Black country collections online

Black Country Collections Online
Linda Ellis and James Grimster

Project aims
To widen access to objects and artworks held by museum services in the Black Country (Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall & Wolverhampton)
To reduce costs by working together
To create a sustainable online resource
To promote the rich industrial heritage of the Black Country
To instil a sense of local pride in the area

Considerations
Target audience
Art / history informed
Local and family history researchers
Non-museum / gallery visitors
Users’ wants
An easy way to find source material about their interests
As much information online as possible
To be able to plan visits to see items not on display
Content they can re-use

Considerations cont.
Of the six main museums and galleries in the region, only one had all of their collections online, one had about 8%, the rest less than 1%
Each of the museum services had widely varying collections
Fine and decorative art, locally made items, ephemera, natural history, geology, ethnography, weapons etc
Our corresponding archive services already had a joint online catalogue - ww.BlackCountryHistory.org

Considerations cont.
Resources:
MLA and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation funding:
Central project team - 3 members of staff
£40k project funding over 2 years
Very limited resources within individual partner museums (staff and money)
Anything we developed needed to be sustainable once the project finished
Ongoing staff time and annual hosting and maintenance costs needed to be kept to a minimum

Our solution – 4 strands
Added content to Black Country History website
Creating 6 audience targeted microsites
Geology, glass, fine art, decorative art, local manufacturing, love and marriage
Added content to third party websites:
Culture Grid, PNDS and Europeanna
Inspiration Bank
Added content to social networking sites

Black Country History website

Black Country History website
8 partners; 4 museum services, 4 archives
Online catalogue; data is taken from our collections databases
Original website used Axiell’s DSCovery software, now using CollectionsBase back end and a WordPress front end
As of Nov 2010 contains 127,800+ records
21,700+ records with images
20,600+ museum records

Improved searching

Issues to be resolved
Data quality
Terminology / use of controlled thesauri
Spelling mistakes, missing data items
Collection management system can handle different date formats but the web system can’t
19 th Century, 1800 – 1899
mid 19 th century, circa 1850, 1840 – 1850

Microsites
Microsites created using the same web back end, focusing on specific audience groups
Geology Matters ( geologymatters.org.uk ) already live, others are in progress

WordPress front end means that websites are easy to set up

Easy to add blogs, videos, twitter feeds etc

Culture Grid, PNDS & Europeanna

Inspiration Bank West Midlands partnership website

Social networking
Collections focused
Flickr, Twitter, Facebook

CollectionsBase
XSLT (XML transforms) into a common interchange format for various systems
MySQL based repository contains XML and provides OAI target
SOLR based indexing, qualified DC, matches CultureGrid schema
Rate limited API layer over SOLR provides OpenSearch and faceted response for WordPress

So far….
Digital Midlands
275,000 records
18 partners, 20 more in the pipeline
Black Country, Staffordshire, Shropshire
Standard use cases
research use, subject specialist
standard events publicity approaches

What next?
We know
more people farm electric sheep than use digital collections (FarmVille)
people are willing to become mayor of a car park (FourSquare, Gowalla)
Trying out MyMuseum: the pervasive game
Stoke CFTF, Shropshire DCD
Virtual Rewards for Achievements based on collections data usage
Real rewards for location based achievements: i.e. treasure hunts via QR. Beer tokens? Nudge theory? Wider citizenship use cases?
FaceBook connect, Foursquare, SCVGR API
Has anyone already tried this?
A disaster waiting to happen?

Contact us
Linda Ellis
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
[email_address]
James Grimster
Orangeleaf Systems
[email_address]
Black Country Museums
Flickr: Black Country Museums
Twitter: @BCMusuems
Facebook: Geology Matters, Made in the Black Country

Black country collections online

by Museums Computer Group on Nov 24, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 1

Statistics

Black country collections online — Presentation Transcript