Comments on: Final thoughts from the Museums and the Web 2008 conference

By: Frankie Roberto - Museums and the Web 2009 roundup

Frankie Roberto - Museums and the Web 2009 roundup — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:16:02 +0000

[...] last year, I haven’t come back with a list of ‘to-dos’ (of which I appear to have done about 50%), rather a head full of ideas, inspiration, and a greater [...]

By: Mia

Mia — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:37:53 +0000

Let’s meet in the middle and settle on ‘agile is good’.

The idea of a community of developers is interesting – if we were really able to collaborate, those who don’t mind the heavyweight back-end or complex stuff could take that on happy in the knowledge that others would build lightweight tools on top of it, and vice versa.

A lot of my perspective on this is influenced by the fact that a lot of my job is about making applications for people who are creating as well as publishing data, or about combining disparate data sources to sit behind a single interface or API.

By: Peer Lawther

Peer Lawther — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:06:49 +0000

From the National Media Museum point of view we’re looking to go forward with the Flickr Commons idea very soon, and thanks for establishing the contact. I think the social media PR as a result of such a move would be fantastic.

By: Frankie Roberto

Frankie Roberto — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:05:36 +0000

Mia, I agree that ‘intellectual challenges’ are interesting, but the point about lightweight and simple solutions is not that they’re easier for a single person to implement, but that they’re easier for a community of developers to implement.

By: Mia

Mia — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:53:35 +0000

*insert eye-rolling icon* I’m not an OAI ‘defender’, but I do think it has its place. I see back-end or institutional use cases cos I’m a boring back-end person, as well as the possibly more simple web-based use cases that might suit other technologies.

Ironically, we’re looking at using our OAI repository (not our choice to have one, but since we’ve got it…) to publish as many of our previous exhibition captions and panels as possible. Our visitors could not only get an insight into the ways in which museums talk about their objects, and how that interpretation changes over time and context, but they could also effectively re-create an exhibition by bringing together a lot of the content and knowledge created for that exhibition. And then imagine if we could link to reviews and blogs of that exhibition…

Lightweight and simple doesn’t always beat complex and hard. Some things are just a bit complex, and intellectual challenges are the interesting part of any job – but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t find lightweight solutions to complex issues.

I absolutely agree with your points about faceted browsing (I was just blogging about that indirectly today, in fact), OpenSearch (with any luck we’ll get that on the OAI server so the OAI-h8ters can still play with our data) and about successful online teams. You need in-house geeks who care about their users and the content, and who have time to play.