Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops (or put your digital content where the users are, not where you are)

1. Boutiques, Shopping Malls and
Specialist Shops
(or put your content where the users are, not where you are)
Alastair Dunning, @alastairdunning
JISC Programme Manager
Presentation to JISC Content Advisory Group, 25th October
2011

3. boutiques may be
lovely and give you
more control, but
they can be out of
the way, and less
people visit them

5. shopping malls – not
so nice.
But a lot, a lot more
people visit them
and you can still have
your shop there

6. for digital content
projects, we can’t
rely simply on
building our own
boutiques

7. we need to put our
content in the
shopping malls
everyone visits.
what are they?

8. obviously
Every content project
must must must get How to do it:
their metadata / Maximising Online
webpages on to Resource
Google. JSTOR c.20% Effectiveness
(?) growth when full
text indexed by
Google

9. Flickr Commons now used by 56 major cultural
institutions.
“View statistics on the first batch of image
uploads exceeded the entire previous year of
views of the same images on the Powerhouse
[Museum] website within five weeks”

10. Over 40 organisations
signed up to give
content on Wikimedia
Commons
Not just about uploading digital objects. Derby
Museum and Art Gallery worked with Wikipedia
for one month’s activities (The Wright Challenge,
QRCodes) and over 1,250 articles related to the
museum’s collections were added.

11. Within the educational
/ cultural heritage
centre, there are
plenty of other
significant shopping
malls

12. Digital Public Space

14. but do shopping malls
really have all the specialist
requirements that
customers need?
sometimes shopping malls
don’t have everything ...

15. but with digital content, how can
we appeal to every single
customer need ... ? E.g. of
• undergraduates
• historians
• design postgraduates
• interested public(s)
• archaeologists
• and plenty more ...

16. we can’t.
but we can allow them
to build their own
specialist shops which
contain our content

17. Search Results for ‘Wooden
Door’
The Victoria and
Albert API allows
queries to be run
over their museum
collection

18. The ‘Wall of Images’ is an independent search
interface over the V and A collections.

19. Using APIs allows you
to expose your
content on the web,
without having to
build an interface.
Others can build.

20. Locating London’s Past
uses API technology to
‘mash-up’ data on
early Modern London

21. Plague deaths in London on 1665, mapped on to John Roque’s map of London
1746. Locating London’s Past (launches December 2011)

23. we also need to
remember the various
ways people travel to
these boutiques,
malls and specialist
shops

24. users don’t just travel to
content by desktop PC, but
via smartphones, tablets,
apps, ebooks ... (and also via
OERs, lectures,
presentations, bibliographies,
...)

25. A documentary cartoon for the iPad, Operation Ajax is about US /
Iranian history and incorporates digitised historical documents
from the CIA

26. The British Library's iPhone App Royal Manuscripts: The
Genius of Illumination delivers 58 of it digitised
manuscripts

27. The University of Manchester is creating an
‘augmented reality’ app that gives users extra
information when the smartphone is held next to the
original special collections object (in this case copies of
Dante’s Divine Comedy)

28. Faber & Faber’s iPad version of The Waste Land
includes readings, performances, notes , and the
original digitised manuscript

29. For universities and
cultural heritage bodies
with digital content,
putting our content
elsewhere requires
practices, policies and
technical infrastructure

30. starting with ...
• Ensuring content is
harvestable by Google – and
that technical infrastructure is
amenable to that
• Exposing content via clear,
well-documented APIs
• Clear licensing conditions

31. But for the content to be
properly reused and
redisplayed then staff are
needed to constantly recurate
the content and create the
links with the shopping malls,
specialists and transporters

32. This is an ongoing process
that requires commitment
from an institution, and also
skills in communications,
licensing and business
planning, amongst other
things

33. But if we want our content to
travel in different ways and
users to visit own our
boutiques, but also others’
shopping malls and specialist
shops, such strategies are
essential to implement
... or else ...

35. References
Paris boutiques 19,11,08 011 - www.flickr.com/photos/aparis/3047260751/
Bondi Junction Shopping Mall - http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliebrewer/67838081
Signs.ArtsDistrict.Hyattsville.MD.12apr06 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/perspective/280434807
The Psychic Piglet - http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicecupoftea/3048662972/
Specialist Shop (Spank the Monkey) -http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonf/3485449181
Specialist tobacconist (The Black Swan Shoppe) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/phillip/3323236821/
Glasgow Tube - http://www.flickr.com/photos/julio_/26051929/
Bicycle - http://www.flickr.com/photos/paukrus/4093835537/
Bus - http://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=59564&sos=5
30 Years On (Car) - http://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=113826&sos=10
Nostalgia's not what it used to be - http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcemarc/3556778601