Linking Museums meetup

Somehow I ended up organising a meetup about 'Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage'.  I've written about it for the UK MCG blog and there's a write-up of 'linking museums' from various people on the 'Museums and the machine-processable web' wiki.  If you're interested in 'helping museums make content re-usable; helping programmers access museum content', the wiki is a good place to join in.

I've also shared some thoughts on publishing re-usable object data and subject authorities from the Science Museum on the wiki.

Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang

A paper for Museums and the Web conference in Denver, April 2010.

Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang

Abstract

'Cosmic collections' was a Web site mashup competition held by the Science Museum in late 2009 to encourage members of the public to create new interfaces with newly accessible collections data prepared for the Cosmos & Culture exhibition. The paper reports on the lessons learned during the process of developing and running the competition, including the organisational challenges and technical context. It discusses how to create room for experimentation within institutional boundaries, the tools available to organise and publicise such an event on a limited budget, the process of designing a competition, and the impact of the competition. It also investigates the demand for museum APIs.

Keywords: experiment, collaboration, mashup, API, social media, exhibition, collections

My slides are also available on Slideshare and below. As in 2009, I helped facilitate the Museums and the Web 2010 Unconference.

2009: an overview

An incomplete, retrospective list of work, talks and more in 2009…

February – I did a talk: "Happy developers + happy museums = happy punters" at JISC's Dev8D; I blogged a transcript.

At some point in early 2009 I started the Museum API wiki, which still exists at http://museum-api.pbworks.com.

In April I was inspired by the Museums and the Web international conference to setup 'the MW2009 challenge' – 'take something from all the conversation at Museums and the Web 2009 and do something with them. So – pick one task.  To keep the momentum going, you should do it while it's still April 2009.'

In June I gave a talk Bubbles and Easter eggs – Museum Pecha Kucha at the British Museum in London. In July I repeated Bubbles, icebergs and Easter eggs at the Melbourne Museum Pecha Kucha.

September – I had an article published on the Museum-iD website, Learning lessons from a decade of museum websites. It was based on a paper I gave at the Museum-iD seminar on "Museum as Media Company: Social Media, Broadcasting & The Web” about ‘the role of the web at the Science Museum’.

November – the 'Cosmic Collections' crowdsourced web mashup competition I ran got some press on two web developer sites! Yahoo Developer Network: A new API and hack competition – this time not from a tech company but by a museum! Programmable Web: Science Museum Opens API and Challenges Developers to Mashup the Cosmos

December – I was invited to Oslo to give a lecture on Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: Opportunities and Challenges and curated a session at the UK Museums on the Web conference on ‘Sensory’. I also spoke with Elizabeth Lomas and Benjamin Ellis on Continued Communication: maximising your communications in a Web 2.0 world at the Online Information 2009 conference. The paper I wrote with Elizabeth and Ben is online at Continued communication – maximising the business potential of communications through Web 2.0.

'Cosmic Collections' in the tech press

The 'Cosmic Collections' crowdsourced web mashup competition I ran was picked up by two very cool web developer sites, the Yahoo Developer Network and the Programmable Web.

Yahoo Developer Network: A new API and hack competition – this time not from a tech company but by a museum!

Programmable Web: Science Museum Opens API and Challenges Developers to Mashup the Cosmos

Two favourite quotes: a "crusade to bring museums out into the open as places of innovation rather than preservation" (Yahoo) and, "with the rollout of a new API to provide access to information about some of its exhibits, the museum itself has become an example of technological innovation" (Programmable Web).

Museum API wiki

I've been maintaining a publicly-editable wiki, museum-api.pbwiki.com since early 2009.  The impetus was the development of an API for a subset of the Science Museum's collections.  I introduced it with a post on Open Objects, Get thee to a wiki – the great API challenge in action, saying:

Help us work on an informal, lightweight way of devising shared data, API standards for museum and cultural heritage organisations – museum-api.pbwiki.com is open for business.

These days, the focus is on collating a list of cultural heritage APIs and open and/or linked datasets from museums, libraries, galleries, archives etc and collecting examples of things made with cultural and historical data, with the core goal of cultural heritage organisations make content re-usable and helping programmers access cultural and historic content.