Cultural Heritage

I’m pleased to have been invited to give the opening plenary talk on the second day of the Welsh Libraries Archives and Museum’s annual conference which this year has the theme “Space For All”.  The conference will take place on 21-22^nd May 2009 at the Metropole Hotel, Llandrindod Wells.

The title of my talk is “Virtual Space for All: The Opportunities and Challenges provided by the social Web 2.0“. I’m intending to give some examples of how cultural heritage organisations in Wales are making use of Social Web services. Anyone who can provide suitable examples is welcome to give their suggestions, either as a comment to this blog post or by sending an email message to <b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk>.

The importance of RSS as a format for allowing content to be syndicated, embedded on other Web sites and easily viewed on mobile devices has been emphasised at UKOLN workshops for the cultural heritage sector.  But what if you make use of an RSS reader (such as, say, Netvibes or Pageflakes) and wish to move to an alternative RSS tool (such as, say, Feedreader or NetNewsWire). You may wish to do this because of preformance problems with your preferred RSS reader, because you’d prefer to make use of a desktop RSS reader rather than a Web-based tool or because you wish to read RSS feeds on an iPhone or iPod Touch device and wish to integrate this will a desktop client.

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) provides an import and export format for RSS readers, allowing groups of RSS feeds to be moved between RSS tools without the need for the time-consuming process of manually adding feeds if you wish to use (or perhaps just evaluate) a new tool.

An example of how this can be achieved is illustrated in the two accompanying images.

The first image shows the File menu in the Feedreader desktop RSS reader. The menu contains items for both importing and exporting an OPML file.

If Feedreader is your current RSS reader you can export the RSS feeds (and corresponding structure of the folders used to manage such feeds) to an OPML file.

The second image shows how an OPML file can be imported into a different RSS reader. In this case the import and export functions of the Web-based Google Reader are shown.

Easy, isn’t it?

A news item in the April 2009 issue of Library & Information Update (“Call for MLA to focus more on the ‘L’“, page 5) reports that Andrew Motion, the new Chair of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is ‘insisting’ that MLA focus ‘more equal attention’ on libraries than in the past. In a speech at the London Libraries conference in St Albans he spoke about his new role and how he feels that ‘we need to encourage government to think more strategically about libraries in general’.

It is good to see this focus on libraries and it will be interesting to see what concrete initiatives emerge. UKOLN has previously contributed to a range of projects in collaborations with the public library sector – Internet provision in public libraries, Stories from the Web, NOF-digitise and the People’s Network Discovery Service, People Flows, Cornucopia and the Public Library Web Managers Workshops – and we’re looking forward to further work in this area, such as the national library card that Andrew Motion mentions.

We are in the process of writing an IntroBytes briefing document on wikis and how they may be used in the cultural heritage sector. Apart from the obvious example of Wikipedia I am interested in examples of how wikis can be used within museums, libraries and archives. I have come across many examples of how social networking environments and social sharing services (such as Flickr) are being used, but not many examples of use of wikis. So if you have come across such examples which you feel would be worth mentioning in the document please let me know.

Amanda Hill gave a talk on “Archives on a Micro Scale” at the “Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists” conference which was held in Manchester on 19-20^th March 2009. This talk will, I feel, be of particular interest to those working in archives and similar cultural heritage organisations with limited budgets and effort, describing, as it does, a small archive in Canada which has a total annual budget of $11,000 (£6,000) and 1 member of staff who works for 1 day per week. The total cost of the software purchased (for a 2 year licence) was $47.99 (£26)! This was the cost, I think, of a licence for a Flickr Pro account.

Amanda’s slides are available on Slideshare. They are also embedded in this blog post.

With Amanda’s permission I also videoed her talk, which is available in  .avi and .flv formats. In addition the video is also available on the Google Video service. This video recording is also embedded in this blog post for Web browsers which can render .flv files:

I’m pleased that Amanda’s talk on “Archives on a Micro Scale” can now be viewed on a global scale

I previously announced my talk on “A Risks And Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0” which I presented at the “Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists” conference which was held in Manchester on 19-20th March 2009.

My previous post included an embedded screencast of a rehearsal of the talk, with an audio track being played together with the slides.

For the talk itself I removed a number of the slides. And a video recording of the talk was taken which is available in .avi and .flv formats. In addition the video is also available on the Vimeo video service. This video recording is also embedded in this blog post for Web browsers which can render .flv files:

The video of the talk, the accompanying PowerPoint file and the slidecast of the rehearsal of the talk are all available under a Creative Commons licence which permits reused by others for non-commercial purposes. These resources may be particularly useful for the participants at the conference, who may find them useful for jogging their memory about talks given at the conference, whether in the short term (for writing a trip report) or over a longer period.  But how useful are such resources for others, I wonder? And should I try to synchronise the video with the slides in order to provide a richer experience?

We are in the process of writing an UKOLN IntroBytes briefing document on wikis and how they can be used in Museums, Libraries and Archives. We would like to include some real examples of use of wikis from the sector. So if you are using wikis we invite you to provide a brief summary as a comment to this blog post.

We will make an announcement on this blog when the document is published.

About This Guest Blog Post

As Curator (Collections Knowledge) at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery I’m keen to explore ways we can use web 2.0 again after trialling Facebook, Flickr and MySpace with our Designated Challenge Fund ‘Opening Up Collections’ project for 2006-2008. I was invited to share my experiences of this at the Exploiting the Potential of Web 2.0 UKOLN Workshop for Renaissance West Midlands at The Herbert, Coventry on 26^th February 2009. In this guest blog post I describe this work for those who weren’t at the workshop.

Catherine English, Curator (Collections Knowledge), Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Background to the ‘On the Pull’ project

The On the Pull project was an exciting opportunity for Brighton Museum & Art Gallery to work with target audiences and new ways of researching our collections. Funded by the Designation Challenge Fund (DCF) the project was themed around courtship, attraction and the quest to find the perfect partner, drawing on our Designated collections of World Art, Decorative Art and Natural Science and exploring our Fashion, Local History, Media, Film and Fine Art collections.

Six ‘Researcher/Interpreters’ were recruited to carry out new research and give innovative and creative responses to the museum collections through music, film and writing, teasing out the hidden histories.

Each stage of the project was guided by focus groups comprised of under represented groups in the museum’s visitor profile. They informed research sub themes, gallery interpretation, signage, design, web content, marketing and a programme of events.

The result was a light-hearted look at love and attraction, in terms of both the human experience and in the animal world. In addition to a series of small displays, there was an accompanying programme of events, an interactive area and the use of social networking sites. Visitors could take time to relax in the ‘chill out’ area, record their first dates on a local love map and make their mark in the kissing photo booth.

Using Social Networking Sites

Using social networking sites was not an initial goal. There was a commitment to providing additional interpretation on our museum website but meeting the focus groups made us begin to think about other ways we could give On the Pull an online presence, with the feeling that maybe our collections website would not be the most appropriate place. The first session with the focus groups explored preconceptions of museums and barriers to visiting. The response was that they were thought of as dusty, boring and intimidating places. In this same session we looked at how the members spent their spare time and where they found out about things to do and what was going on around the city. The younger age group (18-24 year olds) spent considerable time looking on line and using sites like MySpace and sending information on word of mouth to friends. We wanted to tap into this and having a MySpace page about On the Pull seemed to be a good place to start.

The ethos of On the Pull was about taking a step away from the traditional museum exhibition to encourage new visitors/target audiences. We began to explore the idea of using social networking sites as a marketing tool and get away from the associations with the word ‘museum’ as a way of breaking down barriers and the connotations the word held to our focus groups. Consequently our marketing was carried out with the web address for the MySpace page, www.myspace/brightononthepull, rather than Brighton Museum. It had links to our main Web site (www.virtualmuseum.info) and links to On the Pull Flickr and Facebook pages too. The focus groups gave us their opinions on colour schemes, designs and also helped choose the title, On the Pull, which we hoped would be something a bit different, short and catchy, and again stepping away from the traditional museum exhibition.

Myspace

Our MySpace page let us add the music and films (linked from YouTube) created by our researchers which were not included in the final displays. We encountered some problems with the subject matter. One of our researchers had produced a film about lobster mating rituals developed around specimens in our natural science collections, when it was added to YouTube it automatically extracted links to similar films to view on YouTube. Some of these were politically problematic, so in the end we had to remove the film.

We included images of the objects the researchers had looked at and used the blog facility to add details about events which were happening throughout the six months On the Pull was up.

We created a persona for our page, which reflected the younger target audience. We became a female, age 22, single, Aquarius, ‘here for networking and friends.’

Flickr

As we were exploring romance related themes we had a photo booth style kissing booth in our interactive area, which visitors could have their photos taken in. These photos were uploaded onto the Flickr pages with a link in the myspace page. I created and monitored the Flickr site. We decided to use Flickr because of its ability to manage many photos. We did not encounter any problems setting up the account with our ICT team as we’re on an open access network with our museum and library service, it also gave us access to Yahoo as you need a yahoo account to open a flickr account. This is something to be aware of when deciding to use these sites.

The photo upload averaged at 1000 images per month, this meant we had to upgrade to a pro account. The pro account gave us unlimited uploads and access to statistics at the cost of $25 a year. It was quick to upload the photos to the site but downloading them manually from kissing booth took time. We encountered some data protection and consent issues which were unique to this project and the images being taken. We had signs up saying the booth was for over 18s only and a message on the screen. You had to agree to the use of your photo on Flickr before the picture was taken. I had to manually upload pictures and use my own judgment over the people’s ages. In a way, as one of the age groups we were targeting were 18 year olds it was a bit of a shame that we may have been excluding their pictures and could have been contradicting what we were trying to do in the first place.

We added keyword tags to all the pictures and arranged them by date in sets. As there were so many we felt this was the best way to organise them, so that people searched through the date they visited the museum to retrieve their picture.

Facebook

We used Facebook in the same way as MySpace as a marketing tool. We advertised our events programme, ran competitions to win free event tickets, displayed promotional images, images of objects from the collections and played music.

We had reservations about using Facebook as you have to join up to use it. However some staff were particularly keen to exploit this as it would allow us to tap into the local networks and our target audience groups, with thousands of members in the local geographical area. We had our own ‘Brighton On the Pull’ group which was open to the Brighton & Hove network; anyone could join and invite others from the local network to join too.

Our overall challenges came from museum management who were concerned about giving us permission to use these sites in the beginning, mainly because they were not sure about how they worked and particularly with the romantic subject matter. It took a lot of effort from me and the project manager to convince them to go ahead. The discussions took up a lot of time and caused some delays on the project.

We weren’t able to add to it all of the time due to staff and time limitations. I think it is important to be quite active and dedicate a lot of time to updating the sites, or maybe have more than one editor, in order for it to evolve. During On the Pull we recruited some volunteer gallery assistants to be meeters and greeters and the friendly face in the gallery our focus group wanted to see. More importantly they were our younger focus group age (18-24 year olds) and most likely used Facebook in their spare time. It would have been great to have them helping out as editors to send out messages in their own voice, keep the pages up-to-date, get people to recommend it to friends and allow it to grow but that meant giving up quite a lot of control of what went on the site. Therefore, we didn’t really have many friends on Facebook, we had slightly more for MySpace but quite a lot of these were local businesses, and a few museums, using these sites in the same way as us.

Focus Groups Feedback

Our focus groups thought that the marketing generally oversold what was on offer and thought it sounded like a single’s night or dating service. Some of the younger group members also said that our MySpace page looked a bit amateurish compared to other MySpace pages.

Because there was so much else happening during the project I feel we didn’t really get the opportunity to evaluate this aspect as much as we would have liked to, maybe because it was a bit of an addition to the main outcomes. We did monitor the amount of friends we had and hits – we had about 6000 hits on the MySpace site for the duration of the project. Flickr was much more popular with 3500 in the first month. The older focus groups (60+ year olds) thought that the MySpace site was for much younger people, but loved the mix of people on Flickr and really welcomed that.

Just as we may have been excluding the younger age group by not adding their kissing booth photo on Flickr, if we had added much more online we could have been excluding the older groups, as they are less likely to use such sites. Flickr was by far the most popular out of the three sites; I think people enjoyed the interaction and being able to look up their photos.

In summary, I’m glad we had the opportunity to explore and experiment with these sites and in the future I would like to see us being a lot more object focussed with using sites like Flickr more proactively to encourage more interaction and social comment on the collections.

I’m pleased that a proposal for a talk entitled “A Risks And Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0” has been accepted by the organisers of the “Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists” conference which will be held in Manchester on 19-20^th March 2009.

I’m in the process of finalising my slides for my talk.  In order to estimate how long the talk would take I decided last night to record the talk. As the talk took over the 30 minutes which I have for the slot I will have to remove some of the slides. But it did occur to me that the recording of the rehearsal may be of interest to others, including those who can’t attend the conference.  So I have synched the audio with the slides and made the talk available on Slideshare. This is also embedded in this blog post (for browsers with appropriate plugin support).

I am conscious of the umms and errs in the audio. I also find it difficult to communicate my enthusiasm when I recording the talk in my office without the adrenaline buzz which a live talk gives. However as someone who seeks to embrace the Web 2.0 culture of ‘always beta’ and ‘trusting the audience’ I have decided to share this resource.  And I’d welcome feedback on both the content and also the approach I’ve taken.

I’m pleased to report that UKOLN will be running two sessions at this year’s AIM Conference, the annual conference organised by the Association of Independent Museums.

Brian Kelly will present a 30 minute plenary talk on “Benefits Of The Social Web” from 11.45-12.15 on Friday 5^th June 2009. After lunch, from 14.00-15.00 Brian will facilitate an interactive workshop session on “Exploiting The Potential Of The Social Web” which will provide an opportunity for participants to discuss in more details the opportunities which the Social Web has to offer independent museums and to explore barriers to such opportunities and ways in which such barriers can be addressed.

The conference itself will last from 4-6^th June. The conference programme is available (in PDF format).

I’ve just added a new resource, a Blog Directory to the UKOLN Cultural Heritage Web pages. As I discovered when I started looking for blogs to create this, there are increasing numbers of blogs out there in the cultural heritage sector. Not only are there lots of blogs, but they are very varied in both scope and viewpoint. Some are corporate, while others are personal. The focus might be on news or topics or it might be more reflective. Some blogs contain only text, while others include images and video clips.

For this Blog Directory the decision was to list blogs which in varying ways deal with using Web 2.0 within the cultural heritage sector. The process of deciding what to include left me with other blogs that didn’t fit those parameters but which demonstrated the reasons why organisations might choose to set up blogs and which I felt it was useful to list in some way.

Rather than simply extending the Blog Directory, I decided to try out a service called Dipity. This is an aggregator service for blog RSS feeds; a widget enables you to embed clusters of RSS feeds into your web page. There are other aggregators available, so why choose Dipity? Well, typically aggregators display lists of posts, but Dipity displays the entries in a graphical timeline format, and as the posts are displayed chronologically, the ‘list’ order mixes up posts from the various blogs.

I’ve selected groups of blogs that demonstrate the use of blogs for specific purposes – news, reading groups support, etc. Equally, if your organisation has a number of blogs, then you could provide a Dipity timeline view of all your blogs from somewhere on your Web site.

This whole process has thrown up some issues.

To start with, Dipity is an external service. There are no service level agreements, so we can’t guarantee that the display always appears – the service might go down for a period, or even disappear entirely at some point in the future. On the plus side, my colleague Brian Kelly, who also uses Dipity, noticed a problem, reported it to Dipity and it was quickly fixed – see his post about this.

The Dipity display also poses accessibility problems due to its graphical nature, so we’ve included a list of the blogs below the display, together with URLs.

A further issue is that the content shown in the displays is drawn from external content sources – i.e. the blogs themselves – over which we have no control. And, as with Dipity itself, we cannot guarantee that the blogs will continue in the long-term.

So why go ahead? Well, the Dipity displays provide useful information now so the decision was to go ahead with using Dipity, and find easy ways to addressing the problems we identified. So the supplementary list of blogs provides an alternative route for anyone who finds the display inaccessible, and adding a bit of text that mentions potential problems, and identifies potential reasons for them, means viewers have some idea of what’s gone wrong if the display is not functioning.

So I’ve learnt that the trick here is to evaluate the potential problems of using an external service and what impact each will have, and explore the possible fixes and work-arounds; if you decide to go ahead, then provide some useful information for the viewer.

What are your customers saying about your organisation? How would you find out? Gathering such market intelligence is likely to be in the remit, I would imagine, of information professionals. The type of person who might be a member of CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

So I would hope that those who actually work for CILIP have been keeping an eye on the ‘twitterverse’ over the past few days, after a blog post by Phil Bradley, in response to a post by CILIP CEO Bob Mackee, generated much discussions and airing of views, not only on the topic of the blog posts (whether CILIP should make use of services such as Twitter), but also on the relevance of CILIP itself.  Such a lively debate has been taking place that it was picked up by the Social Reporter.

Yesterday Bob MacKee responded to the furore in a post entitled “Yes, let’s try that!” in which he explained that his inital post was “was intended to provoke debate, not to dismiss the value of social media“. If that was the intention, then he clearly succeeded! And in citing the comments “You’re “angry” with CILIP, “ashamed” of CILIP, “embarrassed” by CILIP, “disillusioned” with CILIP”  it would appear that he has picked up on the feedback – although whether these are just the comments left on the original blog post by the CILIP members who are permitted to leave comments on the CILIP blog or reflect the comments made outside “officially-sanctioned CILIP spaces” is unclear.

How CILIP as an organisation will respond to the debate is a matter for CILIP and members of CILIP. And how, and indeed whether, CILIP as an organisation makes use of social media is another interesting question. But let’s not forget that social media can (and indeed is) be used by organisations to listened to what there users are saying about them. I personally have had a couple of positive experiences when providers of Web services have spotted my blog posts and responded (such as a comment from Dipity’s Product Manager following a blog post on problems I’d experienced with the Dipity timeline service. I am also please that Bath’s bus station now use Twitter and have a blog, which proved particularly useful during the recent heavy snowfalls around Bath. But when, I wonder, does listening to one’s customers turn into eavesdropping?  An interesting ethical debate – which I would hope that CILIP’s information professionals will engage in.

I recently received an email from Ian Edelman, Web Manager for Recreation and Heritage at Hampshire County Council. Ian had decided to experiment with Twitter to provide a live blogging channel for the one day ‘Transforming Public Libraries’ conference held in Winchester on 26^thFebruary 2009. I’d spoken to Ian at last year’s Museums and the Web 2008 conference about Twitter, where Twitter’s use during the conference had had a very high profile. Ian was also aware that I was a fan of this micro-blogging tool and so we had a chat about how it could be used to support live blogging at a conference.

The aims were of the live blogging service, it seems, were two-fold: to maximise engagement with the strategic issues raised at the conference to an audience beyond those physically present and to gain experiences in use of Twitter.

Judging by a blog post entitled “Well played HCC!!!” published on the Neil’s Random Letters blog the experiment was a great success. In the post the author suggested that “we all have to stand up and give a round of applause to HCC for making it accessible to the broader community“.

I suspect that I added to the numbers in the remote audience when I tweeted “The @libconfID is now liveblogging the Transforming Public Libraries Conference – http://is.gd/kNdL“. In particular this resulted in Sarah Washford describing how she was “Watching the twitter stream from the Public Libs conf @libconf – so far not very challenging or inspiring I’m afraid“. However Sarah’s initial reservations seem to have changed during the day, as later on she said that “@libconf The twittering is great and creating some interesting debates. ‘Inspiring’ quote was more about some ideas we’ve heard many times“.

Now as well as Twitter being used to post summaries of the presentations and discussions held during the day, the ‘libconf’ tag was also suggested as a way of aggregating comments and questions from others, including the remote audience. As can be seen from the accompanying image (taken from a search for ‘libconf’ in the Tweetdeck Twitter client) there were significant discussions taking place after the event as well as during it, as you can see for yourself.

Ian has already posted his reflections on the experiment. I’d like to add a few more suggestions:

• Make use of Slideshare: Rather than providing access to the speaker’s PowerPoint files (or PDF version of the files) hosting them on Slideshare allows the slides to be viewed more easily and for comments to me made.
• Consider use of a dedicated live blogging tool: Although Twitter is growing in popularity, it has shortcomings as a live blogging tool: followers of someone who is using Twitter to live blog may not appreciate the copious numbers of tweets received and it can be difficult to integrate the comments which are dispersed over multiple Twitter accounts, particularly if the event tag is omitted or misspelled.  A tool such as Coveritlive or ScribbleLive may provide a more useful alternative.
• Provide an Acceptable Use Policy: It may be useful to provide an Acceptable Use Policy for the event, so that everyone is aware that live blogging is happening and that you have contingency plans in case participants want to make contributions which they do not want to be divulged to a wider audience.

Any other comments people would like to suggest?

On Thursday 26^th February 2009) I’ll be running a workshop on “Exploiting the Potential of Web 2.0 and the Social Web” on behalf of Renaissance West Midlands at The Herbert gallery, Coventry. Everything had been planned: the handout had been printed, the slides updated, travel and accommodation sorted. And then I received an email: “The council blocks access to social networking sites and you will be unable to access any of the sites that you want to use!” The email went on to say “I can see no option but to cancel Thursday’s workshop“.

Now as well as being an inconvenience to me this would have also been very frustrating for the workshop participants who, I was told “were keen to participate“. And cancellation at such short notice would no doubt have irritated staff at The Herbert (and possibly could have resulted in cancellation fees).

My response to the email was a speedy telephone call to say “This isn’t a problem; this is an opportunity to explore the reasons for council policies which block access to social sites, to gain a better understanding of the rationale behindsuch policies and to explore ways possible solutions to the tensions which such policies cause“.

I believe it is possible to change such policies. Look for example at a recent announcement made by Portsmouth City Libraries:

New Internet access policy for children
From December 2008, children will be able to enjoy improved Internet access in all Portsmouth Libraries. The current “Walled Garden” arrangement will be discontinued. The Internet access offered will be similar to that provided in Portsmouth schools but we will also be allowing access to games, Web chat and social networking sites.

I’m looking forward to Thursday’s workshop and having the opportunity to explore strategies for enabling such change. And I’d welcome comments from others in similar situations, especially those who may have been successful in liberalising conuncil’ policies.

We have published four new briefing documents for the cultural heritage sector: Introduction To Intellectual Property and Copyright, Project Scoping and Planning, Preservation and Sustainability and Preparing For Digitisation.

These documents were based on the Simple Guide to Digitisation that was researched and written by Julian Tomlin and published by Renaissance East Midlands. We are grateful to Julian and Renaissance East Midlands for their permission to reuse the contents of their document, which has been made available under a Creative Commons licence.

There are a number of benefits which can be gained by allowing reuse of documents in this way. As Julian commented:

“It is good to know that the content will have a wider audience, and I am sure that both Caroline and I would be interested in any feedback that you receive“.

Providing a wider audience for documents produced by a regional organisation can help to maximise the benefits of such work and, as Julian pointed out, enable a wider range of feedback to be received.

A summary of the benefits which can be achieved by allowing others to reuse documentation along these lines includes:

• Provision of alternative formats: the briefing documents have been published as A5 documents, allowing them to be reused in individual chunks. This modularisation of the original content provides greater flexibility in how the resources can be used.
• Maximise feedback: Having alternative versions which can be used in a wider range of contexts and audiences allows a wider range of feedback to be obtained.
• Enhance sustainability: Having the content available in multiple locations can help with the sustainability of the resources (and, as we have seen with the demise of the MLA Regional Agencies this is a very relevant issue).
• Additional marketing: Having another organisation to promote important outputs and deliverables will strengthen the marketing of the original materials, as well as the organisation which originally produced them.
• Strengthening links: Working together in the way in which UKOLN and Renaissance East Midlands are doing helps to strengthen links between the organisations and provides a sound basis for future joint activities.
• Maximising “Google Juice”: Having mutual links from the organisations’s Web sites support Search Engine Optimation (SEO) and helps to enhance the visibiloty of important resources in search engines such as Google.

As I suggested in a paper on “Let’s Free IT Support Papers!” which I presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference providing support materials under Creative Commons licences and encouraging their take-up by others can provide a range of benefits. And if you believe in maximising access and openness shouldn’t you be following the lead taken by Renaissance East Midlands?

Do you have a Wikipedia entry for in your museum, library or archive institution? The most likely answer is yes, if it isn’t then maybe you need to thing about getting one?

As the Wikipedia site explains:

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau (a combination of portions of two words and their meanings) of the words wiki (a type of collaborative Web site) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia entries are easy to create and provide high-profile information that is Google-friendly. It’s a great way to get your users to know more about your institution. Wikipedia is collaboratively created and so also allows the community to enhance and develop content.

Content Control

In the past Wikipedia has suffered at the hands of vandals. Oner of the most prominent cases to date was journalist John Seigenthaler’s entry in Wikipedia. One user edited the entry to claim Seigenthaler was connected with the Kennedy assassination, an allegation that Seigenthaler obviously took very seriously.

This week, after a trail run in the German language Wikipedia, Wikipedia has announced that there will be more stringent controls over the biographies of living people. In a recent BBC Radio 5 interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales explained that they were planning to implement a software change that would mean certain areas of the site would be reviewed before they went live.

Such a move by Wikipedia might lead many to ask will increasingly more control taken over content? Will the site eventually be locked down? Is this moving into the arena of censorship? What will be the implications of this be for those of us interested in the changing role the Internet plays in our culture?

What is your reaction to a new technology? Some people with tend to react positively, feeling that innovations can provide benefits; others, however, tend to be react dismissively to new technologies, arguing that they are irrelevant or counter-productive.

How do you tend to react to innovation, generally? And what are your views on the Twitter micro-blogging service?  I suspect Twitter has provided a good example of how perspectives may be polarised along the lines I have suggested.  Indeed a search for Twitter on the MCG JISCMail list reveals a series of interesting comments since the first reference in July 2007.

The discussion in July 2007 initially addressed the potential of Facebook for use in museums. Graham Turnbull (SCRAN) agreed with comments made by Mike Ellis (then at the Science Museum) which discussed some of the potential benefits which Facebook (which had just announced an opening up of the Facebook platform). And Graham went on to say that

All the evidence seems to point to activity within the rules of the medium being the attractor. For example, twitter [www.twitter.com] works if u want to regularly post one-liner updates
but is hopeless for a static description.

This seems to have been the first mention of Twitter on the list.  And although Graham appeared to have been the first on the list to predict an interesting use case for Twitter it was Mike Ellis who, the following year, announced his Onetag Twitter aggregation tool for use at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference.

Around the same time Rhiannon Looseley sent a message about the new British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA) Wiki in which she described that she is “particularly keen to find ways of making the most of Wikis’ potential for collaborative work“.

This message quickly led on to a lengthy discussion about the appropriateness of models like social networking and participative media to the delivery of museums online. But rather than repeat the discussions which took place (if you are interested in the details see the threads “British Postal Museum & Archive Wiki “, “suggestions that museums should use Twitter or Second Life … are ill-advised” and “Re: The speculative aspect of using Web 2 [was: British Postal Museum & Archive Wiki]” in the archives for July 2008)I would like to revisit the particular case of Twitter.

I think there is a tendency for innovation to be treated by some initially with scepticism as to whether the innovation is feasible and then, once tangible examples are demonstrated, by attempting to laugh at how it could be used. Here’s an example of this:

“Imagine a world in which Twitter did not exist (give it a couple of years…) would you really invent a constantly-updated trivia machine as the best way of communicating with museum audiences?“

Recently, however, we have seen a number of examples of Twitter becoming mainstream.  A good example of this was the BBC News item on “Tweet smell of success over Digg” which described how “Use of Twitter, the mobile phone-based micro-blogging service, rocketed nearly 1,000% in the UK over the past year, according to industry analysts HitWise“.

But what is the evidence suggesting about use of Twitter by museums? I recently created a search of Twitter posts (or ‘tweets’ as they are often called) for the term ‘museum’ in my Tweetdeck desktop Twitter client. And, as can be seen from the accompanying image, the Twitter community are using the service in a variety of ways:

User feedback: A tweet by PTG described how this museum visitor was in the Natural History Museum’s new, and great, Darwin exhibition. Wildlife Photographer o f the year next“. Gareth described how he “enjoyed a weekend in London. Visited Greenwich and the Science Museum. The Listening Post was particularly interesting!“

Events: A tweet by spjwebster described how he “and @njwebster will be going to the Science Museum Lates session on Wednesday, for ejamacational thingamabobs“.

Promotional activities: A tweet by canongatebooks urged people to “if you love Robert #Burns, raise funds for the Birthplace museum in Alloway: http://tiny.cc/6dV1U“.

In addition to these examples I am very aware of how Twitter is being used to provide peer support, community-building and community discussions. Indeed suggests that Twitter has a role to play in marketing activities are sometimes met with concerns that this type of use will detract from the original role in played in community support such as, for example, the use of Twitter at conferences for museum professionals such as the Museums and the Web 2008 conference.

I’m not too concerned, myself, as I feel that the different uses can coexist. What we will need are mechnnisms for sharing examples of the different use cases and the associated best practices.  UKOLN has published a number of IntroByte briefing documents, including three (so far) covering micro-blogging.  We hope that these documents will prove useful to organisations which are thinking about making use of services such as Twitter.

I’d like to conclude with one specific example which illustrates the benefits I have gained from being able to tap into the expertise on my Twitter community. Catriona Cardie, Marketing Director, Our Dynamic Earth commented in a recent guest blog post:

“Personally I was astonished at the speed with which specialist could exchange information through a blogging network, and make this specialist knowledge widely available. This was clearly evidenced when Brian asked a question on his blog. Within seconds a really useful response, with further web references, had been returned.“.

I actually asked the question on Twitter and received a speedy response from Mike Ellis.  It would be nice to thing that the huge growth in the popularity of Twitter was due to such examples. However I have to admit that I suspect that the growth in popularity is more likely to be due to articles on its use by celebrities such as Jonathon Ross and Stephen Fry. Not that I would be dismissive of such uses – after all celebrities also have Web sites too

Sebastian Chan, Powerhouse Museum, Australia, and Jim Spadaccini, Ideum, USA presented a paper entitled “Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere” at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference. In the paper they provided an overview of use of blogs in the museum sector. They stated that “As 2006 began, there were less than thirty known museum blogs” and then went on to add that in 2007 “there are well over 100 blogs exploring museum issues, from a range of institutions and individuals across the globe“.

I recently noticed that a blog post entitled Museum Blogs and Museum Podcasts Directory Sites published in December 2008 on the Ideum blog announced that “The Museum Blogs directory site has been revised and relaunched“. And looking at the directory I find that there are now 286 museum blogs listed.

There’s clearly been a significant growth over the past couple of years. And yet I also suspect that there are many museums around the UK which don’t have a blog, perhaps because they don’t feel that blogs can provide many benefits, are concerned at the resource implications, don’t feel they have the technical experience to set a blog or writing expertise to write blog posts.  Or perhaps there are museums which would like to set up a blog, but are prevented from doing so by the powers-that-be – the local authority, perhaps, the board of trustees or maybe in-house barriers such as resistant from managers.

UKOLN has sought to address such issues. We have run a blogging workshop on a number of occasions (both as a half-day workshop and, more recently a full-day workshop which provided an “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations“). I should add that a number of reports on the Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Organisation workshop that myself and Mike Ellis facilitated at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference were published which contain useful feedback on the session and the discussions which took place. In particular I should mention the reports published on the LibraryTechNZ and The Butterfly Net blogs together with brief notes on the session published on the Museums and the Web 2008 conference blog itself.

We have also published a series of IntroByte briefing documents on a variety of aspects related to blogs and blogging, including An Introduction to Blogs, Use of Blogs in Museums, Developing Blog Policies,  Planning Processes for Your Blog, Quality Processes for Your Blog, Launching Your Blog, Building A Blogging Community, Evaluating Your Blog, Technical Issues For Your Blogging Service, and, last but not least Addressing Barriers to Blogging.

Now I don’t believe in forcing people (or institutions) to blog if they don’t feel that blogs can tangible benefits. But I do feel that, in light of the growing numbers of museums which are using blogs, institutions should explore the potential benefits.  I hope the documents listed will provide an insight into the various issues which need to be explored. And if any organisation (a regional body, perhaps, or a national event) would be interested in hosting a blogging workshop, please let me know.

Alternatively if you have any thoughts on the role of blogs in the museum sector, feel free to add a comment to this post. Perhaps you’ve a success story you’d like to share, or hit unexpected problems. Or maybe you’d like to challenge the view that blogs do have a role to play.

Different Types of Museum Blogs (thanks to Nina Simon)

And maybe you could suggest blogs and blog posts which provide further insights into use of blogs by museums.

One blog blog I found to be of particular relevance to museums thinking of engaging with blogs is the Museum 2.0 blog and, in particular, the post on What Kind of Blog is Right for Your Museum?

This post includes a graphic which provides a great visual summary on some of the issues which you may have to address. I’ve included the image in this post – and would like to give acknowledgments to Nina Simone for making this available.

Since 2005, I’ve been part of the international effort to create Resource Description and Access (RDA) – a set of cataloguing rules that can be applied to any type of resource, physical or digital. January is named for Janus, the Roman god of doorways, beginnings and endings, which prompted me to consider how technology has changed our collaborative working practices.

Despite the image of cataloguers as shy, retiring types in the backroom, this work has generated a lot of (sometimes heated) discussion. The development process has become far more open as information can be shared easily via a Web site and email discussion lists. In contrast, the text of the previous set of rules, AACR2, was only seen by most cataloguers once it was published in print.

Time and cost restraints limit the number of face-to-face meetings, so the CILIP/BL Committee on RDA uses email between meetings. Each formal UK response was compiled from these emails, but messages might cover several issues and subject lines might not match message content. Now we use a wiki – we still have the challenge of incorporating differing views into our responses but are spared having to trawl through multiple emails.

Outreach activities can connect with a wider audience. Presentations at events are made available via Web sites and services such as SlideShare. Articles in the professional literature (e.g. my article ‘RDA: a cataloguing code for the 21st century‘ in CILIP Update) are increasingly available in digital as well as print formats.

Making the draft text openly available has also demonstrated that cataloguers are happy to experiment with technology.  When the latest draft was issued in PDF format, Bernard Eversberg was able to create a searchable version on the Web just two days after release.

Technology is also influencing publication decisions: RDA will initially be published as an online resource. Potentially we could have comprehensive and concise versions, or versions targetted at cataloguers of specific materials (serials, music, legal, etc.) – even MyRDA. The text could be incorporated into the  cataloguing modules of library management systems. It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops.

During 2008 UKOLN ran a whole series of workshops for the museums, libraries and archives community which were aimed at familiarising the sector with the key Web 2.0 and the Social Web concepts, providing participants with an opportunity to try out some of the key services and to provide an opportunity for practitioners to discuss ways in which such services and approaches could be exploited. The sessions also explored some of the barriers to effective use of Web 2.0 and outlined ways in which such barriers could be best addressed.

A number of the workshops were hosted by MLA Regional Agencies and others by professional bodies (i.e. the Society of Archivists), cultural organisations in Scotland (ASVA) and Wales (CyMAL) or accompanied large-scale international conferences aimed at the sector (the ILI and the Museum and the Web conferences).

• Workshop on “Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Museums, Libraries & Archives” for MLA East of England held at Villiers Park, Foxton, Cambridgeshire on 27^th November 2008 (which was reviewed recently in a guest blog post).
• Workshop on “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations” held in Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh on 12^th November 2008.
• Workshop on “Sharing Made Simple: A Practical Approach To Social Software” for CyMAL which was held in Bangor on 6^th November 2008.
• Workshop on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library” which was held at the ILI 2008 conference in London on 15^th October 2008.
• Workshop on ”Sharing Made Simple: an Introduction to the Social Web” for CyMAL held in Newport on 10^th September 2008.
• Workshop on “Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Museums, Libraries & Archives” for MLA London which was held at CILIP headquarters, London on 14^th July 2008.
• Workshop on “Web 2.0 and Social Networking For Museums, Libraries And Archives” for MLA Yorkshire held in Sheffield on 12^th May 2008.
• Workshop on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Organisation” at the Museums and the Web 2008 Conference held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 9^th April 2008.
• Workshop on “Sharing Made Simple: a Practical Approach to Social Software” for the Society of Archivists held at the University of Manchester on 10^th March 2008.

It is important to note that the workshops did not provide a simple one-way transfer of experiences and expertise.  Although the workshop facilitators (which included myself and my UKOLN colleagues Marieke Guy, Stephanie Taylor and Ann Chapman) were able to share our experiences and advice on best practices, we were also able to tap into a wealth of related expertise from the sector, through invited co-facilitators and contributors including Mike Ellis, Paul Bevan, Andrew Eynon, Mia Ridge, Ingrid Beazley, Ian Thilthorpe, Victoria Godfrey and Natalie Jones.

And as well as such formal contributions to the workshops, the workshop participants also actively engaged with the workshop activities, sharing experiences of local uses of Web 2.0 and discussing further ways in which Web 23.0 could be used in a cultural heritage setting.

These discussions played an important role in shaping many of the IntroByte briefing documents which were either initially evaluated at the workshops or were developed in responses to areas of interest which were identified at the workshop.

It should also be noted that we made use of wikis to capture feedback from the various discussions groups at many of these workshops. This has provided a valuable resource which contains useful information on the variety of ways which were identified on how Web 2.0 might be used, as well as information on potential barriers to use of Web 2.0.  Over the next few weeks we will be analysing this information and providing a summary of the recurring themes.