As described last month, UKOLN publishes a number of blogs which help us to engage with our communities and provide a dissemination channel. A monthly update of posts which may be of interest to the cultural heritage community will be published on this blog.

CILIP: More Popular Than Swine Flu!

A summary of the CILIP Open Session which provided an opportunity for members of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and other interested parties to discuss the role of Web 2.0 to support the professional activities of librarians. A feature of the session was the use of Twitter to allow remote participants to engage in the discussions.
Published 30 April 2009

Permission to capture Twitter

A blog post on the JISC PoWR blog provides some evidence that digital archivists may have permission to archive Twitter posts.
Published 1 May 2009

Swine Flu: Panic in the Streets of London

A look at the effect pandemics, dangerous weather situations and other catastrophes have on the demand for remote working.
Published 5 May 2009

“Seething With Anger” at the Demise of Geocities

The forthcoming demise of Geocities has angered some who are concerned at the loss of the history of early consumer-focussed provision of digital resourced.
Published 5 May 2009

Lessons Learnt from the Amplification of the CILIP2 Event

Although the CILIP 2 Open Session was felt by many to be a great success, behind the scenes there were a number of ways in which the event’s amplification to a remote audience could have been improved. This blog posts shares these experiences.
Published 6 May 2009

Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation

An animated cartoon, published by DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), illustrates the importance of digital preservation.
Published 12 May 2009

Remoter Remote Working

A guest blog post about long-distance remote working written by Amanda Hill, an archival consultant based in Ontario, Canada who works on a number of UK projects.
Published 13 May 2009

Remembering the Value of Face to Face

Consideration on the continued value of face-to-face working in the Web 2.0 world many of us now work in.
Published 18 May 2009

Why Video

A look at the key reasons why information workers may want to use video as part of their working practice including the need to reach a wider audience, the ability to give users a visual clue and the the increased desire for video conferencing and amplified conferences. This post also offers some suggestions for ways you can use video more.
Published 21 May 2009

Reflections on Use of Twitter at the #CILIP-CYMRU09 Conference

A summary of how Twitter was used at the recent CILIP Cymru conference.
Published 26 May 2009

The Social Web and the Belbin Model

A blog post which speculates whether ‘plants’ and ‘resource investigators’ tend to make greater use of social networking services such as blogs and Twitter.
Published 27 May 2009

Last week I attended the CILIP Wales, Welsh Libraries, Archives and Museums Conference 2009 which was held at the Metropole Hotel, Llandrindod Wells. A recording of a rehearsal of my talk, which was entitled “Virtual Space for All: The Opportunities and Challenges Provided By The Social Web“ has been made available on Slideshare (and is embedded below). At the conference itself I took a video recording of my talk, which is available on Blip.TV.

[flv:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/events/cilip-wales-2009/talk.flv 480 360]

I suggested that the ease of creating and sharing videos may be particularly relevant to Welsh cultural heritage organisations, in light of the difficulties in travelling around Wales. I have made a start by ensuring that my talk can be viewed by people who might not have been able to travel to the conference. I hope this proves useful – and your feedback would be welcomed.

In my recent blog post on my Talk at the MCG Spring Meeting 2009 I gave a brief summary of the talk on “Engaging With The Social Web: A Risks and Opportunities Framework” which I gave at the MCG Spring Meeting 2009 and included a video recording of the talk.

As promised in that post, I am today explaining in more detail what I mean by a risks and opportunities Framework.

The advocacy work, such as that described Mike Ellis and myself in a paper on “Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers” at the MW2007 conference, has now been widely accepted. The opportunities which can be provided by the Social Web are now widely acknowledged, as we heard in a number of presentations form staff from the Bath Cultural Heritage Service Department.

As I explained in a paper on “Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Service” presented at this year’s MW2009 conference We know need to address a range of concerns including those which have been raised at various workshops organised by UKOLN and delivered through MLA Regional Agencies and Renaissance Hubs. Such concerns include a lack of understanding (of what the Social Web is about); concerns over legal issues, technical challenges (such as interoperability, reliability issues), business challenges (such as sustainability) and related resourcing issues.

It may be useful to consider the Gartner Hype curve in the context of exploitation of Social Web services.  The early adopters have, in many cases, been successful in promoting new technologies, such as, initially the borad concept of Web 2.0 and, more recently, specific examples such as Twitter.  But we now need to attempt to reshape the Gartner curve, by managing expectations and deploying a variety of approaches in order to avoid the ‘trough of despair’ and achieve sustainability and effective services.

We firstly need to ensure that we have a realistic view of the various emerging Social Web services. Simply suggesting that a setting up, for example a Ning social networking environment will provide a sustainable community isn’t the case, and there are enough examples of empty social networking environments which can be used to demonstrate this. However we also need to remember that it’s not just a question of the numbers of active users which defines success: there will be examples of social networks with small numbers of users (such as, perhaps, a committee) who feel that the environment satisfies their needs by providing a cost-effective solution. We must remember that there is a context to any success criteria.

We do need to consider the various legal issues. But we need to remember that as the law may not reflect technical possibilities, it may sometimes it may be possible to exploit technologies in ways in which ‘reasonable measures’ clauses in legislation may permit. The Disability Discrimination Act and its application to the IT environment, for example, provides an interesting case study. Does the video recording of my talk at the MCG Spring Meeting fall foul of disability legislation, as there is no trasncipt available? Or could I argue that the video recording enhances access for people who could not attend the meeting (and we have evidence that that is the case)? And doesn’t this blog post provide an equivalent (indeed richer) experience than is provided on the video? Indeed could it not be argued that a failure to provide videos of the other speakers contravenes disability legislation? After all, it is now very easy to record talks (as I demonstrated) and make them available online.

We also need to address the issues of sustainability and interoperability. Two years ago, I frew parallels between Web 2.0 services such as Google and Yahoo! and the banks. ‘Banks might become bankrupt‘ I argued ‘But they  normally don’t, so let’s not worry too much‘.  These days I say ‘Banks do become bankrupt, but that doesn’t mean we don’t use banks and keep out money under our mattress. Rather we take a risk management approach and ensure we don’t have more than the £30,000 limit (I think) which is guareanteed by the government‘. We need to develop similar risk assessment and risk management approachs to our use of Social Web services.

In this post I will not expand on the approaches to addressing the interoperability anbd sustsinability issues in any details, or related issues regarding gaining a better understanding of the Social Web and addressing the organisational and cultural barriers we are likely to encounter, especially in public sector organisations – I’ll simply mention the various UKOLN workshops we’ve delivered over the past few years and the briefing documents which seek to address such issues.

A variety of deployment strategies have been discussed at various workshops (e.g. identifying the low-hanging fruit; supporting the enthusiasts, etc.) For now, however I wish to address three key aspects of the framework I have been working on: a risks and opportunities assessment and management approach; exploitation of Critical Friends and friendly critics and a culture of openness.

As described in the JISC infoNet Risk Management infoKit “In education, as in any other environment, you can’t decide not to take risks: that simply isn’t an option in today’s world. All of us take risks and it’s a question of which risks we take“. Our organisations will need to take risks, and we need to acknowledge the difficulties of changing a culture which, in many public sector organisations, is risk averse. We also need to apply a risk assessment approach to in-house development work as well as exploitation of third-party services. We should remember the experience of the UK eUniversity when £62 million pounds of public money was invested in the development of a national e-University. In 2004, however, we learnt that HEFCE had pulled the plug on the E-University. We need to ensure that we avoid repeating such mistakes in other areas, especially as people are predicting significant changes in the management of, and associated levels of funding, after the next election.

An approach I have been exploring recently is use of Critical Friends. I first came across this in a JISC context in order to ensure that reality checks are in place in areas of innovation. It seems that Critical Friends: (a) have a mission to make projects succeed; (b) balance informal approach with critical eye; (c) maintain confidentiality, frankness, sensitivity & independence and (d) may have a funded role. In the absence of Critical Friends innovative developments may benefit from ‘friendly critics’ who have no formal responsibilities but are still willing to discuss and engage and will appreciate sensitivities, constraints, etc. Ensuring that such mechanisms are in place will help to identify possible unexpected risks and dangers and minimise attacks at a later date from unfriendly critics & hostile opponents.

The risks and opportunities framework was first developed as A Framework For Making Use of Facebook. An updated version was described in a post on the UK Web Focus blog and the accompanying diagram is shown here.

In brief it is proposed that decisions on use of Social Web services should be informed by documentation on:

• The intended purpose of the service
• The perceived benefits for various stakeholders
• The missed opportunities for the various stakeholders of not using the service
• The costs of using the service for the various stakeholders.

It should be acknowledged that such documentation is likely to reflect an organisational and organisational and personal biases and other subjective factors.

In order to maximise the benefits of this approach, external input should be encouraged, whether through the formal use of Critical Friends or by inviting friendly critics to give feedback on proposed plans.

In public sectors organisations in particular we would expect this approach to be taken in a culture of openness and sharing.  The sharing of experiences (both good and, as Mia Ridge has recently described, bad) happens already on various mailing lists and at events and conferences. But we should be doing more of this and at an earlier stage in development work.

We  may, indeed, find ourselves in the situation in which FOI requests will be made in order to provide public access to information on networked services, as has been seen with the FOI request for information on the total number of objects in the Natural History Museum’s collection. In this example the National History Museum was able to report “a total holding of 75.6 million items for the entire Museum“.

We know from the recent stories about MPs expense claims that there can be real dangers in attempting to hide information from the public. And once legislation or pressure from the media and the public forces public bodies to provide such data we now find that the whistle-blowers aren’t just newspapers (often with an axe to grind) but the development community who now can use various technologies to visualise how public sector funding is being used (or misused, as can be seen from Tony Hirst’s various mashups of MPs expense claims).

The benefits of being open about development work shoiuld be self-evident. And It is worth mentioning Nick Moyes’ recent post on this blog on “When Peregrines Come To Town” in which he described some unexpected problems in deploying a very popular service:

So great were our webstats submitted under the now-superceded system of “Best Value Performance Indicators” reported by local authorities, that the Audit Commission even questioned their veracity. After much high level debate they declared our figures unsuitable for reflecting website usages by museums. Had it been a stuffed peregrine, fine. But this was a live bird – so how could it be seen as valid for a museum to report on that, they argued. A fair point, perhaps. After all, “Best Value” was designed to allow for fair comparison to be drawn between similar types of service across different local authorities, so maybe exclusion was sensible. But when it was suggested locally that this decision might put the viability of the whole project into question, then alarm bells did begin to ring. I feared this could be a case of the statistics-gathering tail wagging the audience-focussed dog. But common sense prevailed and we’ve since been fully supported in our work, especially so after being able to demonstrate that we draw many thousands more visitors into our main websites each summer

And rather than regarding such FOI requests as a threat, the museum sector in particular should regard this as an ideal opportunity to build on a well-established tradition of openness and use figures (such as the Natural History Museum’s “total holding of 75.6 million items for the entire Museum” as an opportunity to promote one’s own contributions to the digital environment. And if more museums were making their data available in an open and reusable way the entire sector would be well-pusitioned to exploit the opportunies provided by the ubiquity of Web 2.0 and the Social Web.

Yesterday I attended the MCG Spring Meeting 2009 which was held at the Guildhall, Bath. I had been invited to give a talk on “Engaging With The Social Web: A Risks and Opportunities Framework“, which was intended to provide a response to the first set of talks in the morning which described a variety of developments taking place in the Bath Cultural Services department. As I didn’t know in any details what those developments might entail this provided quite a challenge, especially as my talk was given immediately before the lunch break! In my talk I described the risks and opportunities framework which I had outlined in a paper I presented at the recent Museums and the Web 2009 conference. I was pleased that immediately before my talk I heard about plans to make use of Twitter and Facebook to promote Bath’s rich cultural heritage, including the Roman Baths and the Victoria Art Gallery. This particular example was one I had described previously, arguing the need to consider the intended purpose of the services (Twitter as an organisational one-way marketing channel or a two-way communications channel for peer-to-peer support and learning, for example), the perceived risks and benefits, the missed opportunities of failing to use the services and the associated costs.

Due to the lack of time I wasn’t able to describe this approach in any detail. I will remedy this in a forthcoming post in this blog. For now, however, I am providing access to a video of my talk (which is available in .avi format) via the Vimeo service.

[flv:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/events/mcg-2009/mcg-spring-school-2009.flv 480 360]

I should also add that I have also uploaded this video to my Facebook account – and shortly after doing this I received a message from Caroline Moore saying “Thanks for posting this Brian I was unable to attend yesterday as I was at an engaging users event at the London Metropolitan Archives“. As I suggested to Ross Parry during the talk, shouldn’t we be making greater use of video to record talks at events such as the MCG Spring meeting?

Our last guest blog post highlighted a case study presented at a UKOLN workshop for Renaissance West Midlands. This month we feature a guest blog post by Nick Moyes, Senior Keeper of Natural Sciences at Derby Museum and Art Gallery which expands on a case study Nick presented at a UKOLN workshop on Exploiting the Potential of Web 2.0 and the Social Web which was organised on behalf of Renaissance East Midlands.

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When the world’s fastest creature sets up home in the heart of your city, people take notice. And so it was that when a pair of peregrine falcons (see Wikipedia) started making futile attempts to nest on the narrow stone ledges of Derby Cathedral’s ancient tower, something had to be done.

I was honoured to be invited to write a guest piece for this blog. I only recently discovered UK Web Focus and was, to be frank, a little intimidated by its academic content. Nevertheless I find it to be an extremely useful source of information and ideas in this new world that some call “Web 2.0”. I don’t call it that; I call it getting the job done. So here’s my tale of what we did when peregrines came to town, and how we used web technologies in a project that grew beyond our wildest expectations …

Nest Platform

What we did when the birds arrived was simply to abseil down and install a wooden platform for them to nest on (see YouTube video). Well, perhaps “simply” is not the right word. This was back in the spring of 2006 and the birds took to it almost immediately and were soon incubating eggs. Word got around through the usual means: newspaper, local radio, wildlife e-groups. And as the three chicks were being raised during June of that first year, so thousands of people came out to watch them during lunch hours or at evenings and weekends. With telescopes provided at Watchpoints run by our local Wildlife Trust. It became quite a social gathering each lunchtime to stand and “talk peregrines” with complete strangers, swapping tales of what we’d seen or what might happen next. Some of that talk inevitably turned to installing web cameras and whether our partnership of Derby Cathedral, Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and Derby City Council’s Museum Service could actually do it.

Web cameras

By the start of 2007 we had a plan. We would buy and install the cameras, cabling and video server ourselves, leaving our Council’s IT support company to do just the essential network configuration. This would send (FTP) images to a third party hosting organisation, because our own networks had neither the bandwidth capacity nor the security policies for us to do this ourselves. We would also try running a blog to report back on progress as we abseiled, crawled, sweated and swore our way through the whole process, eventually (we hoped) reporting solely on the progress of our peregrines as we watched them through our nice new cameras. We had of course written a business case and gained the necessary permissions. We argued that we would create new audiences and promote what had already become a small eco-tourist attraction, perhaps generating 30,000 or more web hits in our first year. How naïve we were.

Blogging

I knew nothing of blogs back then, and nor did our local authority. There were certainly no policies on them at the time, but a suggestions from one of our e-business staff led me at first to open a MySpace account. But this didn’t look good, so Google’s Blogger was tried instead. It was perfect: simple to use, had clean lines, easy photo upload and blog archive and a comments facility, with all the admin controls I thought might be needed, plus the ability to include some of our corporate colours into the blog’s template. Later on, Google introduced video uploads and scheduled blog-posting too. It couldn’t have been much better, so now the Derby Cathedral Peregrine Project had a means of communicating topical information from all three of the partners 24 hours a day, as well as via a more traditional introductory “peregrine project homepage” on our council’s own web site. Very soon we gathered followers. When local TV broke news of eggs being laid and new web cameras going live they peaked at 1,000 a day. From that moment they haven’t stopped coming.

Breeding Success

In that first year we had over 270,000 hits to our combined webcam pages and blog followed by 430,000 in 2008.As well as innumerable video clips and interviews in local TV, radio and newspapers, we’ve appeared in BBC’s Springwatch and regional TV’s component of Alan Titchmarsh’s BBC series on “The Nature of Britain”. In 2008 we were even approached by an independent company wanting to produce a commercial DVD about the project. This helps raises much-needed funds. With four eggs now hatched, and with fledging due around 6^th June 2009, we might even be on course for 2/3 million visits during 2009. Our blog alone can peaks at over 9,000 visits a week from people wanting to catch up on all the current news and photos, with our Clustr maps archive showing a strong European and North American readership, as might be expected.

So great were our webstats submitted under the now-superceded system of “Best Value Performance Indicators” reported by local authorities, that the Audit Commission even questioned their veracity. After much high level debate they declared our figures unsuitable for reflecting website usages by museums. Had it been a stuffed peregrine, fine. But this was a live bird – so how could it be seen as valid for a museum to report on that, they argued. A fair point, perhaps. After all, “Best Value” was designed to allow for fair comparison to be drawn between similar types of service across different local authorities, so maybe exclusion was sensible. But when it was suggested locally that this decision might put the viability of the whole project into question, then alarm bells did begin to ring. I feared this could be a case of the statistics-gathering tail wagging the audience-focussed dog. But common sense prevailed and we’ve since been fully supported in our work, especially so after being able to demonstrate that we draw many thousands more visitors into our main websites each summer and that our project contributes towards some of our authority’s Corporate Priorities, too (see report, PDF format).

With evidence emerging of visitors coming to Derby specifically because of its peregrines, from as far afield as Hong Kong and Toronto, we see this partnership project really is becoming an unexpected success story. Perhaps two viewers’ comments reflect its value best of all:

“Just want to say a huge thank you for this fascinating and gripping project. We did . . . actually come to Derby, but as I am ill and not able to get out much especially not able to see much wildlife, this really has been a lifeline to me. Thanks xxx Penny”

“I am learning so much about peregrins through reading the blogs. Even got my grandchildren interested. One of the youngest ones has gone away today with the web address – bless him. Going to keep looking today to see if I may catch the 3rd egg [being laid]. Hope so, as someone else mentioned, this is better than TV. Joy”

It has probably been the peregrine blog, with its liberal scattering of close-up nest photos and video clips that makes our project so different from most other wildlife webcams around the world.

We didn’t set out to do it, but we’ve somehow created a global community of wildlife enthusiasts who see something special in what’s happening in Derby, and many now follow it closely. With the project partners writing frequent and regular contributions throughout the breeding season and beyond, that engagement has been a two-way process and is now almost self-sustaining. Webcam viewers leave short comments to report what’s been seen on the three cameras; but many ask questions and others respond to them. It can even be self-policing, with readers asking others to refrain from commenting on non-peregrine related topics (the Obama elections in 2008, for example). The project partners do respond to comments, but we try to maintain a modicum of anonymity whilst at the same time writing in a personable and informative style. – this is a peregrine project and a partnership, not a personality trip for those who set it up, though sometimes it’s hard not to get carried away with the vibrancy and enthusiasm generated.

The number of readers, plus the fact that we write on behalf of a partnership, means that we’re acutely aware of the need to write responsibly. With so much of this project run from home and in our own time it could be all too easy, late on a Saturday night after a glass of wine, to make some inappropriate or ill-thought out remark on a blog. It’s a sobering thought to realise how many people watch and care about what we say; or what the consequences of inappropriate remarks could be.

Is There a Risk?

Compared to killing ourselves whilst abseiling, the risks of being the first to use social networks in our partner organisations may seem rather small. But they do exist.

The use of web tools like Blogger, YouTube, Flickr and especially newcomers like Twitter can leave one exposed to an employer having concerns about what one is doing if they’ve not been fully authorised, or if policies on the use of social networking sites are still in a state of evolution. They certainly get the job done in a way that traditional in-house resources can’t and it could be argued that the not inconsiderable benefits can outweigh most potential concerns. Of course, the survivability of these do-it-yourself services can also be called into question when created by staff using personal accounts. Having now given copies of relevant user names and passwords for these Web services to our central Web team, I feel this makes what we do far more robust, and not more threatened.

One of the risks of not get involved in social networking sites is that others may well try to do it for you. Cyber-squatting on social networks might be seen as a compliment, but when it happens you’ll have no control over content. In one fortnight in March we found that two Facebook accounts and one Twitter account had been created in the name of our Peregrine Project, and some looked reasonably official. Currently unable to counter with approved accounts of our own, we simply accept there’s little we can do for the time being and hope these pages will be maintained and managed in a way that doesn’t harm the image of our project. Time will tell.

With our own blog comments left unmoderated, but with “word verification” required for anonymous contributors, virtually all spammers are excluded from our blog. Our only problem has been when strongly worded comments are left by those who race or display pigeons. Not surprisingly they hate peregrines with a passion, and we do have sympathy for their frustrations when birds are taken. So far we’ve allowed such comments to remain, only deleting a few really unpleasant remarks from both sides of the argument, but we’re not afraid to close a discussion thread once the matter has been aired enough. With 50 to 100 comments for many new posts, it can seem more like a discussion forum than a blog at times.

We recently – and rather carefully – launched a Flickr group pool, allowing viewers (who we ask to agree to abide by our Rules) to upload and share webcam screenshots which we can rapidly embed into our blog, avoiding the need for us to capture and upload them ourselves. In our first week we had 250 pictures posted by over 50 new members, and we ask everyone to take responsibility for removing any inappropriate comments left by others against their pictures.

We are putting so many high quality videos on YouTube for embedding in the blog, that I’ve started to worry that we’re flooding the site with simply too many clips of similar content. So Blogger’s own video uploader is used to keep the less interesting clips within the blog’s pages. The down-side of YouTube and Blogger is that most schools are barred from visiting the sites and so a valuable educational resource is not available to them. We’re now looking at developing other, more accessible educational resources, including museum-based school classes.

The Future

We did not set out to “fly under the corporate radar” at Derby. Indeed, the Peregrine Project started using web technologies before the issues began to be addressed at a corporate level. Schemes like ours can demonstrate the value of social networking tools in building and engaging with totally new audiences (and maybe even contributing to a city’s image at home and abroad). But when you realise that, as an employee, you are standing in the firing line for breaching any number of constantly evolving IT policies, it can be a worrying time. Even this guest article has been seen by senior staff in my authority and, to be honest, I welcome that. At a time when policies on blogging and other social media are still under discussion it is important to work with the system, and to explain to everyone what we are trying to do. Improved customer service can only be the eventual outcome, even if the wheels of local government do tend to move at a slower pace than those of smaller, independent organisations.

Within the libraries and museums sector the value of being able to use developing web technologies is clear for most of us to see. It’s probably also the least threatening platform from which they could be introduced by local authorities because cultural services attract such positive press and public support. It is unlikely we would be used as a soapbox for disgruntled local taxpayers to air a grievance; they would find better ways.

But I do wonder if there is an even greater role for UKOLN here, not only in continuing to collate and promote examples of good practice within our sector, but also to put more emphasis on supporting and providing the necessary evidence and background information to the key policy-makers within local authorities. They will not be intimately familiar with what we do, so perhaps we should help them understand it better. It is they who will decide what is permissible; it is up to us to demonstrate what is possible.

As for the peregrine falcon, well, it is a remarkable species that has risen from the brink of extinction in just 60 years. This has been a success story indeed. And for me, the rise of technology that lets us share this creature’s life and intimate moments with a world-wide audience has been almost as awe-inspiring.

Nick Moyes, Senior Keeper of Natural Sciences at Derby Museum and Art Gallery, England and a 24hr-a-day wildlife enthusiast.

Checking out broken links is a routine task in maintaining a Web site. This can be frustrating when, despite concentrated searching, the target site or resource seems to have vanished into thin air. However, it can also be a voyage of discovery leading to other interesting and useful resources. This was the case the other day when I was checking out a link to Culturemondo.

Culturemondo is a network of people who are all working running, managing, building or editing cultural portals around the world. It is open and free to anyone working in this area to join, from anywhere in the world. An annual Culturemondo International Roundtable is held at a different venue each year and the 4th Roundtable was held in Taiwan in December 2008 with 37 participants from 21 countries.

Apart from finding the Culturemondo site, I also discovered the Culturemondo group page on NetVibes and blog postings on the event by Jane Finnis of Culture24 and by Seb Chan of the Sydney Powerhouse Museum on his Fresh + New(er) blog.

So next time you have to check a broken link, try thinking of it as an opportunity and not just a chore. You never know what you might find.

Background

API stands for ‘application programming interface’ and is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for service to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them. A Web API is the Web version of this interface. It comprises of documented code and is effectively a way to plug one Web site or Web service into another.

Recently many Web sites have exposed APIs and made them available to external developers. The term Open API is often used to describe the technologies that allow this interaction.

Why?

There are many potential benefits of provision of APIs. The key one is that others will reuse your data and possibly create mash-ups with it. This in turn means your data will reach a much wider audience. As it would be tricky to find a cultural heritage institution that didn’t have reaching wider audiences listed on its wish list, providing APIs makes a lot of sense.

So What’s Happening in the Cultural Heritage Sector?

Recently there has been a lot of API activity in the museums sector with many big museums like the Science Museum (London, UK), the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, Australia) and the Brooklyn Museum (New York, US) releasing their APIs.

Libraries have long been at the forefront when it comes to mashing up data. From John Udell’s library look up tool, to the days of the Talis Mashed up Library competition and on to the Mashed Library events, held last year on the 27th November 2008 at Birkbeck College, London and taking place later this year at the University of Huddersfield. (There is an article written by Paul Miller entitled What Happens When We Mash The Library? on earlier activities.) Many libraries have released APIs and a useful list of library-related APIs is available from the Mashed Library Web site.

How do we Start?

There is a now a lot of literature available on writing APIs, releasing APIs and supporting them. One useful place to start might be UKOLN’s recently released Introbyte document: An Introduction To APIs.

API developers and users may find the deliverables of the UKOLN Good APIs project useful. The Good APIs project has recently been carried out to look at what makes a good API. Although the project focussed on activity in the UK Higher Education arena many of the results and outcomes are transferable to the cultural heritage sector. One such outcome is the list of good practice techniques for API creation and consumption. The techniques are currently open for comments.

Background

In March I facilitated a workshop on “Exploiting the Potential of Web 2.0 and the Social Web” on behalf of Renaissance East Midlands. In my opening talk I outlined some of the ways in which Web 2.0 could benefit cultural heritage organisations. This included a description of the way in which Twitter is being used to support communities of practice, initially development communities who may be more willing to investigate new technologies but increasingly those involved in service provision and support.

How The Science Museum Is Interacting With Its Visitors

At the workshop I speculated that in the future, as mobile devices which support location-based applications (such as the iPhone or the new HTC Magic Android device) become more widely used, we could see organisations such as museums responding to visitors which may have posted comments about their visit using technologies such as Twitter. Over lunch Nick Moyes, one of the speakers at the workshop, told me that this is already happening.

Anonymised visitor: Outside the science museum

Anonymised visitor: Just emptying jar of neuro transmitters.

Anonymised visitor: Soon to be devoured by imax spider, I gather

Anonymised visitor: Inspecting gas turbine engine

Anonymised visitor: The dan dare space ray gun was quite something. Fact!

A satisfied visitor to the Science Museum, we can surmise from these tweets. And the sciencemuseum responded:

sciencemuseum: @anonymised-visitor -hope you enjoy your day, if you’ve got any questions while you’re walking around the museum let us know!

And this dialogue was observed and commented upon:

Anonymised observer: @sciencemuseum Now that’s service!

Nick made the comment that “This thread did continue further, but what an impressive way to demonstrate to 2,698 followers what a responsive and caring organisation you are!”

How “Standing Stones” Interacted With Me

Over the weekend something similar happened to me. On Saturday night after a meal in a countryside pub I visited the Stanton Drew Stone Circles. When I got home I tweeted:

Back from Stanton Drew Stone Circles. There’s a Great Circle, a NE & SW Circle – & some stones left over (bit like an IKEA self-assembly) 9:51 PM May 2nd from TwitterFon

The following day I received a response to my tweet which now appears to have been deleted. But a few days later I received this message, from the same account, I believe:

Hi @briankelly Having just been to Stanton Drew, you might find this a bit of a revelation: http://bit.ly/qIdl7 (after bit about Avebury) 4:08 PM May 4th from TweetDeck

A great example of a way in which cultural heritage organisations can be quick to see the potential of new technologies and use them in order to provide a richer experience for its visitors. Or an illustration of the dangers which we’ll see more of as what are perceived as personal communications start to be exploited by the commerical sector?  And the next time I tweet that I’m off to the pub, will I find myself receiving unwanted messages from lager companies?

What do you think?

A recent comment submitted to this blog for the Twitter For Museums post asked:

Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?

The comment was trapped by the Akismet spam filter and required approval by a blog administrator. I would normally automatically delete such comments based on my judgment that any comments which could be made of any blog post is likely to be an automated posting. For example there was another comment which said “My friend on Facebook shared this link and I’m not dissapointed that I came here” – and this included a link in the author’d detail to a cigarette-selling Web site.

The sentence in the first example: “Interesting blog post” also provided an indication that this was a spam comment, aimed at getting readers to follow the link to the author’s Web site and hoping to enhance the findability of the Web site in Google and other search engines by creating lots of links to the site.

The Web site in question was a blog provided by a marketing consultant. But as original blog post was concerned with use of twitter for museums it could be argued that a question on “What would you say was the most important marketing factor?” could be a legitimate one to ask.

So I used Google to search for “Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?” – and found the identical phrase being used in a number of blog comments. I also discovered the Backtype service which can report on comments made by individuals are found a whole series of one line comments which have been submitted to a range of blogs. In contrast if use the same service to look for comments I have made on blogs you’ll find a diverse range of more thorough comments which are unlikely to have been generated automatically.

I have now deleted these two comments and flagged them as spam.  And in case of anyone raising issues of censorship, I can point them to the blog’s policy which states that “Comments which are felt to be spam or are inappropriate will be deleted“.