: General

Mobile Computing

Dafydd James, 11 April 2008

The first session in Mobile Computing was about the Heritage 2.0 project based in Belgium by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Flemish Institute for Cultural Heritage, Belgium. The two main aims of the projects was to build a 'communication layer' on top of existing heritage databases and to distribute this content on mobile devices in Flanders. 

They decided to bring in some international experts in to find out about the issues of mobile heritage presentation - and the outcome was that Flanders was not ready for handheld devices. The project could open up heritage to a larger audience, though the experts concluded that they should focus on content and not just use PDAs for the sake of it.

In the following presentation our fellow countryman Tom Pert from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) showed some of the GPS-based handhelds projects he has been working on for the last couple of years. 

In 2005 he built an e-trail for Ruthin using some customised GIS software and had some input from local Welsh Baccalaureate students for content design (which was mainly text and images). 

Due to the success of the project he has won funding for another project in Blaenafon, which launches on the 18th April. I'm looking forward to testing these devices, which have predefined zones that trigger (or stop) media files depending on your location. He also mentioned the possibilities of using KML with Google Maps on your mobile.
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Beyond Single Repositories

Dafydd James, 11 April 2008

The Peabody Essex Museum in the USA have been working on several web projects collaboratively through the ECHO project. The project is a mix of Native and non-Native institutions within USA and is funded by Federal Government grant.

Even though ECHO is challenged by different educational standards at state and national level, they continue to work to engage young people and children in local communities. They also mentioned some cross-cultural design issues, though some issues have been successfully overcome with their interactive map and artists' gallery on newtradewinds.org.

We also listened to a Flickr representative talking about a new project called 'The Commons' (flickr.com/commons), which they developed alongside the Library of Congress. It's a more formal way for institutions to increase access their photographic collections through Flickr. The number of tags and comments added are unbelievable - in two and a half days the Library of Congress' online collection had 20,000 tags, and have had 4,000 comments so far. And some of the feedback has been added into their records, which means it's a good way for the public to contribute knowledge.
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A very brief update on new media

Chris Owen, 11 April 2008

It's great to be back at the international Museums & The Web conference. The last conference helped shape a lot of the work we've been doing in the last year, so now seems a good time to update you on a few of those developments.

Around this time last year we launched a new blog area. If you haven't seen it yet, click 'refresh' and you're here! Since then we've expanded the feature and published over 70 blog entries. Similarly, we launched our first podcast in October of last year. There's more work to do here and in the short term, you'll see an overhaul of our blog pages and, of course, lots more content.

Tying a lot of things like this together is our new collections site,

Rhagor

. The goal behind Rhagor was to open up our collections and stories to the public in ways that weren't possible before, and really engage visitors with our collections.

The creative process and technical challenges behind our work is sometimes unseen in the final product of an exhibition or an event. We'd also often like to tell you the interesting stories behind our objects without filling our galleries full of text. For me, this really enriches the experience of going to museum for real. We're going to be doing a lot more work to tie our blogs, podcasts and Rhagor features into our visitor pages to give a fuller picture of the work we do.

This is all part of a wider plan we're working on and an evaluation of everything that goes into our site. As always, feedback is welcome. I'll keep you updated as this work develops, but like this time, I'll try to keep it short and sweet!

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Engaging Museum Audiences

Dafydd James, 10 April 2008

Today's sessions at Museums and the Web kicked off with an interesting opening plenary by Michael Geist, from the University of Ottawa. He looked at where we were 10 years ago in relation to internet policies, as well as current trends on the web, and looking towards the future for current policy approaches.

The session I attended this morning was about engaging museum audiences, with the Brooklyn Museum impressing again as they showed why they are one of the best at utilising familiar social networking technologies. They've had some interesting developments since last year including a Facebook application (Artshare) and a YouTube-based video competition. They also approached 10 photographers that posted on Flickr to photograph their collections in a different way. These images were much more dramatic than their current library, as the photographers seemed to give the objects much more character (presumably due to a free rein).

Also in the same session the Australian Museum showed some of the work they had been doing to classify their users, which was much different from the normal demographic data. They created characters to try and understand why people engage in certain behaviours, which allowed them to see how certain types used the internet.

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Keeping the Focus on Learning in e-Learning

Dafydd James, 9 April 2008

 

Today I went to a workshop that drew on the National Museums Online Learning Project (NMOLP), which was presented by staff from the Tate Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A).

The project is the development of an e-learning resource for students, teachers, and lifelong learners. There are nine museums collaborating on this project, which will use all of the partners' online collections. It is a three year project that will launch in March 2009, funded by the UK Government.

The exercises for schools are called 'WebQuests', which are task-based lessons that draw content distributed across the partner museums' websites. For lifelong learners there is more of a social media portal, which uses an open source technology and although it is hosted by each partner museum it is continually updated via RSS feeds.

The workshop was interesting from a project management perspective, stating the importance of knowing your target audience and what you want to achieve. It's also important to establish who is leading the project, who needs to be involved and what the implications are after the funding ends.

They showed how they used wireframe sketches of the interface to shape the final product - testing their ideas with children and other stakeholders before starting web development. The project coordinators also gave templates to content producers to standardise the information supplied for WebQuests. I look forward to seeing the final result!

Chris and I will be blogging throughout the week about the sessions held at this year's Museums and the Web conference.
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