2. Accessibility
For Students
How can students incorporate museum resources in their
research?
How can museums increase awareness of available
resources?
For Professors
What new ways can professors incorporate museums
collections?
What barriers are preventing use of museum collections in
courses?
For Researchers around the World
How can museums support non-local researchers?
How can museums support and benefit from institutional
collaboration?
3. Student Accessibility
Source: smiaware.com
Source: www.penn.museumSource: www.discoverphl.com
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Source: www.penn.museum
Guided Tours Volunteer/Work Study
Social Media Online Catalogs
The Museum
4. Accessibility for Students – Where are
the doors still closed?
Source: en.wikipedia.org
The Museum
Source: daisyjanie.typepad.com
11. Hackathons – Leaving the Museum
Bubble
Source: http://inewmedia.org/Source: http://blog.hackerrank.com/
12. The Universal Challenge – Data
Accessibility for Researchers
Museum data accessibility:
Online Catalogs
Digital Scans of Archival Material
Problem: How can museums
increase accessibility to research
data?
Solution: Content Management
Systems designed specifically for
museums!
13.
14. Storing Any Type of Data
Objects Context Media People
Relationships
Free-Form & Controlled Properties
19. Data Unification
Structure
Controlled Properties – Control
what you can
Free-form Properties – For
everything else
Any entity can have any number
and combination of properties
Benefits
Project team members can work
together in real time anywhere in
the world (with an internet
connection)
Collections of objects distributed
throughout the world can all be
studied and analyzed together
23. Linked Open Data Standards
Application produces
search results that both a
human and a computer
can use
Definitions and entities
are linked to relevant
ontologies and
repositories of related
data
24. Fitting the Needs of Any Project
No restrictions on what is recorded and
publically/privately displayed
With a minimal knowledge of Python and HTML,
the application can easily be modified to fit the
needs of the project
Use of Solr and ResourceSpace make the project
scalable
25. Ease of Use
Current development is focusing on
making the data editing interface useable with little to
no training
creating a variety of data upload tools to improve
speed and ease of legacy data ingestion
multiple language support
mobile support
Thank for inviting me to speak today
I am particularly delighted to speak about digital humanities and museums because finding digital solutions to age old challenges in the fields of archaeology, museology, history, and anthropology has fascinated me ever since I was an undergraduate student here at Penn. As a work study student at the Penn Museum, I was fortunate enough to work directly with researchers who were actively excavating, studying, and cataloging archaeological data, and it was here that I had a revelation of sorts
As a child, I had always thought of museums as a place that held things, essentially a very large, well kept storage closet. But working at the Penn Museum, I realized that museums weren’t closets. They were doors. Doors that carried you to the past, or to a distant continent, or even helped us understand our present and future.
This got me to thinking, why did I use to think of museums as closets? How could I help others take advantage of what museums really have to offer?
The answer to these questions, and what I consider one of the greatest challenges to modern museums, [CLICK] is accessibility
Stewardship is not simply about caring for a collection, but taking advantage of every opportunity, digital or otherwise, to share that collection
I would now like to discuss three specific challenges to museum accessibility, and possible digital solutions
I will be focusing heavily on university museums and the audiences they serve, keeping in mind that this discussion can easily be expanded to incorporate most other kinds of museums, and even galleries, libraries, and archives as well
[CLICK]
First, how can museums improve accessibility for students?
The museums on this campus are unique resources that give Penn students opportunities few other universities can offer. How can museums, like the Penn Museums, facilitate the use of their resources in student research?
For those museums that already offer a wide variety of outstanding resources, how can museums increase awareness of these resources among students both locally, and at other universities?
[CLICK]
Second, it is not only important to increase the accessibility of museums as learning tools for students, it is also vital to improve access for professors to teaching resources
Professors both at Penn and at neighboring institutions already frequently utilize the Penn Museum as a teaching resource, but what new ways can professors incorporate museums into their curriculum?
In addition, for those under-utilized resources at museums, what barriers are preventing the use of museum collections in courses?
[CLICK]
Finally, as the internet becomes more and more common place in homes and institutions around the world, it has become even more viable for museums to offer access to their collections to researchers and other individuals anywhere on the planet
How can museums support these non-local researchers?
Expanding digital access around the world also opens doors for museums to expand collaboration with distant institutions. How can museums support and benefit from increased inter-institutional accessibility?
How can students incorporate museum resources in their research?
So first, lets talk about the student experience
How do students currently connect with museum collections and resources? [CLICK]
Students participate in guided tours led by professors or docents, or undertake self-guided tours as part of class assignments
Students can take advantage of volunteer, internship, or work-study opportunities to work more directly with collections
Most museums now use some form of social media to communicate with younger audiences
Finally, many museums have some kind of online resource to browse their collections
[CLICK]
So what is missing here? What museum resources are still difficult or impossible for students to interact with?
As I’ve just mentioned, students have a wide variety of opportunities to interact with the collections that are on display, and even occasionally work with museum resources in storage or out of public view through internships
But what about those objects which can not be view in person without a significant amount of object handling training? Or objects or archival materials too delicate to be put on display? How can students interact with these objects?
A wide variety of solutions for “digital visits” to museums are currently being developed and implemented around the world
Projects like Micropasts in the UK are working on developing quick and easy methods for creating 3d models of any object on a very small budget. With only a digital camera and freely available 3d imaging software, a museum can create 3d object models, allowing students to examine an object in great detail without ever having to remove it from storage
As imaging software continues to improve, it is even occasionally possible to use already existing object images to create the 3d mask, making it possible to create 3d models without having to dedicate time to rephotographing them
One additional benefit of this kind of project is the opportunity for additional student participation. Micropasts uses a very simple 3d masking tool to crowdsource the creation of the 3d models. Students or professors to incorporate the creation of these models into their coursework
InstantAR, a freely available app and software package, is currently being developed by a team working with European museums, as a tool for the quick and simple installation of Augmented Reality in museum galleries.
Users can either download the app upon entering the museum, or use iphone or android devices provided by the museum.
Within the galleries, holding the phone or ipad up to certain objects or paintings will display additional data about an object, information on objects that might not currently be on display, or share with the user some multimedia to enhance the educational experience
As I mentioned before, many museums use social media to attract new audiences and update active followers
Freely available apps, such as Hang w/, could also be utilized as a simple way for students to connect more directly with museum employees who might not often be able to demonstrate their work publically, such as conservators
Hang w/ allows broadcasters to live stream short videos at anytime to their viewers from their phones, which can either be viewed live or archived and viewed later
The low overhead and casual nature of the software means that when a conservator came across a particularly fascinating object in the middle of an average work day, they could simply pick up their phone and live stream a quick short video giving students and other followers a truly unique behind the scenes look into the museum
Hang w/ also displays live commenting, so that the broadcaster could immediately respond to questions and comments from viewers, as if the students were right in the work room with them
This would not only be a useful way for college students to connect more directly with museums, but students at any grade level as well. Grade school teachers could play back these broadcasts, or even work with museums to schedule live broadcasts, similar to programs like the Remote Classroom currently used by the Penn Museum
The tools I have mentioned thus far allow students wider learning opportunities
But what about teaching opportunities? How can professors take advantage of digital solutions to increase their access to museum collections?
As I have mentioned before, professors will frequently use guided or self guided museum tours to connect their students with a museum
Occasionally, professors will even offer courses that result in the creation of student exhibits, such as the Penn Museum’s Year of Health—Corn: From Ancient Crop to Soda Pop exhibit
However, the amount of planning, funding, and employee resources required to facilitate these physical student exhibits limits how often they can be offered
The solution would seem to be the creation of digital exhibits, or digital augmentations of existing physical exhibits
One of the many free and open source digital curation tools is Omeka, a web publishing platform which is already used at many institutions on this campus
With a minimal amount of training, professors can work with their students and museums to create rich digital narratives to accompany existing museum exhibits, or to display materials which the museum does not physically showcase
In addition to creating these exhibits, professors can use tools like Omeka to encourage students to become digital museum ambassadors. An exclusively online exhibit can expand far beyond the boundaries of a physical building to connect objects in museums around the world. Professors could use this opportunity to digitally unify collections and create entirely new narratives never before possible
A digital museum ambassador program could also help students create connections to other students working in the same field, laying the foundation for future collaboration after the student graduates
Finally, museums that offer digital ambassador programs could reach beyond the students and professors at their local university to schools that may not have direct access to a local museum
Museum engagement with professors and university courses is not limited to the development of student exhibits
Crowdsourcing has become and extremely useful new tool for museums to interact with professors and benefit from free labor
One crowdsourcing project, DIYHistory, is using university courses as well as the general public to transcribe the massive archival collections of the University of Iowa Libraries
A similar museum outreach program is taking place here at Penn. UrCrowdsource.org, a website for transcribing the documentation of Leonard Woolley’s excavation of Ur, has partnered with professors at Roanoke College to expose students to historical documentation of an archaeological excavation
I have already mentioned projects like Micropasts, which are using crowdsourcing to digitally recreate objects in 3D
Other crowdsourcing projects include Ancient Lives, based at the University of Oxford, which is using participants to transcribe ancient papyri and Project Mosul, which is attempting to digitally recreate objects which have been damaged or destroyed
Crowdsourcing digitization allows a museum both to increase its accessibility for professors to include museum collections in their curriculum, as well as adding to the digital material available for general consumption
Finally, museums do not have to exclusively cater to professors and university courses in the humanities
There is a massive labor force available at most universities which few museums have tapped into
I am referring to computer scientists
Museums are in dire need of software development catered specifically to their unique needs and CS students need the experience of working with a client to develop software from concept to completion
Museums could consider participating in university hackathons or even hosting their own as a method of engaging computer science students to work with museum collections and would get free software in the process
Participating in hackathons would also be a great opportunity to expose computer scientists to potential career development in the field of museum studies
In addition to hackathons, many engineering schools also offer a course in software engineering, where the students are tasked with developing an application over a semester for a particular client. The development process lasts an entire year instead of the day or two of a hackathon, allowing for much more complex applications to be created
The solutions I have mentioned so far are basically ways for museums to extend their galleries into the digital realm
What these applications make available is the viewing experience of objects not normally accessible to students
But what about data? It is likely the amount of a data a museums stores about its collection greatly overshadows the collection itself. How is data accessible to students?
Most large museums offer online catalogs which allow students to view a wide selection of data about an object
For archival or library materials which can be digitally scanned, digital collections such as Penn in Hand and OPenn allow students to browse and search these documents
However, it is likely that massive amounts of data created by researchers and museum employees never reaches the public catalogs where students can access it. Funding, technical resources, and the sheer amount of data produced all limit researchers and museums from sharing their data with the public
How can museums give students access to this data for their own research?
What museums need is a content management system designed specifically for the kinds of data created by museums
This premise is the primary goal of my own software development project, UrOnline
With UrOnline, our team hopes to create a free software tool for the publication and analysis of all aspects of an excavation (our primary focus is currently museums with archaeological material, but we are working on expanding that to any type of museum)
This includes data created after the excavation, by archives, museums registrars, conservation labs, and libraries, from birth to infinity
I will speak more about how UrOnline works in a moment, but I would like to highlight a few opportunities this type of data publication makes possible
Increased data availability would allow students to take part in research projects which examined broad selections of a museum collection without having to
Now that Simon has described the extent of the information we are trying to capture in digitizing the excavation of Ur, I would like to discuss the application I am developing to manage and disseminate this data to the public. UrOnline is not just a webpage for collecting Woolley’s data on Ur. Our goal it to create a software tool for publication and analysis of all aspects of an excavation, with the potential to serve as a documentary tool for threatened cultural heritage sites. This includes everything from object measurements to detailed mapping of a site. This is obviously quite a daunting task, so in the initial planning stages of the project, the team identified 8 key features this new software tool would need.
Now, I going to quickly break down how we are meeting each requirement and give a few examples using the live public website.
(CLICK) When trying to determine the extent of the data the project needed to store in our system, we looked to OpenContext as a model because they have developed a similar system for publishing excavations. (CLICK) After testing their model with a sample of our data, we made a few modifications which resulted in a three part structure: (CLICK) Entities, Relationships, and Descriptive Properties
There are four Entity data types: People, Media, Contexts, and Objects. Objects are basically artifacts, context can be a variety of things from sites to a grave; to even a stratigraphic layer; media encompasses original notes, letters, publications, images, video, and any other documentation of the excavation; and finally people, the individuals who were a part of the excavation and its documentation.
(Two clicks) Each of these four entities can be related to the other three to enhance the understanding of the entity, something I will discuss further in a moment
Finally, the third structure in the model is the Descriptive Property, which is how information about a specific entity is stored. These can be either Free-Form or Controlled
Now, I’d like to demonstrate what this structure looks like on our website. This is detail page for an object. * show object page, different property types, and relationships
There are similar pages for Context, Media, and People
(CLICK) A natural result of storing information in this format is that every entity is presented within a meaningful context. Objects, are shown with their find location and a bibliography of their publication and where they appear in the unpublished documentary record. Contexts/locations are displayed with a full list of the artifacts found within them as well as a record of their documentation. Publications, letters, and field notes, are shown with the artifacts, people, and contexts they describe.
Show examples using the Context and Media links
(CLICK) In addition, the system uses controlled properties to provide additional meaning and standardization for the information used to describe entities.
Show Ram/Object Type example
Finally, storage of the data in this manner allows for much more complex querying of the data over these relationships.
Show all objects in an article example
In the future, we hope to incorporate a GIS component in the storage and display of Contexts to further enhance the presentation of relationships
(CLICK) The vast majority of the data uploaded to the Ur project so far has come from a large variety of sources with no standard storage format. This is likely the case with many other excavations. In addition, both the original excavation and the current project are a joint effort between two different museums which have collected a wide range of data. It did not seem feasible to wait for the field of archaeology to agree on a single set of properties to describe an object or context. So, rather than locking in a single set of fields for each entity type, we have designed a two-part structure: (TWO CLICKS) Controlled Properties (for a given property, like object type, you can define a finite set of values) and (CLICK) Free-form Properties (for everything else). (CLICK) In addition, it was decided that there would be no restrictions on the types and number of properties an entity could have.
This prevents the data loss that would result from forcing a given source of data into an existing immutable data schema. For example, if one study from the 70s collected bead widths for a very small subset of objects, than only these objects have this field. Woolley’s original description of objects has been stored alongside the project teams modern description for any objects that have both.
(TWO CLICKS) There are two obvious benefits to data unification. (TWO CLICKS) First, it allows the project team members to work together, in real time, from anywhere in the world. (CLICK)The second is that collections of objects, like those from Ur, which might be distributed in many different museums, can all be studied and analyzed together. One additional potential benefit that is particularly relevant to this conference is that the system could be used to actively track the state of objects or sites under threat of damage, and to quickly document collections at risk.
As one of the primary goals of UrOnline is to make excavation information available to anyone, we have anticipated a wide variety of users. To that end we have built in a tiered system for querying the data.
Show simple and advanced search
Show preview results display
For general users, definitions for controlled terminology is easily accessed. Other the other hand, academic users might be more interested in the linked data tied to the controlled terminology, or the conservation analysis on the analytic tab.
In an effort to further increase the ability of our application to share data online, as well as providing more context and meaning to our data by linking it with other data sets, we are incorporating linked open data features into the system. For example, our application produces search results that both a human (CSV and Excel) and a computer can use (JSON). In addition, the system uses RESTful uris to reference entities for added permanency and to make it simpler to link to objects, contexts, etc.
I previously mentioned that controlled properties have been linked to relevant archaeological ontologies such as the British Museum’s Semantic Web. The system also allows objects, contexts, people, and media to be linked to other repositories of related data.
As we have developed this application, one of the most important lessons we have learned is that the system must be able to adapt and grow easily. As a result, we have produced an application that can be modified easily to fit the ever-changing needs of a project.
(CLICK) This is exemplified by the lack of restrictions on what is recorded and publically or privately displayed. If an excavation team would like to collaborate on a project, but are concerned about disseminating certain pieces of information that might compromise the safety of the excavation, it is very simple to set some information to only be view privately to users with a login to the application, while other information can remain accessible via the public site. The lack of restrictions on what is recorded means that if at any time, an entirely new set of data should be added, the site would not need to be modified in any way.
(CLICK) If a project did wish to modify the application, for example to enforce a rule that every object must have a given field, it only requires a minimal understanding of Python and HTML. The application has been entirely constructed using Django, a web framework specifically built for quick and easy online publication. Many aspects of the public website template can already be configured from the admin settings, however, it would also be simple for users to supply their own HTML templates for the interface.
(CLICK) Finally, the use of Solr to index the data for searching, and ResourceSpace to store the digital assets makes the size of the data stored in the system limited to the size of your server.
(Two clicks) One of our primary goals for future development is to improve ease of use. We hope to make this application a solution for people around the world who feel unable to publish their archaeological data due to financial or technological restrictions. To this end, we are working to make the data editing interface useable with little to no training. (CLICK) This includes creating a variety of data upload tools to improve the speed and ease of legacy data ingestion, so that contributors will not feel held back by the difficulty of converting old data sets. (CLICK) One benefit to developing with Django is the built in language tools. We hope to utilize these tools to offer multiple language support. (CLICK) Finally, enabling mobile support will make the application much more practical for things like recording the state of heritage under threat.
The final system requirement, that our application be free, has been met using exclusively open source technology. (Read the above).
