About This Guest Post

In his role as chair, Martin Bazley introduces us to the Digital Learning Network (DLNet). The group was formerly known as the E-Learning Group for Museums, Libraries and Archives and has much to offer cultural heritage professionals looking to expand their knowledge in technical areas and make contact with peers with similar interests.

Martin can be contacted on using the DLNet email (info@digitallearningnetwork.net).

Find people, build networks, share ideas

The ELG has become the Digital Learning Network – DLNet for short.

DLNet has been created by the group formerly known as the E-Learning Group for Museums, Libraries and Archives. The idea is to go back to basics and get people talking about technology and learning. There are so many people whose job involves some kind of educational/digital role, but who don’t have a network and really depend on colleagues and informal relationships to share information about new developments.

It’s all about connecting people and sharing ideas

The Digital Learning Network arranges events, meetups (called ‘ThinkDrinks’) and tries to encourage people to come together – whether it’s 3 people in a pub or 100 people at a conference.

Have a look at a short video from the first London ThinkDrink:

So we are changing our name from the E-Learning Group to the Digital Learning Network – DLNet for short – and putting more effort into getting people talking and sharing ideas, as well as doing all the stuff we used to do.

Just created, and growing fast

In the first few weeks more than 65 people have registered, and 15 local groups created.

Have a look at how the site works, in this short introductory video:

Find people, build networks, share ideas

• Do you want to find people working in digital learning in your local area?
• Do you want to build networks?
• Do you want to exchange ideas, experiences, and best practice?

We can help. We’re getting conversations going about using digital technology to support learning:

• online – through the website or Twitter
• face to face – all over the country, in networked groups

Here’s what you can do:

• get a few people together for a ThinkDrink – at the pub, out for tea, at the zoo – wherever you like
• let us know what you talked about – Tweet it, post pictures on Flickr, write a blog post, or post a short video on YouTube
• form your own Digital Learning Network group

And don’t worry, we are still:

• exploring how technology can help deliver inspiring and creative learning in museums, libraries, archives and the heritage sector
• running our highly popular events such as conferences and seminars
• hosting the email list, which is now DLNet@jiscmail.ac.uk (instead of elearning@jiscmail.ac.uk)

You can be a member of DLNet Online for free.

Or become a full member of DLNet – and receive discounts on bookable events and other benefits. Costs £12 individual, or £40 corporate (up to 3 member discounts per event)

If you’re already a paid-up member of the ELG, you are now automatically a full member of DLNet.

Have a look around the Digital Learning Network website and let us know what you think: http://www.digitallearningnetwork.net

The recent CILIP Executive Briefing Days on RDA (at which I was one of the speakers) included one presentation by video from a speaker based in the US.

This could have been done in a variety of ways. It could have been a ‘talking head’ with the person simply speaking to camera; initially that may feel more interesting but there is an obvious disadvantage of no slides to refer back to after the event (unless these were supplied either in the delegate pack or made available after the event). Another way is for the speaker to be filmed giving the presentation so you see them and the slides. Thirdly, the speaker could simply do a voice-over narration while we watched the slides. We got a combination with a five-minute introduction of the speaker talking to camera followed by voice narration while viewing the slides. This meant that we got a feel for the person and an image of them we could hold in our heads during the slide section. For me, that worked well.

Why do this? Cost is an obvious factor – paying the travel expenses from the US for a fifteen-minute slot is not realistic, especially if this has to be re-couped via the delegate fee. It can also help provide a balanced programme, especially if it is not possible to get a specific viewpoint from UK-based presenters or the video presenter is particularly known and well-regarded.

Do delegates feel cheated by including video presentations? I think that depends on various factors. For example, how many video presentations are there within the programme? In this case there was just the one video presentation alongside four longer face-to-face presentations, which seemed to work well. In the context of a whole day event, I think that two short video presentations would have been acceptable (e.g. one in the morning and one in the afternoon) but for a shorter half-day event better to have just the one. And of course, there can be no face-to-face interaction: delegates cannot ask questions of the speaker or speak to them during the breaks and the speaker cannot join in panel discussion sessions.

Could one have an entire event by video presentation (or video-conferencing)? Yes, but this turns it into a different type of event and delegates would have different expectations. The Collections Trust Museum Development Officers Support Day in Nov. 2009 filmed the presentations on the day and then made these available on YouTube after the event. Have a look at these and you’ll get a feel for how wathcing an entire event via video might feel. So, if you have experienced individual video presentations or virtual events using video presentations or video-conferencing, please add your comments.

The last in the series of thirteen MLA/UKOLN workshops on Web 2.0 and the social Web took place last week.

The UKOLN/MLA Web 2.0 Workshops

The workshops were funded by the MLA to enable museums, libraries and archives staff to get up to speed on the concepts behind Web 2.0, the challenges it presents and the opportunities it offers to cultural heritage organisations, including small organisations with limited budgets and technical expertise.

Thirteen

Thirteen workshops took place in venues all over England. An online map of the location of the workshop venues is available.

Links for the main page for each workshop are given below:

1. Preston Workshop (the Gujarat Centre) – 13th November 2009
2. Devizes Workshop (Wiltshire Heritage Museum) – 16th November 2009
3. London Workshop (Clore Learning Centre, Museum of London) – 3rd December 2009
4. Leeds Workshop (Leeds Discovery Centre) – 9th December 2009
5. Leicester Workshop (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester) – 18th December 2009
6. Dulwich Workshop (Dulwich Picture Gallery) – Friday 29th January 2010
7. Newcastle Workshop (Discovery Museum) – Monday 8th February 2010
8. Chelmsford Workshop (Goldlay Gardens) – Wednesday 17th February 2010
9. Birmingham Workshop (Central Library) – Monday 22nd February 2010
10. Sheffield Workshop (Millennium Gallery) – Monday 1st March 2010
11. Bath Workshop (Kingston Room) – Monday 8th March 2010
12. Nottingham Workshop (E-Learning Centre) – Wednesday 17th March 2010
13. Cambridge Workshop (Central Library) – Monday 22nd March 2010

Thank you to all our host venues!

Two hundred and forty-two

242 delegates attended the workshops. The workshop programme included: presentations introducing and discussing Web 2.0/social Web, case studies from local practitioners, (if the venue allowed) a chance for delegates to try the tools out for themselves on laptops and PCs, an opportunity to discuss the issues and time for delegates to chat to their peers over a free lunch.

One hundred and twenty-seven

While the workshops were running we managed to take quite a few photos (127 in total) of the venue and delegates at work. These photos are now available on Flickr.

Why not have a look at the slideshow or the selection used in an Animoto slide video (now on YouTube).

Nineteen

We were lucky enough to have 19 case studies given by local practitioners during the workshop series. Most of their presentations are online and out there for you to use – have a look on the corresponding workshop page.

1. Preston – Web 2.0 at Huddersfield: Dave Pattern, University of Huddersfield Library
2. Devizes – Wiltshire Heritage Museum Case Study: Google Books, David Dawson, Wiltshire Heritage Museum
3. London – Museum of London Social Software, Bilkis Mosoddik, Museum of London
4. Leeds – Artspace and Artspace Online – Attempting to support users in the practical space with the virtual space, Dominique Attwood, ELearning Leeds Museums and Galleries
5. Leeds – Follow Alex – Facebook and engaging with young people about culture, Dominic Burton, Marketing Officer, Libraries, Arts and Heritage, Leeds City Council
6. Leicester – Using Social Networking on the Museum Studies distance learning course, Ross Parry, University of Leicester
7. Dulwich – Dulwich OnView Case Study: Ingrid Beazley, Steve Slack, Angie Macdonald, Yang-May Ooi, Dulwich OnView
8. Newcastle – Making Heritage More Engaging, Janet E Davis, Museum Consultant
9. Newcastle – Democracy, Jim Richardson, Sumo
10. Newcastle – Geek inside and BALTIC, David Coxon and Craig Astley, BALTIC
11. Chelmsford – The Essex experience, Janice Waugh, Essex Libraries
12. Birmingham – Birmingham Libraries 2.0, Jen Bakewell and Matthew Jelfs, Birmingham City Library
13. Sheffield – Web 2.0 at Sheffield Library, Karen Wallace Sheffield Library
14. Bath – Communicating with the Facebook generation, Nicola McNee, Librarian, Kingswood School
15. Bath – Me and my blogs, Ann Chapman, UKOLN
16. Bath – Twitter at Reading, Peter Barnes, Corporate Information Systems Group, University of Reading
17. Nottingham – Confessions and Lamentations: Social Web at the University of Leicester Library, Gareth Johnson, Document Supply & Leicester
18. Cambridge – The UL on Twitter, Emma Coonan, University of Cambridge
19. Cambridge – To ‘fb’…. or not to ‘fb’, Libby Tilley, University of Cambridge

Thank you to everyone who came and presented!

One hundred and ten…and counting

Over one hundred URLs have been bookmarked on Delicious that are relevant to the workshop subject area. More are being added by the day.

To support the workshops a number of complementary materials were created and utilised. All materials are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. The workshop materials are available from the individual workshop pages.

Please do use the materials available with your teams and pass on details to any one interested.

Priceless

After the workshops had taken place we solicited feedback from delegates using a Google docs evaluation form. Thank you so much for your constructive comments, we really appreciate the positive feedback and did our best to take on board the suggestions made.

We hope we helped people feel positive in a practical way about what Web 2.0 can offer them. As one workshop delegate said:

“I was inspired and several days later am still excited about the web 2.0 possibilities opening up for my organisation. It was one of those training days where you reflect and say “that made a difference“.

We will be running a new series of workshops for the MLA on related areas.

Keep an eye on this blog, the Cultural Heritage events RSS feed and the Cultural Heritage Twitter feed for details.

About This Guest Post

In this guest blog post James Boardwell, Design Research Lead for Rattle, introduces us to exciting project encouraging people to engage with digital objects through different participatory media, including Twitter.

James can be contacted on Twitter using jamesb.

My Life As An Object

There are millions of objects held in our museums and galleries in the UK and yet our interpretation of them is generally constructed in the third person. They’re seen as static, inanimate things without effects, without lives.

This was the initial thought that led us at Rattle to a project for Renaissance East Midlands, an experimental project that looks to engage people around the objects’ lives. Each week for three weeks, we’re taking an object from the Nottingham galleries collection and bringing it to life in different ways, using different participatory media.

The project kicked off last Monday (15th March) with the Yellow Chopper, a story of the Raleigh Chopper which is held in the Nottingham galleries collection (as it was created in Nottingham by Raleigh). This story is quite linear, with a narrative arc spanning the life of the bike, from being given as a gift to being redundant in the shed, a victim of the next product innovation, the BMX. You can read Frankie Roberto’s overview of this bit of the project on his blog.

Subsequent stories will bring a watercolour by Paul Sandy (Tea at Englefield Green) to life and as well as Boots baby weighing scales. The objects were chosen to represent different ‘types’ of object you can find in museums and galleries and which consequently required different ‘design’ solutions to engage audiences. We won’t ruin the fun with any spoilers, so you’ll have to check in at the project site to see what happens and how the project evolves. But we’d love your feedback as this is a learning project and so sharing our thoughts on what works and what doesn’t can only help in designing better experiences for all going forward.

There is a new service for people interested in finding out what Scotland’s libraries, museums and archives holds. The service uses a geographical interface using a Google mashup, showing location of services, collection descriptions, tag clouds for people and subjects and much more.

Check it out at: http://www.scotlandsinformation.com

Is your library, museum or archive on the map? If not, email: scotearl@slainte.org.uk

All comments and feedback can be blogged at:

http://scottishlibraries.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/mapping-it-out-for-
scotland/

The November 2009 issue of CILIP’s journal Library + Information Update has two pieces on staff Web 2.0 development programmes, both well worth a read. The first piece by Jenny Evans and Lynn Barrett compares and contrasts the programmes developed at Imperial College London and the University of Huddersfield, while the second piece by Leo Appleton and Alex Spiers reports on the programme at Liverpool John Moores.

All programmes ran over an extended period of time, with individual ‘lessons’ on specific aspects of Web 2.0. An integral part of all the programmes was the requirement to try out various Web 2.0 tools and services. The reports also include useful information on what worked and what didn’t.

Imperial College London and the University of Huddersfield both used the 23 Things programme created by Helene Blowers as the basis for their staff training programmes. Blowers invited people to re-use her work by licensing it under Creative Commons and it’s since been adapted by more than 350 libraries across the world. But there’s no reason it shouldn’t be equally useful to museums and archives. So why not have a look and see whether it could work for you?

Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the Collections Trust has written a blog post for us introducing the Open Culture blog.

Nick’s role at the Collections Trust is to work with the Board to provide leadership and direction for the organisation. He is responsible for championing the Collections Trust’s work to many different people, including the government and private-sector partners.

Nick can be contacted by email using nick@collectionstrust.org.uk.

*************

The Collections Trust has a blog called ‘OpenCulture’, dealing with issues of Digital strategy and programmes in museums, archives and libraries.

The blog, is part of OpenCulture, a multi-year joint initiative with Culture24 and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.

Open Culture blog

The aim of OpenCulture is to promote open and participatory approaches to cultural services and new technologies. It includes projects on a number of digital areas, including Digital Inclusion, Digital Preservation and strategies for funding effective digital content. The blog provides information about these subjects, as well as offering museums, libraries and archives an opportunity to feed into current and future activity.

Collections Trust Web site

Our blogs, along with the range of other online services we provide, are an excellent way of connecting with the different audiences for our work. Not only can we provide regularly updated information, there is no better way of getting responses to policy development or programmes in realtime and directly from our user community.

Our sector is fast becoming a digital broadcaster and publisher of a huge range of content and services. As we go through this evolution, we think it is vital to capture and share as much of the new knowledge that emerges as possible. The OpenCulture blog gives us an opportunity both to capture and share knowledge in an open and dynamic way that complements online services such as Collections Link.

Collections Link Web site

The OpenCulture blog is the first of a series of blogs provided by the Collections Trust. An International blog details their work on the Europeana project as well as liaison with the European Commission and information about forthcoming funding opportunities. The Collections Trust also provides updates about its work via Twitter at @collectiontrust.

Web 2.0 and the Social Web are terms which are now being used widely. But what do these terms mean? And what, if anything, can Web 2.0 and the Social Web offer to museums, libraries and archives, especially small organisations with limited budgets and technical expertise?

A one-day workshop sponsored by the MLA and entitled ‘An Introduction to Web 2.0 and the Social Web’ will be touring the country in the next few months. The workshop will attempt to answer the above questions. It is free to attend but places are limited. Bookings are now open so why not sign up!

• Preston (the Gujarat Centre) – 13th November
• Devizes, Wiltshire (Wiltshire Heritage Museum) – 16th November
• London (Clore Learning Centre, Museum of London) – 3rd December
• Leeds (Leeds Discovery Centre) – 9th December
• Leicester (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester) – 18th December

More workshops in other areas will take place after New Year.

The Wiltshire Heritage Museum library has just gone online with a full digital library created in just 5 months using the Google Books service.

The Library has been collecting books about the history, environment and archaeology of Wiltshire for over 150 years, and has many rare and important books in its collection of over 8000 volumes. Until now, the idea of getting the library online has been only a dream for librarian Dr Lorna Haycock. Without Google, it would have cost tens of thousands of pounds, buying a computer system, exhaustive data entry and only a few of the books could have been scanned electronically.

Museum Director, David Dawson explained that the controversial Google Books service has a ‘My Library’ facility, where you can simply click on a book that you have found on Google Books, and then add it to your own digital library. Work began in May this year to catalogue the entire library, using Google Books, and over 5,000 books have now been recorded. Many of them have already been digitised, and the full text of many can be searched online. He commented “as far as we know, we are the first library in the world to have created a digital library using the Google Books service. As an independent charity, we simply couldn’t afford to get our library online until Google Books gave us this fantastic opportunity to enable people to carry out their research online.”

The digital library has now been launched through the museum Web site. Everyone can now browse and search the library online – finding books that contain detailed information about where they live, or about the history of their family. Director David Dawson explains “people can then visit our library to read the real books, discovering the wealth of material that we have in our fantastic library”. As Google digitise more books, increasingly you can search every word in a book. Users can sit in their office, search the digital library and find the information they need within seconds. Sometimes they can read the book on the screen, if it has already been digitised by Google, or they can get the book from the shelf in the library. For the museum, this is the key,  researchers are already using the Google Book catalogue to find the books they need, and then coming to the library to read the book.

David Dawson will be talking in more detail about the project at a forthcoming one-day workshop facilitated by UKOLN and funded by Musuems, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the South Western Federation of Museums and Art Galleries. The workshop, entitled The Social Web – An introduction to Web 2.0, will be held at Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes, Wiltshire on 16^th November 2009.

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) have published a new set of Web pages highlighting their policy for the Digital agenda in libraries, archives and museums.

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Sector has an important role to play in using digital technologies to deliver improved access, increased information and more opportunities for participation in its rich diversity of resources and services.

MLA is committed to helping museums, libraries and archives make full use of these opportunities, and to ensuring that the sector is at the heart of government digital policies.

Our role is to provide strategic leadership to the sector in relation to the digital agenda through:

• Developing a vision for the sector’s use of digital technologies
• Supporting and promoting the development of quality standards
• Encouraging innovation to enable inclusion of all communities
• Promoting understanding and skills development

MLA has commissioned digital services from a number of organisations to help to deliver:

• More and better quality information on cultural opportunities to the public
• A coherent portal for cultural resources for teachers and learners
• Greater interaction with individuals and communities through use of Web 2.0 and social networking tools
• High quality standards in the management and preservation of digital resources

UKOLN will be working with MLA on this digital agenda and an overview of the digital services commissioned is now available.

Further information on the social Web workshops we will be running is also now available. More information on venues and dates will follow.

I’ll be taking part in this CILIP/OCLC Executive Briefing Day on 15th September 2009 at CILIP HQ, London, alongside Roy Clare of MLA and Nick Poole of Collections Trust as part of the roundtable panel. So what’s this event all about?

Libraries, Archives and Museums (LAMs) all collect, manage and share information and materials. By integrating and working together, their users can access dispersed materials from within a single search environment. This one-day event will look at what makes LAM collaborations work and consider the potential for future joint ventures. The programme will feature presentations on the OCLC Research and RLG Partnership workshop series and case studies demonstrating varying forms of collaboration, followed by a panel roundtable and discussion forum. Speakers come from diverse organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution; V&A; University of Calgary; Libraries and Heritage, City of York Council; MLA; UKOLN; Collections Trust; University of Aberdeen, JISC and Culture24.

Places are still available and the full programme, speaker profiles and online booking are available at www.cilip.org.uk/lams.

First things first – just what are QR codes?

Wikipedia defines a QR Code as: “a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.” The QR Codes can be read by some mobile phones with a camera or in Seb Chan’s words “QR codes are probably best seen just as mobile-readable URLs“.

So how might QR codes be used in cultural heritage services? I’ve found a couple of places that are currently using these codes to help users.

The University of Bath Library is adding QR codes to the details you see in the results of a catalogue search. The code contains title, author and shelf location. Their blog post notes “I simply find the resource I want, scan the code and save it on my phone. I can then use this to find the item on the shelf. In fact, I can save this on my phone (I’d probably take a little more time and cut and paste into a mobile word document) and start to build up my own reference collection.”

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is also trying out QR codes. In their case they’ve been trialling using the codes beside exhibits in a display to take the visitor to the catalogue entry for the item. The technical aspects are described in some detail in the post on March 5th 2009 with a follow-up post on April 8th 2009.

This follows an earlier experiment in which the QR code appeared in a festival catalogue and redirected readers to a ‘hidden’ web page which gave access to a discount voucher for the festival and free entry to the museum during the event. Further posts on October 16th 2008 and October 23rd 2008 reviewed the experiment and discussed some issues that arose.

Has anyone reading this tried using QR codes? It would be good to know if anyone else has experimented with using these codes and for what for what purpose, and how successful you think it’s been.

SABIP (the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy) has just released its commissioned report Copycats? Digital consumers in the online age (PDF format). The report, undertaken by UCL’s Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER), is a hefty 81 page document that offers some amazing insights into the many paradoxes of digital copyright and consumerism.

The backdrop to the research indicates that “at least seven million British citizens have downloaded unauthorised content, many on a regular basis, and many also without ethical consideration“. In monetary terms this is seen as around 8% of British GDP, a truly shocking figure.

The introduction to the report is set very much in our current times and placed in a period (January – May 2009) during which the Digital Britain report was published indicating the intention to bring broadband Internet access to every home (no doubt increasing the ability to download illegal material). Yet also suggesting consideration of the creation of a Rights Agency and the passing of anti-file sharing legislation. During the same period high-profile legal action was taken against the Pirate Bay Web site and a new law was passed in Sweden allowing copyright holders to force ISPs to reveal details of those sharing files. Alongside these activities and Open Rights Group claimed that rigid copyright was stifling innovation and hurting citizens.

The key CIBER findings were that:

• The scale of the `problem’ is huge and growing
• There are myriad choices when consuming content and consumers are confused
  about what is legal and not legal
• Attitudes and behaviours towards property in the online and physical worlds are very
  different
• It has never, ever been easier to break the law
• There are fewer cues to guide behaviour in the online world
• Education isn’t working, yet
• There is a powerful idea that there is “no victim”, and so “no crime”
• Internet service providers and the consumer electronics industry: two elephants in the
  room

It seems that there are now two cultures: the digital one and the physical. They have evolved differently (despite not always being the case digital is often seen as free while physical has a cost) and now need to be analysed and dealt with in completely different ways. Seven million downloading unauthorised comment means seven million criminals, a situation that is ridiculous and unworkable.

The report recommends many future areas for research. For example to date almost all research on file sharing has been carried out on young people and students, research should be opened out to cover the four demographics used in recent research into digital convergence. These are: ‘kids’ (teenagers); the ‘tech vanguard’, (those with high ‘self efficacy’ who are early to adopt new technologies); the ‘mainstream’ (adults); and ‘laggards’ (those who do not yet have internet access, or certainly do not engage with e-commerce).

The report also suggests “It would also be possible to undertake a parallel (or alternative) study based on British Library users or site visitors, as this would help to inform policy in terms of the academy, the library and their relationship to intellectual property.”

The SABIP report has a huge amount in it and is essential reading for those dealing with copyright issues. Lets hope its pragmatic approach sparks some sort of turning point in the copyright chaos that currently exists.

“The fundamental question is not how or why the downloading, copying and dissemination of unauthorised content takes place (this report seeks to answer those questions) but who does it, (and therefore, who doesn’t), and can this behaviour be changed? And if it cannot be ‘changed’ what does need to change: the law, the business models, or the relationship between the creative industries and the public domain?“

Whether current copyright law is correct or not seems to be out of scope for the report. Glyn Moody argues in his blog post Why the “Copycats?” Report has a Copycat Problem that “one reason why people have few qualms about downloading copyrighted material – that lack of “ethical consideration” the report refers to above – is that there is growing realisation that copyright law as currently construed is totally tilted in favour of businesses“. Glyn provides some interesting figures that demonstrate that this is the case.

It seems the copyright war is one that will continue to be fought with fervent supporters for both sides. This report does not provide an answer to that fight but it does illustrate that while the problem is not realistically addressed casualties are inevitable.

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.

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.