On the right track? Chris Owen, 13 April 2007 From our tour of San Francisco both Chris and I were quite relieved that other Museums were using similar technology to Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Web based delivery of in-gallery digital media seems to be quite popular, and our custom built content management system allows us to roll out responsibility for some services to selected editors.The new gallery at St Fagans, Oriel 1, uses web-based technology for most of its applications. This means that most of the audio-visual content is quite flexible and can be accessed across networks. It's a bit of a testing ground for us!
Web 2.0 Chris Owen, 13 April 2007 The web 2.0 workshop yesterday allowed us to see how some of the world's leading institutions are connecting to social networks to gain new audiences.Jeff Gates from the Smithsonian explained how they had assembled a blog team, and developed an online identity (Eye Level) that has gained popularity. I was quite suprised at the workflow involved with posting a blog - but happy to see that even a heavliy moderated blog can be successful.Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth from Brooklyn Museum showed some very interesting uses of social networking sites like Flickr. I was particularly impressed with their 'Graffiti Mural' project where people leave tags or comments on the wall, and track the progress of the wall on Flickr - check it out here. You can even upload pictures of exhisting Graffiti. They are really blurring the line between visitors that are physical and virtual - I look forward to visiting them in NYC.Finally there was an enjoyable presentation by Mike Ellis from the Science Museum (UK). Out of the many valid comments Mike made (ranging from bureaucratic to technical), the point of 'start doing' was the main message that came through.
Blogging at Museums & The Web 2007 Chris Owen, 12 April 2007 It's now Dafydd and I's second day at the Museums & The Web conference, and appropriately today's workshop was on blogging. It was hosted by the web team at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They've been running a series of blogs for quite some time, and it's grown from the first few 'new media' entries into the most popular part of their website, and one of the best museum blogs on the net. We're looking forward to meeting them next week and seeing more of what they do.It was interesting to hear how their blogs have evolved in that time - I think the only way for us to make this area as engaging for people as possible is to keep posting, listen to your feedback (we'll introduce better mechanisms for this soon) and let it happen. What you read now is not the corporate tone, or perhaps what you'll read here in 2 years time.Another striking difference from the rest of the site is how our blog entries are not directly translated into both Welsh and English, but are presented simply as they're written. It's a personal, off-the-cuff medium and I feel this is in the right spirit. We welcome your feedback on this.In later posts, I'll talk a bit about how we work with bilingual content and our own Content Management System (CMS). This will be a major consideration as we take our blogging further.
Medieval boat discovered in south Wales estuary 12 April 2007 The remains of the boat in the mud Raising the boat from the mud 4.00am August 27th 1995 A reconstructed model of the Boat In 1994, the remains of a boat were discovered in the thick mud on the Gwent Levels, south Wales. Tests on the timber revealed that the boat dated from around 1194. Further excavation revealed that an intact portion of the vessel, 7.2m long and 3.9m wide, survived, making it the most important boat find of the Middle Ages in Britain for 25 years. Lifting the Wreck Recovery of the wreck was essential, but it could either be dismantled on site, or recovered intact. Dismantling could only be done in controlled conditions. However, the wreck was only accessible at low tide for a few hours at a time. The only reasonable course of action therefore was to retrieve the vessel intact. Outside assistance in lifting the wreck was provided from the company building the nearby Second Severn Crossing, and over a period of seven tidal windows, day and night, a team of people worked tirelessly to dig tunnels underneath the vessel to build a cradle of aluminium beams. Extreme care had to be taken as the poor condition of the wreck made it vulnerable to disintegration. The cradle was then attached to a lifting crane, the cables tightened, and the remaining sediment dug out. The vessel was successfully lifted at 4.00 in the morning before being transported to Cardiff, where it was placed in water to prevent the wood rotting further. The remains were recorded and dismantled with each timber being drawn individually. The vessel was carrying iron ore at the time of sinking so had to be thoroughly cleaned using water and soft brushes to remove the iron salts from the ancient remains. Since it was hoped that the boat could be displayed in its original form at the Museum, the timbers had to be conserved either in a way that would allow reshaping after conservation, or be moulded to shape before conservation. Both these methods have advantages and disadvantages: Conserving the ancient wood Waterlogged wood is conserved using a water-soluble wax, this means either immersing the timbers for five to ten years in a concentrated solution before being slowly dried in air; or immersed in a more dilute solution followed by freeze-drying to remove the water, producing a 'dry' product within one to two years. The first method results in an object that is more wax than timber, with a non-wood like appearance, but the large amount of wax allows reshaping of the timbers. Freeze drying, on the other hand, produces a material which still has the appearance of wood as the amount of wax is much lower. However, the timbers are much more brittle than those treated by the first method and it is not possible to reshape the timbers. Creating a Model of the boat It was decided to reshape the timbers into their original form before conserving the wood and so a full-size model of the surviving structure had to be built to work out what the final shape of the timbers should be. The model had to accurately replicate in three dimensions the lay-out and shapes of all the surviving timbers. The model could then provide a set of moulds to be constructed to shape and hold the planking during conservation. After the remains were successfully reshaped, the timbers were conserved using the wax and freeze-drying treatment. The dried and stabilised timbers are now safely in the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru and research on the vessel continues, helping to place this important find within its historical context.
The Llandaf Beaker Man - An Early Bronze Age grave at Llandaf 12 April 2007 The Llandaff Beaker. In 1992, renovations at a house in the Llandaf area of Cardiff uncovered an unusual stone slab buried by river sands and silts. Beneath the slab was a long bone and clay pot. The pot turned out to be a beaker - a decorated clay vessel, fashionable in western Europe some 4,000 years ago, during what is known as 'the Beaker Period'. The beaker may originally have contained mead, beer or some other special brew. The stone slab marked the position of a grave. With the cooperation and encouragement of the owners, the Department of Archaeology and Numismatics conducted an excavation in the driveway to their house, to re-expose the grave and fully excavate its contents. The enclosing cist, constructed of slabs of the local Radyr Stone, was unusual in that it was the form of a lean-to, its capstone resting at an angle of 30° contrasting with more conventional box-like, beaker cists. Little of the skeleton remained. The expectation had been to find a crouched skeleton typical of the Beaker period, but only fragments of the cranium (the top of the skull) and limb bones survived. Additional grave-goods were unearthed, a bronze awl (a pointed tool for making holes, as in wood or leather) and a flint flake - objects that would have been buried alongside the person to be used in the 'next world'. Awls are usually associated with female burials. Analysis of the sediment filling the grave may explain the unusual form of the cist and why only part of the skeleton was preserved. The presence of graded water-lain sediments within the grave suggests disturbance and erosion of the burial by flood water. Today the river Taff flows close by and property where the grave was discovered is built on the former floodplain of the river.
