IMu import tool. Their stated goal with regard to online content publication is to "BE OPEN" with their collection data, and publishing of web content is a highly automated process.

The new M-Shed Museum at Bristol are using IMu to publish catalogue records, narratives and images to touch screen kiosks throughout the exhibition spaces. These terminals offer a consistent clean design, which provides in-context information that relates to a particular showcase. It also provides a point for user generated content to be uploaded - which has been a popular feature so far (though they have not yet decided what to do with all the content generated by visitors.)

Te Papa demonstrated some refinements they've made to their Thesaurus module to support improved web navigation. Their customisations have enabled more user friendly and logical navigation through the use of some consistent descriptors alongside subject and category headings. Clear relationship-type definitions like "depicted in" or "former owner of" really provide meaningful context within a record. This solution would translate really well to our own website and would allow us to build more meaningful and relevant browsing suggestions in the future. Visit this search page to see the pivotal browse boxes down the right hand side to see the ways you can navigate and discover through different topics.

There were also a few demonstrations of new iPhone/iPad apps developed by Qatar Museums Authority and The Manchester Museum.

Why it pays to have good documentation practices;

Dr Penny Berents spoke candidly about a long and very drawn out series of thefts at the Australian Museum and the subsequent investigations and audits that relied heavily upon information in EMu - ultimately prosecutions and a multi-million dollar insurance claim were made possible because thorough documentation provided irrefutable evidence of ownership - even though specimens had been heavily tampered with and dramatically altered in appearance.

We also heard a very moving tale from the registration team at the Cairo Museum and how they fled the museum during the recent uprising which engulfed the square where the museum was located. Staff were evacuated from the country and flew out with a copy of the database in their handbag! When they returned to find the museum looted, the staff, army and police relied upon the EMu records to determine the extent of damage - and much of the material has since been recovered.

Alexander McQueen's in the Performing Arts Collection

Its been hard to ignore all the hype around the Royal Wedding and Catherine Middleton's Wedding dress. Designed by Sarah Burton of the late Alexander McQueen's design house, The Dress seemed to grab many of the headlines.

Did you know we hold 5 garments in the Performing Arts Collection that are Alexander McQueen originals?

All part of the Kylie Minogue Collection, they include a beige dress worn by Kylie in her Chocolate video clip from 2004 (pictured); a red halter necked top worn in the Spinning Around video, and a heavily corsetted dress worn on French television to promote Red Blooded Woman. The Collection also includes a sequinned singlet top and a sequinned vest.

There's a couple of extra photos to our Flickr Stream on here

Rockr Girls

Rockr Girls (Stage performance pics only please!), a group on Flickr.

And a follow up to the previous post - Here's a Flickr stream we could easily contribute to with photos from the ROCK CHICKS launch event.

Linking to existing photo groups is also a good way to help people discover our site too.

Flickr Galleries

Caz & I set up a Flickr account for the Arts Centre's Collections some time ago with a view to eventually being part of The Commons.

I was suprised to find that other flickr users have uploaded some great photos from inside Hamer Hall and tagged them as Performing Arts Collection.

Check out our so far very "modest" efforts at a Flickr Stream here. Flickr provides an interesting Curatorial outlet for us - Sets or Galleries can be created with up to 18 images. It could be a set of quirky or unusual images you stumble across during research; a selection a favourites; or musings and selections featuring the colour yellow - whatever you like!

The focus is on interesting photography, and we are not short of resources in this regard. So lets delve into the collection and create some small galleries without the usual constraints of the physical gallery environment.

I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get some conversations started in the comments about unidentified photographs from our collections, and potentially crowd-source some info about them. Got an interesting image you need help identifying? Lets put it on our flickr stream and see what people think!

As a follow up to the last post , if you are interested in the Circus Oz project have a look at our blog http://www.circusarchive.net/blog/

Theatre in the Digital Age

Image: Digital Theatre

Can something as ephemeral as performance really ever be 'captured' or it really just a case of trying to nail jelly to the wall? Having been personally involved (often unsuccessfully) in trying to convince performers, directors, musicians and unions of the importance of preserving their archival performance footage I know by heart all the excuses for not doing so.

'It was only a dress rehearsal not a real performance'
'It was only a single camera shoot',
'It doesn't capture the spirit of the performance',
'You'll never get such and such to sign a release form'

While we all sympathise with these concerns I'm glad to see that there are three exciting digital projects out there at the moment trying to resolve some of these issues.

The first is the remarkable Digital Theatre featuring performances the Royal Court Theatre,Young Vic and Almeida Theatre among others. If you haven't already read it this article in The Age recently shows just how far we have come in being able to document live perfomance in a real and meaningful way.

Another interesting site using digital technology to document/discuss theatre in a different way is Theatre VOICE . The site was set up in 2003 in association with the Theatre Museum at the V&A and features 100s of audio recordings about theatre in the UK through the eyes of critics and theatre practitioners.

Closer to home, we're involved in a three year ARC Linkage project that aims to 'create and analyse an experimental prototype for an online participatory ‘living archive’. Built upon the Circus Oz collection of performance and rehearsal video documentation, this project seeks to 'drive innovation in repertoire development, performance research and audience interaction'.

Maybe we're starting to get somewhere...

War Horse...

Check out this amazing TED Talk by the Handspring Puppet Company the people behind the extraordinary production, War Horse. If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, scoot through to about the 9 minute mark to see the horse in action - it will take your breath away.

3D 'Ring' Cycle...

Image via

Given our current interest in the way space is ‘imagined, evoked and populated within the constraints of the proscenium arch’, I thought you might be interest in this. Canadian director Robert Lepage (whose production,‘The Blue Dragon’ was presented at last year’s Melbourne Festival) has commissioned the Montreal-based company, Realisations to create a 3D-design for one of the scenes in the Metropolitan Opera’s new ‘Ring’ cycle.

The technology has been developed by digital artists, computer programmers and lighting experts over a number of years and does not require the audience to wear 3D glasses. According to the New York Times, the effect is created by using ‘a bank of projectors, motion-capture cameras and computers to fashion the images. The tilt of the on the stage allows for hundreds of different projections, changing in slivers of a second, at different depths to help create, say, the colour, shading and contour of a rock, or at least (enough) to convince the eye’. If all goes according to plan it will certainly be a tough act to follow!

Check out the behind-the-scenes action here.

Edit: Theo has sent through this link to an amazing design for a Spanish 'Ring Cycle' conducted by Zubin Mehta and performed by acrobatic troupe La Fura dels Baus and now available on DVD.

Masterpieces in 7 billion pixels... Google Art Project

Google's latest venture Art Project took their Street View mapping technology through 17 of the world's greatest museums and galleries. Participating collections include The Tate, The Palace of Versailles, MoMA, the Hermitage and the Uffizi Galllery among a very distinguished list of others.

Each institution selected a masterpiece for digital capture at ultra-high resolution, up to 7 billion pixels in some instances. The beauty of this site is you can linger on the extrordinary detail and explore the paintings in ways that you cannot when in the gallery (and without enduring the crowds and queues!)

These 2 short clips are a worthwhile introduction before you explore the Art Project site in all its mind boggling glory.

Making Museums More Mobile

At what stage of an exhibition's development do you start to think about including digital content? Is it primarily a way to add movement & sound to a static collection of objects, or do you consider it integral to the design, presentation or functionality of an exhibition?

Digital elements such as downloadable content, interviews, social networking or games, can replace other traditional aspects of an exhibition to create a dramatically different look and feel.

With so many people carrying smart phones these days, mobile device tours are a new take on the traditional audio guided tour. I've often spoken about the suitablility of the Public Art Collection for this type of tour, well now there's an accessible mechanism to help us build one! The My Tours site lets you easily build your own mobile application for the public to download onto an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Whilst this doesn't cater for all visitors, a few iPod Touches could be made available for use within the exhibition space, with other visitors using their own device to navigate through an exhibition, or around our venues.

Caz has shown us some examples of Brooklyn Museums iPhone apps. The American Museum of Natural History have also developed one. Another site of interest discussed at a recent Culture Victoria forum on the topic of mobile tours includes this beautiful interactive soundscape developed for a sculpture park.

How social are you?

You may have noticed that we now have a sign in the 'Rock Chicks' exhibition to let people know they can leave a comment on the Arts Centre's Facebook page. While we are not exactly being deluged with comments I think it's a good first step to improving our social networking presence. All we have to do now is start engaging!

Social networking in a museum context has come a long way since 2008 when many of the bigger institutions in Australia starting developing their social media policies and in April next year we'll have a chance to hear from some of the pioneers of  'the first wave' at the Transformations in Cultural Communications Conference. The focus of the conference is on developing and supporting culturally diverse audiences and will feature speakers from the Smithsonian, Powerhouse, RMIT, MOV, ACMI and Australian Museum.

If you feel like you've missed the first wave entirely don't worry it's not that hard to catch up. A few people have asked me to re-post the details of the Licence 2 Test Drive site I mentioned way back in January. You may recall that it's an easy self-guided, six lesson course that will have you up to speed in no time. If you'd like any help getting started or you think it might be fun to do a few lessons as a group just let me know and I'll see what I can organise.

Friday links

It's been a while between drinks but here are a couple of interesting projects and sites I've come across lately...



Have you heard about this exhibition? We're quite excited about it in Collections. It's called 'Move: Choreographing You - Art and Dance' and it's on at the Hayward Gallery in London. Using interactive sculptures and installations this show explores the intersection of dance and art over the past 50 years by encouraging people to actually dance there way through the exhibition.You can check out more about the show at this great microsite.

Caboodle is a fun kids/museums/digital project.You can read more about it here and here but basically it's a great way of getting kids invloved with collections by visiting museums, talking to curators, taking photos and uploading them to the Caboodle site. They can also become part of an online club and it is used both by schools and individuals. Kids don't have to interact with collections they can also draw, build, find something they want to photograph and upload.

The site where I found out about Caboodle is also worth a look. It's called Culture24 and it's run by a not-for-profit group working across the areas of arts, heritage, education and tourism in the UK. If you haven't come across it before it's definately worth exploring and being inspired.

Floorplanner - free exhibition layout tool.

Exhibition designer Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 has hit upon a great easy, free online tool for producing 3D exhibition layouts. It's called Floorplanner and you can read a post about it here. It looks like a great tool for mocking up exhibitions/events/displays that don't necessarily have their own design budget but that need that little bit of extra visualisation. 

Did you know that the 1st of September (Wednesday just gone) was 'International Ask A Curator Day'? It's not quite clear who made it so but 17 Australian museums and galleries seem to have jumped on board joining 100s of other organisations from 22 different countries to answer any questions the general public wanted to throw their way.

The aim of the project was for the public to have access to curators via Twitter for the day. Some organisations like Powerhouse decided to use Facebook instead as it let them answer questions more fully and is already their most active social networking platform. (This interesting post from the fresh + newer team gives you more insight into their involvement and how it fits in with their overall social media strategy). It's a bit early to tell yet how successful it was but if it becomes an annual event perhaps we could jump on board next year?

How to Make History Interesting...

It's not always easy to think of ways to make history engaging for kids...

Tate Online

While we await the new version of our EMu Intranet site, it may be useful to take a look at The Tate's online database. This operates in a very similar manner to the IMu set up we will be using, and includes many similar design features.

Have a test drive here

The overall look and feel will obviously be different, but the built-in functionality is very similar; simple search and advanced search tabs, and the saved objects (known as My Collections in our version).

Tate also use a really interesting Subject classification page - which allows users to browse without any prior knowledge of the collection content. Our "Browse Collections" functionality will be implemented using the Narratives records to provide multiple ways for users to discover our collection overviews.

Also of interest on the Tate website is a detailed explanation of their ongoing digitisiation project - Insight: digitising the Tate Collection - which is well worth a read.

Experiments with Learning

Whilst exploring the Powerhouse blog Fresh + New(er) on a boring tram journey, I stumbled on another interesting post by Seb Chan on their recent experiment with using QR codes on Object labels. Similar to barcodes, QR codes are those little square pixelated codes which are used by mobile devices to photograph or 'scan' an embedded code which looks up an URL (much easier than typing a hideously long url).

What struck me in this post was the powerhouses willingness to experiment and test a new process so that the organisation can learn from the mistakes they may make - rather than just outsourcing the mistakes and the learning... read his comments here.

As Nick recently suggested, it might be useful for us to include Registration Numbers on our Object Labels, and in time when the whole EMu catalogue goes public on the Web, we could consider adding URLs to the labels as a way to provide visitors with access to more detailed information. This would also help redirect people to our website and raise awareness of our collections online facility.

Key to the City

Photo: Louis Armstrong House Museum

Key to the City is a clever project created by artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. To be part of the project members of the public are invited to go (with a friend) to a kiosk in Times Square. Here friends bestow keys on each other and the adventure begins. The key may be for a back door, front gate, community garden, graveyard or museum in all five New York buroughs. The keys open spaces usually not accessible to the general public.

Imagine all the interesting doors you could open in the Arts Centre?

fresh + new(er)

This is the blog I mentioned at the staff meeting this morning. It's called Fresh + New(er) and is written by Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse. If you have any interest at all in digital media and museums then this is a great place to find out what's happening at the cutting edge. If you want a short-cut into the site use the 'Categories' on the right sidebar to dip into areas that interest you most or check out this post about the digital strategy for The 80s Are Back exhibition.

Fresh + New(er) was originally set up as an internal 'repository and sounding board' and is now one of the top 10 most visited sections of the Powerhouse website. I think the disclaimer from the organisation is also an interesting feature allowing Seb and his team the freedom to talk about things that may never happen, went wrong etc without it reflecting on the 'brand'.

If you like what you see why not subscribe by email (also on right-hand sidebar)? It is not a daily or even weekly blog so you won't be bombarded with emails and you can save them or print them out to read later.

Reference Library now in EMu

As I write this post, over 5000 records for our Research Library Collection are being imported into the Bibliography Module of EMu...at last!

Our books have recently been catalogued in Libraries Australia, the National Library Database. These same records are also displayed to the public via the free online combined libraries portal called TROVE. These records have now been imported into the EMu Bibliography Module to enable the physical location of the books to be tracked - as the Library Books will be divided between the Collection Store and the Research Service in the Ballet Centre.

The EMu Bibliography Module has been designed to support citations and references of any sort of material (websites, maps, aerial photography, catalogues, journals) - and not just the material which we hold a copy of.

Each type of publication has its own tab, so choosing "Book" will activate the Book tab, and choosing "website" will activate a different tab with the necessary fields to reference a website.

It is important to understand that all items held in the Reference Library are all classified with the publication type "Archived Resource / Library Holding".

The information that could be imported into EMu was quite minimal: Title, Author, Call Number, ISBN, Publication and Imprint data. Although the EMu records lack some of the additional details that would make records more easily discoverable (no Subjects or Keywords) this has been overcome by providing a hyperlink to the full TROVE record. You can activate this from any Archived Resource Record by choosing the Tools Menu > Resource > Search Trove. (EMu has been configured to copy the Title field to Trove and search for a match). Trove is still the most appropriate place to search for books unless you know the title or author.

So in summary -

• Trove should be used to browse or search for records if you are not sure what you are looking for


• Everything in our library is treated as an Archived Resource / Library Holding in EMu Bibliography


• All other Types in Bibliography are for referencing externally held material


• Library Holding records contain a direct link to the full Trove record (Tools>Resources)

And as always, I'm happy to show anyone how to use this module

Rowena