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

'Object of the Week'

Image originally posted on Powerhouse's 'Object of the Week 'blog

In the last post I mentioned the Powerhouse blog 'Object of the Week' and recently they had a very interesting post on Lady Sonia McMahon's famous dress that got me thinking. There are so many instances when we could do this sort of thing to make our collection relevant. When 'Hey, Hey It's Saturday' was re-launched we could have done something on Ozzie; we could something on Lauris Elms as the winner of the Green Room Awards; something on Robert Helpmann, Kristian Fredrickson, Bell Shakespeare the list goes on...

In many instance the text is already written (as captions etc) and increasingly we have good images on EMu so something like this would be very achievable. I know that Ro has been working very hard on the new version of EMu which makes web publishing much easier so perhaps that might provide some opportunities. What do you think?

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