Three problems with museum data.

Data from FOI requests include curator, object, country, year, and acquisition method. Need a mapping process, as not everything maps, and certain items can be mapped to something simplified, for example, “edged weapon” becomes just “weapon”. Same for countries, etc. However, there are several tricky ones, for example, what country is “asia”? This is when you say “Good enough”.

Frankie shows off a locally hosted website showing the aggregated data. By putting the data into more generic silos he’s able to parse things much more easily for view and searching.

Issues - all objects counted equally (small coins all counted separate, so there are many more of them), no photos, user interactions not available. Prototype at museum-collections.org.

Uniting The Shanty Towns: Data Combining Across Multiple Institutions
Seb Chan, Powerhouse Museum, Australia
People like order, but if you look closer you get mess. But mess is good. Yet mess makes mashups hard. Can we agree on standards? Lets start with calendars. Figured can’t be hard, it’s just a calendar. But it was, everyone has different CMS’s or no CMS at all. How do we do it? Could just use people to do it by hand, but that’s too much work. So we scrape, aggregate, have a nice backend and use sites we can trust. Then we can get a nice frontend, RSS and iCal to all these aggregated sites.

Semantic web, why can’t we use it for collections? We write themes, tags, tracking searches, etc, but there’s gotta be a better way. Use Calais, a text analysis tool, creates dynamically generated meta data tags. It’s work humans can do, but this is automatic, which saves a lot of time. However, it doesn’t always come up with proper tags (but again is “good enough”). Once you have this data, you can then start connecting it to other data. Once you have the data identified, you can use it in mashups of other data (for example, if you have a company pulled out for Google, you can then do auto mashups of stock prices, locations, etc).

Take it to the next level. If you know where Google is in our example, you can mashup your own location, put it into a search page, and it will show you what things are near your current location (including Google if you happen to be near it for example), as well as all the other data associated with the original record.

Also did a video competition on YouTube. Tons of rules in order to put up a video. Barrier to entry is fairly high. However, one video submission was entitled “art thief”, which reminded people of a person who would walk into the Brooklyn Museum and hang his own artwork (much the chagrin of museum admins). Could have posed a problem because of what happened in the past, but the lesson learned is trust your audience. Not everyone is doing things in a negative light, even if you’ve been burned in the past. Don’t let one rotten apple spoil the bushel.

Brooklyn has a Flickr group where they let people post photos of the museum and the work. Had the idea of why not invite 10 top photographers on Flickr to come in and shoot the museum objects in their own way. Gives a personalized view of the artwork, which is very different from the normal object photo shot. Allows people to see the artwork in a new way online. Turned it all into one big video showcasing the museum. Visitor created, but showcases the museum really well.

Art Share. Facebook app, to share artwork on their Facebook profile. If you’re an artist you can upload your own artwork too. What’s interesting is what people put on their profiles. You learn more about people based on what they decide to display on their profiles. (note: Walker Art Center is part of Art Share)

Click. A crowd curated exhibition. Again, trust your audience, let them have a say in your museum.

Hat tip to the Walker: In the Q&A, Shelley mentions Robin last year talking about engaging younger members of your museum to blog, as many tend to actually want to be blogging (which is very true).

Ladders Of Participation, Social Media And Museum Audiences
Lynda Kelly, Australian Museum & Angelina Russo, Swinburne University, Australia
Classifying online participants, use Forester research questions to find out how Australians were working online. Compared that to the US. Found people that visit museums participate a lot more in 2-way activities than people who do not visit museums.

Classifications:

IE handled these modes like most of the other browsers. There was “quirks” mode, which is invoked if no doctype is set (or a deprecated doctype), and “standards” mode if you used an appropriate doctype. Safari and Firefox work the same way. This gives a bit of flexibility to those who may have some older site with nonstandard or old spec code, and still follows general web standards for new code like you would expect.

Microsoft however decided to change things again in IE8. One would think the new and better standards that came about through the Acid 2 test would work in “standards” mode in IE8 given they follow the standard. But that is not the case. If you use “standards” mode in IE8, the browser will instead render the page like IE7 did, you will not get the new up to date standards fixes. And “quirks” mode will still render in IE8 like IE6 did.

Instead, to get the “super standards” mode, web developers will need to add a special meta tag to their sites to tell IE8 to render it in the new mode. This is just short sighted. It’s a band aid fix us web devs will have to live with for another 5 to 10 years.

The biggest problem here is the fact that standards compliance means “opt in”. Standards compliance should be determined by the doctype of the page, like the standards say, not some random meta tag. Microsoft’s comeback is that adding in standards means many pages build specifically for IE6 or 7 will break, and expecting everyone to rewrite their entire websites to standards compliance is not feasible.

Which is why I want to know why standards compliance can’t be an “opt out”? The meta tag idea is fine, but it should be the fix for the old, out of date, non-standard content, not new content. Microsoft can (and should) save companies the time and effort in having to rewrite all their sites, but that saving should come at the cost of adding a simple meta tag in the header of your old pages.

If you look at Microsoft’s OS’s they do similar things. XP broke some of the Windows 2000 programs because the API changed. Same thing happened in Vista. Microsoft rightly gave developers notice of these changes and gave them time to implement fixes for compatibility, so that when the new OS came out, the old programs could already be updated to run on the new OS. I’m not sure why a browser should be any different. Give legacy site devs the meta tag to add now, so that when IE8 comes out it “just works” like it used to. But leave the standards compliance the way it should be, the way the spec says.

This also has the added benefit of allowing legacy code and this fix to die off faster. If meta tags are only put into old code, as those sites are replaced, we can get rid of this “fix” much quicker. Making developers put it into new code just means we have to deal with this for that much longer, which is a pain.

I’m happy that Microsoft has finally decided to embrace web standards for a change. But in their quest for legacy support, their decision to slap an ugly band aid onto future code is a bad one. And it opens a slippery slope for future versions of IE that I’m not looking forward to, and that is unfortunate.

There are expensive people counters available, with all sorts of technology, right down to thermal imaging. There are also cheap hand held counters, with plus and minus buttons to add and subtract people as they come and go to keep a consistent count of people in a gallery.

These cheap hand held versions are great…if you only have one entrance and exit point. What if you have multiple entrances and exits? Suddenly the hand held version falls apart, and putting cameras all over is way too expensive.

This is the issue that was put forth to me. We have an upcoming exhibition for Frida Kahlo. The gallery that the exhibition is in can only support 200 visitors at any one time. We expect more than that, especially on busy days. The kicker of course is that the gallery it’s in has two entrances, so we needed to find a way to accurately count how many people are in the gallery at any given time, and if that number goes over 200, the gallery guards would have to hold people from entering until the number dropped below 200.

I thought for sure something like this must have been made before. Surely we aren’t the only people who have ever had this problem? But in looking online I couldn’t find anything that was cost effective and would “just work”. We kept saying “if we only had two clickers that could talk to each other”.

Something interesting happened the same day I was presented with this problem. Apple announced the iPod Touch. As soon as I saw the Touch, my first thought was Art on Call and the Walker Channel. I could see all sorts of uses for both in the galleries. But after a couple hours wrestling with this given problem it hit me, why not use the iPod Touch?

The iPod Touch is handheld, has touch input, and a browser with wifi built in. All we had to do was make a simple web app for it that counted up or down. Two people could have the Touch’s, check off how many people are entering and leaving, and both be up to date on exactly how many people are in the gallery. So that’s what we did.

Here are some screen grabs of what I built. The left image is the typical display of the app. Options are simply to add or subtract a certain amount of people as they enter or leave. You’re able to reset the counter to zero in the upper right (it has a confirmation before doing so). The right image shows what happens when you go over the gallery maximum. The app also auto updates the number every 10 seconds, so the guard who has people waiting will know when the the number drops below the max value right away without needing to manually refresh.

Making a web app specifically for the iPod Touch (or iPhone) turns out to be really easy. It’s just a webpage. You pretty much can do anything that is available in Safari (though there are a few inconstancies to watch out for), and there are also several special meta tags you can add specifically for these apps (for example, I turned off scaling for our web app). Apple has written up a very nice development doc on their website that I used when making this app. It includes things like screen size, font size, color, meta tags, basically everything you need to make something look nice and stylish on these devices. I’d recommend it to anyone working on apps like this. The screenshot to the left is how the iPod Touch looks with the rest of the UI around it, to give you an idea.

As far as the iPod Touch/iPhone goes, I’m very impressed. I really do think these devices are the future of museum audio tours. Well, not just audio, but video as well! There are things that need to be fixed (like the fact that you can’t get podcasts on them via wifi yet), but overall there is so much potential here, simply by having a real browser with wifi on it and supporting rich media, as well as the UI and multi-touch interface. It could very well be the Rosetta Stone of digital museum tours.