Happy developers + happy museums = happy punters

Happy developers, happy museums JISC #dev8d Mia Ridge, Science Museum

Who?
I’m Mia
I work for the Science Museum
Yes, I have an accent (fading after several years away)
http://twitter.com/mia_out - @ me with comments. I’ll post URLs there too.
http://openobjects.org.uk – my blog on digital heritage, blah blah blah

IMHO
I think museums can change lives
"Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. “
"No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." Isaac Asimov
Museums should be about delight, serendipity and answers that provoke more questions
Museums should also be committed to accessibility, transparency, curation, respecting and enabling expertise

Why am I here today?
Museums have lots of information
We like sharing it
We could guess what’s useful for researchers, educators and developers - but we’d rather go to the source. How we can work with you?

Some challenges
Technical
The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed
Data
We have a lot of it. A lot of what we have is rubbish
Institutional
Challenges to curatorial authority, fear of loss of control, loss of trust, fear that we’ll get the IT wrong
Funding, metrics
How do you propose agile projects to funding committees? How do you measure visitors to a mashup?
Copyright
We don’t always have image or IP rights for our objects or content

Dealing with the challenges
We can’t afford to build interfaces to meet every need.
But we don’t need to if we make it possible for others to build things
Inspiring examples, real success stories from users, sharing technical solutions help sector evangelisers
‘ Fail faster, succeed sooner’ – reward intelligent failure
Suggestions?

What are museums known for?
Buildings full of stuff
Being experts
Making visitors come to us
Being fun. Yay! 8D
Being boring. Boo :(

What are museum websites known for?
Helping you plan a visit
Most people use museum websites to find out when a museum is open, how much it costs, and what's on.
Which is nice... but... we can do more

Pretty ‘exhibition microsites’

Collections online
(not always as pretty)

What do we have?
Lots of objects, lots of images
Lots of metadata about objects
Also interrelated records on people, places, dates, historical periods, events, subjects (topics, themes)
Who designed, invented, made, used, bought, owned, donated an object? When and where was it made, used, found? What’s related?

What are museums doing at the moment?
One way or another, we're opening up access to our collections.
Read access is easy, write access is harder.
APIs large and small
Aiming to produce re-usable, interoperable data with clear re-use statements
Cool examples: IMA dashboard, Powerhouse Museum OPAC, Brooklyn Museum
http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/ , http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/menu.php , http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections/ , http://objectwiki.sciencemuseum.org.uk/

We’re taking our content to where people hang out

What would we like to be known for?
An end to silos
User-centred, not institution-centred
Helping researchers help themselves
Helping developers help others
Being a source of content for lecturers and teachers
Not just history, biography or art – also science, natural history, archaeology

What can we do for you?
Who are you? University users (students, researchers, teachers and administrators), hobbyists, specialists, developers; direct or indirect uses
Enquiry-based learning; mashups; linked data, semantic web technologies, cross-collections searches; faceted browsing to make complex searches easy; museums as a place where stuff lives – a happy home for metadata mapped around objects and authority records?
What else? You tell me! What do you want to provide for your users, and how can museums help?

Happy developers + happy museums = happy punters
“ The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else”
[http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG]

Image credits
http://flickr.com/photos/ncindc/2746241750/ Museum building
http://flickr.com/photos/phploveme/2679669420/ Instrument case
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LondonScienceMuseumsReplicaDifferenceEngine.jpg Replica Difference Engine
http://flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/3083455553/ Happy face
http://flickr.com/photos/dsevilla/129592677/ Curiosity
http://flickr.com/photos/criminalintent/537762948/ Crowd control barriers
http://flickr.com/photos/zoomzoom/304135268/ Silos
If not in the list, http://flickr.com/photos/_mia/

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Happy developers + happy museums = happy punters

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