The document discusses how museums can better work with developers to share their digital collections and data. The speaker from the Science Museum notes that museums have large amounts of objects, images, and metadata, but can do more to make this information accessible and useful to outside users like researchers, educators and developers. Some challenges include outdated technology, poor quality data, concerns about losing control of collections, and copyright issues. However, by embracing openness and an user-centered approach, museums can become a valuable resource for teaching and learning. The speaker welcomes input from developers on how museums can better support their work in building applications and sharing content with others.

1. Happy developers, happy museums
JISC #dev8dMia Ridge, Science Museum

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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?

5. 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

6. 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?

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

8. 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

9. Pretty ‘exhibition microsites’

10. Collections online
• (not always as pretty)

11. 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?

12. 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/

13. We’re taking our content to where
people hang out

14. 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

15. 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?

16. 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/in
dex/CRIG]

17. Image credits
• http://flickr.com/photos/ncindc/2746241750/ Museum
building
• http://flickr.com/photos/phploveme/2679669420/
Instrument case
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LondonScienceMuseums
ReplicaDifferenceEngine.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/