2. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
8. 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
10. 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
– 19th
Century, 1800 – 1899
– mid 19th
century, circa 1850, 1840 – 1850
11. 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
17. 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
18.
19. 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
20. 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?
21. Contact us
• Linda Ellis
– Wolverhampton Art Gallery
– linda.ellis@wolverhampton.gov.uk
• James Grimster
– Orangeleaf Systems
– james@orangeleaf.com
• Black Country Museums
– Flickr: Black Country Museums
– Twitter: @BCMusuems
– Facebook: Geology Matters, Made in the Black Country
