fresh + new(er)

discussion of issues around digital media and museums

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The (Australian) Govt 2.0 Taskforce – introduction and initial thoughts

June 26th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Well the cat is out of the bag and I’m one of the fifteen members of the Government 2.0 Taskforce! And I’m excited by the possibilities.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it down to Canberra for the launch at Publicsphere2 but I “watched it live on Twitter“.

So what is the Taskforce doing?

Its work falls into two streams. The first relates to increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information.

The second stream is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.

Importantly, the Taskforce will not just provide advice. It will be able to fund initiatives and incentives which may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish government 2.0 objectives.

As regular readers know I work in the soft part of government – a part that most people probably wouldn’t even consider as ‘government’. That has its pros and cons.

On the upside it has meant that the government funded cultural sector – libraries especially – have become pretty adept at sharing data and making it available in standardised formats. Our very own National Library of Australia is one of the world leaders in fact. Museums tend to lag – our ‘collections’ of data are far less standardised and are by nature less ‘collaborative’ and more ‘competitive’.

It doesn’t help that we’re encouraged to be ‘competitive’ and find new ways of ‘generating income’ beyond getting people into our buildings. This means we have gift shops, cafes as revenue generators, but also publishing divisions where we look for revenue generation in the data (content) we hold which, until recently, has meant locking it down – yes, even the public domain stuff. We’re only just realising that opening up our data also opens up a blue ocean (and the world doesn’t end).

My team’s recent work with cross-government data (which you will see much more of shortly) has been fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time. Fascinating in that it has revealed that there is an enormous amount of locked up, devalued data out there; but heartbreaking in that its liberation, or even value creation, is prevented by a combination of unsupported legacy systems, an unholy alliance of Copyright and ‘privacy’ concerns, and just a lack of ‘policy alignment’ and resources – the “oh, that’s not our core business so we’ll charge you cost recovery on giving you access to that” problem.

Also, we’ve quickly realised that you are often working with something akin to 6 different interlocking jigsaw puzzles, each missing 20% of the most crucial bits. To provide a useful picture of a location (if you want to deliver mobile services), a period in time (for historical comparisons and trends), or a subject matter – often requires data from multiple agencies in different spheres of government (in Australia – local, state, federal) and that if one of these refuses then the whole is let down greatly (or made meaningless). This is what impresses me so much about Adrian Holovaty’s work with Everyblock – that Everyblock beautifully hides all the difficult, unkempt, manually wrangled datasets that lie beneath it; or Open Australia and MySociety’s original TheyWorkForYou.

We’ve also learnt that raw data is useful to other developers but that whilst projects are still measured in terms of impact on citizens (of whom developers are only a small subset), government projects will continue to be all about the presentation layer and not the release of the actual data behind it. This is relatively easily remedied – do both is probably the logical way forward.

The very recent Stimulus Projects Map on the NSW Government portal that now shows the locations of projects on a map could have easily also released the KML data as an optional download. The project’s success then could be measured by the use of the Stimulus Map on the original site as well as any third party uses of the data too.

New models for measurement and reporting is something we’ve been thinking a lot about now that part of our photographic collection is also on Flickr as well as on our own site – and it gets roughly 20x the usage on Flickr. Does government – our funders – value that as much as us putting it on our own website? what about other citizens and stakeholders (Wikimedia Australia’s Liam Wyatt has an interesting things to say on this)?

Likewise, Joshua Gans criticism of the NSW Baby Names Explorer that my team worked on is entirely justified – “why not release the data?”. Indeed. If we had owned the data we would have . . . we initially had to scrape it form its source to build the prototype! As I wrote in an email relayed to Joshua, the project was about offering an alternative visualisation solution than releasing the actual dataset. Building an alternative visualisation was intended to provide better access to a few single use cases of personalised trend data (”how are the names I am thinking of calling my child trending?”). These were the kinds of questions that were left unanswered on the Births Deaths and Marriages annual league tables, and it was hoped that a new way of looking at the same data might inspire Births Deaths and Marriages to free up the raw data to others – making services for prospective parents isn’t anywhere near their core business. I say ‘hoped’ because of the plethora of roadblocks that had to be navigated even to get a (inside government) third party visualisation of births data online.

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So, dear readers, there’s going to be a bit of a forking going on this blog shortly.

I expect that most of my ‘open data’ and ’social media and government’ posts will end up over at the Taskforce blog – so you might want to grab the RSS if you are interested – whilst the volume of posts here on Fresh & New may decrease as a temporary consequence.

Anyway I’m really looking forward to working on the Taskforce over the coming months and if regular readers have something to contribute then please get in touch.

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1000th Tyrrell image in the Commons (1265 released in total)

June 4th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Bayswater Road, Darlinghurst
(Bayswater Rd, Darlinghurst, circa 1900)


View Larger Map
(Same location today-ish)

Today we released 24 more images into our pool in the Commons on Flickr. That wouldn’t be such a milestone – we release more each week – but we’ve finally released the 1000th image from the Tyrrell photographic collection.

We’ve now got 1,265 of our images out there in total and we’re up to 1 million views since April 2008 – that’s views of photographs that either weren’t available at all or received what we now understand to have been meagre exposure via our website and Picture Australia. (We thought 31,000 views a year of the 260 odd images we had was pretty good previously!)

We’ve been uploading a bunch of other collections and here’s one of my recent favourites from the Phillips collection – it is a bit creepy and I expect/hope it’ll be remixed into some great new configurations.

Portrait of a boy wearing a mask holding a rifle

(Portrait of a boy wearing a mask holding a rifle, circa 1900)

And of course you can still buy our ‘print on demand’ book of the first year of our Commons photographs.

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Twitter information for your users – good practice from Mosman Municipal Council

May 18th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Mosman Council has been doing some great stuff with social media and today Laurel Papworth pointed out their ‘Twitter policy’ that is on their website. They are one of the exemplars of local government social media in Australia – despite being a local government area with a higher-than-average older demographic.

Their information page about the Council’s use of Twitter clearly sets out

- who is tweeting on behalf of the Council (the web team based at the Library)
- why they are doing it
- their reply policy
- how to stop them following you

The clarity here is excellent and a model to base your own institution’s Twitter information page on. I am also impressed that they have experimented and been open about the difference between Twitter communication and more ‘traditional’ forms of contacting Council – this ‘evolutionary’ approach is to be commended.

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Fiddling with Wolfram Alpha

May 16th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Well, Wolfram Alpha is another nail in the coffin of the value of ‘raw data’ on the internet. And another reason why museums (and everyone else) need to emphasise interpretation, value add, and the ‘experience’ (Max Anderson’s ‘the visceral’). The raw materials will increasingly be free, easy to find, and ready for recombination and building upon. (Another reason why if you are not seriously cataloguing, documenting and digitising you are going to become invisible)

I’m impressed with my initial fiddling around.

Once upon a time you would have found it best to visit the Sydney Observatory to find out where Beta Centauri is in the sky. They would have given you a sky chart – which you can now download monthly from our site with accompanying podcast, or buy the annual Sky Guide book.

Of course, you’ll still find the Observatory a great place for a nerdy date or to get a go on the big telescope, and savour the experience of the historic building and unique location.

Now for the sky and factual data I can just go to Wolfram Alpha and do this search. Notice it has given the result relative to my geographical position and the time in my location. Equally impressive is the ability to see the sources used to generate the information (critical in establishing trust), and the ability to download the result as a PDF.

Now go and try it with people, places and things . . . .

You’ve probably noticed Google has also done some nifty new enhancements to their search.

Here’s the Wonder Wheel -

And the Timeline –

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MW2009 Clouds, Switches, APIs, Geolocation and Galleries – a shoddy summary

April 27th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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(Disclaimer – this is a rushed post cobbled together from equally rushed notes!)

Like most years, this year’s Museums and the Web (MW2009) was all about the people. Catching up with people, putting faces to names, and having heated discussions in a revolving restaurant atop the conference venue in Indianapolis. The value of face to face is more the case for people travelling from outside the USA – for most of us it is the only chance to catch up with many people.

Indianapolis is a flat city surrounded by endless corn fields which accounts for the injection of corn syrup into every conceivable food item. No one seems to walk preferring four wheels to two legs – making for a rather desolate downtown and a highly focussed conference event with few outside distractions.

The pre-conference day was full of workshops. I delivered two – one with Dr Angelina Russo on planning social media, and the other and exhausting and hopefully exhaustive examination and problematising of traditional web metrics and social media evaluation. With that out of the way I settled back and took in the rest of the conference.

MW2009 opened with a great keynote from Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Max’s address can be watched in full (courtesy of the IMA’s new art video site – Art Babble) and is packed with some great moments – here’s a museum director who gets the promise of the web and digital and isn’t caught up in the typical physical vs virtual dichotomy. With Rob Stein’s team at the IMA the museum has been able to test and experiment with a far more participatory and open way of working while they (still) work out how to bring the best changes into the galleries as well.

After the opening keynote it was into split sessions. Rather than cover everything I saw I’ll zero in on the key things I took away cribbed straight from my notes. I’ve left a fair bit out and so make sure you head over to Archimuse and digest the papers.

Using the cloud

In the session on cloud computing Charles Moad, one of the IMA developers, delved deep into the practicalities of using Amazon Web Services for hosting web applications. His paper is well worth a read and everyone in the audience was stunned by the efficiencies, flexibility (suddenly extra load? just start up another instance of your virtual servers!), and incredibly low cost of the AWS proposition. I’m sure MW2010 will have a lot of reports of other institutions using cloud hosting and applications.

Following Charles, Dan Zombonini from Box UK who works with, but isn’t in the museum sector showed off the second public iteration of Hoard.it. Last year Hoard.it caused a kerfuffle by screen scraping collection records from various museum collections without asking. This year Dan provoked by asking what the real value of efforts like the multimillion Euro project Europeana is? Dan reckons that museums should focus on being a service provider – echoing some of what Max Anderson had said in the keynote. According to Dan, museums have a lot to offer in terms of “expertise, additional media, physical space, reputation & trust, audience, voice/exposure/influence” – and these are rarely reflected in how most museums approach the ‘problem’ of online collections.

APIs

Last year there was a lot of talk of museum APIs at MW – then in November the New Zealanders trumped everyone by launching Digital NZ. But in the US it has been the Brooklyn Museum’s launching of their API a little while ago that seems to have put the issue in front of the broader museum community.

Richard Morgan from the V&A introduced the private beta of the V&A’s upcoming API (JSON/REST) and presented a rather nice mission statement – “we provide a service which allows people to construct narrative and identity using museum content, space and brand”. Interestingly, to create their API they have had to effectively scrape their existing collection online!

Brian Kelly from UKOLN talked about an emerging best practice for the development of APIs and the importance of everyone not going it alone. Several in the audience of both Richard and Brian’s sessions were uneasy about the focus on APIs as a means for sharing content – “surely we already have OAI etc?”. But as one anonymously pointed out, yes many museums have OAI but in not publicising and providing the easy access OAI is really ‘CAI’.

And APIs still don’t get around the thorny issues of intellectual property. (I’ve been arguing we need to organise our content licensing first in order to reduce the complexity of the T&C of our APIs).

As Piotr from the Met and author of the excellent Museum Pipes shows time and time again, the real potential of APIs and the like is only really apparent once people start making interesting prototypes with the data. Frankie Roberto (ex-Science Museum and now at Rattle) showed me Rattle’s upcoming Muddy service – they’ve taken Powerhouse data and done some simple visualisations.

APIs from a select few museums will probably put the rocket under the sector needed to really open up data sharing – however we need some great case studies to emerge for the true potential to be realised.

Geolocation

Another theme to reach the broader community this year was geolocation. Amongst a bunch of great projects showing the potential of geo-located content for storytelling and connecting with audiences was the rather excellent PhillyHistory site. The ability to find photos near where you grew up has resulted in some remarkable finds for the project as well as a healthy but of revenue generaton – $50,000 from the purchase of personal images.

Aaron Straup-Cope, geo-genius at Flickr delivered another of his entertaining and witty presentations where he covered some of the problems with geo-coding. In so doing he revealed that most of the geo-coded photos on Flickr are in fact hand geo-coded. That is, people opening a map, navigating to where they think they took the photo, and sticking in a pin. The map is not the territory – my borders of my neighbourhood are not the same as yours and neither of ours are the same as those formalised by government agencies. This is the case as much for obvious contested territories as it is for local spaces. The issue for geocoders, then, is how to map the “perceptions of boundaries”. Aaron’s slides are up on his blog and are worth a gander – they raise a lot of questions for those of us working with community memory.

Galleries

Nina Simon made her MW debut with a fun workshop challenging all of us in the web space to ‘get out our (web) ghetto’ and tackle the challenge of in gallery participatory environments. Her slides (made using Prezi) covered several examples of real-world tagging, polling, collaborative audience decision making and social interactions. The challenge to the audience to “imagine a museum as being like . . . ” elicited some very funny responses and Nina has expanded on her blog.

I don’t entirely agree with Nina’s call to action – the nature and type of participation and expectation varies greatly between science centres, history museums, and art museums. And there are complex reasons as to why participatory behaviours are sometimes more obviously visible online – and why many in-gallery behaviours are impossible to replicate online.

But the call to work with gallery designers is much needed. All too often there is a schism between the teams responsible for online and in-gallery interactions – technologically-mediated or not.

Kevin von Appen’s paper on the final day complicates matters even more. Looking at the outcomes of a YouTube ‘meet up’ at the Ontario Science Centre, Kevin and the OSC team struggled with working out what the real impact of the meet up was. Well attended and with people choosing to fly in from as far away as Australia it would have seemed as if 888Toronto888 was a huge success, however –

Clearly, meetup participants were first and foremost interested in each other. The OSC was the context, not the star. Videos that showcased the meetup-as-party/science center-as-party-place positioned us as a cool place for young adults to hang out, and that’s an audience we’d like to grow.

It wasn’t cheap either – the final figure worked out at $95 per participant. Clearly If we want more ‘participatory experiences’ in our museums it isn’t going to be cheap. And if we want audiences to have ownership of our spaces then we may need to rethink was our spaces are.

(As an aside, I finally learnt why art museums have more gallery staff in the galleries than other types of museums – one per room – albeit not necessarily engaging with audiences! According to my knowledgeable source, art museums have found that it is cheaper to hire people to staff the galleries than it is to try to insure the irreplaceable works inside.)

“The switch”

One of side streams of MW this year was a fascination with ‘the switch’. This arose from some late night shenanigans in the ’spinny bar’ – a revolving restaurant atop the Hyatt. The ’switch’ was what turned the bar’s rotation on and off and on the final day a small group were ushered into the bar and witnessed the ‘turning on’. Charles, the head of engineering at the hotel, gave us a one hour private tour of the ’switch’ and the motor that ran the bar – it was fascinating and a timely reminder of the value of the ‘private tour’ and the ‘behind the scenes’. In return, Charles asked all of us plenty of questions about the role of technology in his children’s education and how to get the most out of it.

We need more museum experiences like this!

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Another OPAC discovery – the Gambey dip circle (or the value of minimal tombstone data)

April 27th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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New discoveries as a result of putting our incomplete collection database online are pretty common place – almost every week we are advised of corrections – but here’s another lovely story of an object whose provenance has been significantly enhanced by a member of the public – a story that made the local newspapers!

Here’s the original collection record as it was in our public database.

Now take a look at the same record a week later.

If your organisation is still having doubts about the value of making available un-edited, un-verified, ageing tombstone data then it is worth showing examples like these.

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MW2009 – Multi-touch: what does this technology hold for future musuem exhibits?

April 16th, 2009 by Paula Bray
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Hi I’m Paula Bray and I usually blog over at Photo of the Day.

Today, whilst Seb was slaving away giving two workshops in a row at Museums and the Web 2009 I spent the day with Jim Spadaccini and Paul Lacey in a great, full-day workshop called ‘Make It Multi-touch’ that showcased the custom built 50” touch-table. You can view it over at Ideum .

We got inside information on how this technology was developed from the initial prototype back in September 2008 that featured a dual mirror and two camera solution that resulted in the need to process complicated gestures and quickly. Two prototypes later is the final product you can see here. This technology can process simple to complex gestures known as ‘blobs’ (fingers reflected) which is fed to software that can process touch, drag and drop, pinch and expand, drawing, rotate and double tap features that are all intuitive to the user within a short time-frame. The aim is to provide an interactive social experience that is very different to the traditional computer based interactive exhibits that can tend to isolate the experience to one visitor.

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What can we learn from the public about using museum collections and content through technology such as multi-touch? This form of technology may be a novelty for some at this stage but the future design of this product holds potentials for change amongst many museum applications.

Scenario: Multi-touch tables are available in a museum exhibition for the public to use and interact with exhibition content. Images of collection objects can be moved across the table, details of content can be zoomed in through simple “blob” (finger) movements. Descriptive information about the object can be shown through XMP metadata stored in the file. Location data can be retrieved and the user can create their own exhibit and learning experience. This is a very different user application that can change visitor’s experiece. Do we need to compete with devices that are currently available at home and make it social and educational in the museum? Does fixed navigation work anymore?

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Multi touch technology has potential to change museums experience and it will be interesting to watch this technology develop. Will the public start to expect to come to museums to interact with exhibits in this new way?

This is definitely more than a “big-ass table”.

Post & photography by Paula Bray

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Intgerating Twitter tweets into blog comments

April 12th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Backtype has just released the very first 0.1 version of a Wordpress plugin that integrates tweets and retweets as well as comments on other blogs into the comment stream of your original Wordpress posts.

I’ve been trialling an install and you can see it in action on a post like this one. Notice that the tweets are interleaved with comments on the blog itself – it even deciphers shortened URLs. (And in case you were wondering which URL shortener is the best check out this article from Searchengineland – hat tip Chloe Sasson!)

This sort of cross-site conversation tracking is becoming increasingly important in a world where tweets are easier and more common than on-blog comments. I’ll be watching with interest to see how the plugin evolves.

A word of caution before you go and roll it out on all your blogs – consider the additional moderation that seeing every public tweet and offsite comment is going to create for you!

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A quick QR code update

April 8th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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As regular readers know, we’ve been trialling QR codes and a little while back rolled them on a small selection of object labels in a Japanese fashion display.

I’ve been keep an eye on their usage and some of the continuing problems around lighting, shadows, and low-resolution mobile phone cameras like the current iPhone 3G. So far usage has been, as expected, low. Firstly, the target audience for the exhibition content has, not surprisingly, not been very tech-savvy. Secondly, the ‘carrot’ isn’t clear enough to cause the audience to respond to the call to action.

More critically, one thing we still haven’t quite gotten right is the image size and error correction.

Shortly after the last post we upped the error correction in the codes to 30% (meaning that up to about 30% of the image can be obscured and it still scans – although it is isn’t evenly spread). This alone wasn’t enough.

With the long URLs encoded in the codes plus the error correction the resulting QR codes were even more ‘dense’ and hard to scan with 2 megapixel cameras. We’ve now done another set of codes with our own version of TinyURLs that generate locally. This has reduced the encoded characters from nearly 70 to around 25 characters – thus a far less dense code.

Even so, 2 megapixel cameras have patchy results when obscured by lens flare or shadow so our current thinking is that in the future the codes may need to be as much as 50% bigger.

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One year in the Commons on Flickr – statistics and . . . a book!

April 8th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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picture-262

Today we celebrate one year in the Commons on Flickr.

Since April 8 last year we’ve uploaded 1,171 photos (382 geotagged) from four different archival photographic collections. These have been viewed 777,466 times! For photographs that had been either hidden away on our website (the original 270 Tyrrell photographs on our website were viewed around 37,000 times on our site in 2007), or not yet even catalogued and digitised this is a fantastic result. And that’s not even scratching the surface of the amazing extra information and identifications, mashups, new work and more that has come from the community participation.

To celebrate we’ve published a 78 page book!

The book was published using print-on-demand service Blurb and comes as a softcover or two different hardcovers – it is your choice! Inside there are a range of photographs alongside their individual statistics, user comments and some of the stories of discovery that have come from the first year in the Commons.

Our Photo of the Day blog is giving away 10 copies and you can buy copies for your friends over at Blurb.

I’d personally like to thank everyone at the Powerhouse who have supported our involvement in the Commons and helped make available so many photographs. I’d also like to thank the enthusiastic Flickr community who have so enthusiastically embraced these historical images; Paul Hagon for his mashup;the staff at Flickr (esp George, Dan and Aaron); and the Indicommons crew.

Without all of you this would never have happened.

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Impact of the Commons on image sales at the Powerhouse

April 7th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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As many readers know, Paula Bray, our manager of Visual and Digitisation Services, has been working on a paper for Museums and the Web looking at the impact of the Commons on Flickr on our image sales business.

Paula’s paper has been published over at Archimuse and if you are going to be in Indianapolis next week you’ll be able to get the visually enhanced interactive version.

Over on our Photo of the Day blog, Paula has added some updated figures that give a clearer picture of the impact of the Commons. Have a read and feel free to ask questions either here or on Photo of the Day. I’ll make sure Paula gets them.

We are celebrating our 1st birthday in the Commons on Flickr tomorrow and have an exciting announcement waiting . . .

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Powerhouse Object of the Week – a new behind the scenes blog

April 2nd, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Another exciting thing we are launching today is our Object of the Week blog. It nicely complements our Photo of the Day which recently celebrated 500 posts!

We kick off Object of the Week with a profile of the project lead, curator Erika Dicker. Erika has chosen a favourite object from the collection – a prawn riding a bike, and her quirky tastes are also profiled in a quick Q&A.

Each week the blog will feature a new object and, until each curator has posted, a curator profile. We hope the blog will reveal some of the personalities behind the collection as well as many of the oddities and exciting objects that the public rarely gets to see. In coming weeks there will be video interviews and a whole lot more.

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Powerhouse collection documentation goes Creative Commons

April 2nd, 2009 by Seb Chan
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We’re happy to announce that as of today all our online collection documentation is available under a mix of Creative Commons licenses. We’ve been considering this for a long time but the most recent driver was the Wikipedia Backstage tour.

Collection records are now split into two main blocks of text.

The first section is the relatively museum-specific provenance which is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license.

The second section is primarily factual object data and is licensed under a less restrictive Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike license.

Just to be very clear, images, except where we have released them to the Commons on Flickr, remain under license. There’s a lot more work to be done there.

So what does this really mean?

Teachers and educators can now do what they want or need to with our collection records and encourage their students to do the same without fear. Some probably did in any case but we know that a fair number asked permissions, others wrongly assumed the worst (that we’d make them fill out forms or pay up), and it is highly likely that schools were charged blanket license fees by collecting agencies at times.

Secondly it means that anyone, commercial or non-commercial can now copy, scrape or harvest our descriptive, temporal and geospatial data, and object dimensions for a wide range of new uses. This could be building a timeline, a map, or a visualisation of our collection mixed with other data. It could be an online publication, a printed text book, or it could be just to improve Wikipedia articles. It can also now be added to Freebase and other online datastores, and incorporated into data services for mobile devices and so much more.

Obviously, we’ll be working to improve programmatic access to this data along the lines of the Brooklyn Museum API, as well as through OAI and other means, but right now we’re permitting you to use your own nouse to get the data, legitimately and with our blessing – as long as you attribute us as the source, and share alike. We figure that a clear license is probably the ground level work that needs to preceded a future API in any case.

Thirdly, we’ve applied an attribution, non-commercial license to object provenance largely to allow broad educational and non-commercial repurposing but not to sanction commercial exploitation of what is usually quite specific material to our Museum (why we collected it etc).

You might be wondering why we didn’t go with a CC-Plus license?

A CC-Plus license was considered but given the specific nature of the content (text) we felt that this added a layer of unnecessary complexity. We may still, in the future, apply a CC- Plus license to images where it will make more sense given we have a commercial unit actively selling photographic reproductions and handling rights and permissions.

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Working with Wikipedia – Backstage Pass at the Powerhouse Museum

April 2nd, 2009 by Seb Chan
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I like the notion that Noam Cohen raises in his recent New York Times article where Wikipedia is compared to a city.

It is this sidewalk-like transparency and collective responsibility that makes Wikipedia as accurate as it is. The greater the foot traffic, the safer the neighbourhood. Thus, oddly enough, the more popular, even controversial, an article is, the more likely it is to be accurate and free of vandalism. It is the obscure articles — the dead-end streets and industrial districts, if you will — where more mayhem can be committed. It takes longer for errors or even malice to be noticed and rooted out. (Fewer readers will be exposed to those errors, too.)

Like the modern megalopolis, Wikipedia has decentralised growth. Wikipedia adds articles the way Beijing adds neighbourhoods — whenever the mood strikes. It is open to all: the sixth-grader typing in material from her homework assignment, the graduate student with a limited grasp of English. No judgements, no entry pass.

When most of us take a look at Wikipedia we conveniently forget that behind the names that create and edit the articles are real people. Likewise when we are critical of how Wikipedia works (or doesn’t) we forget that Wikipedia is as flawed (or as great) as people are.

And if you were setting up in a new city you would meet with the city and community leaders, then head out and meet those who make the city function – the recommenders, community activists, the outspoken voices (and, depending on the neighbourhood, the kingpins and warlords!). Before all that, of course, you’d be out in the streets working out who and where all these key figures were, and getting a feel for it all. Alternatively, you might approach a city completely from the bottom-up. In so doing you might get lucky or you might also be led into a dark alley and mugged.

So, when Liam Wyatt, Vice President of Wikimedia Australia approached the Powerhouse to be the inaugural venue for a ‘Backstage Pass’ idea we jumped at the chance to put some real world faces to the avatars, and to learn how the nuts and bolts of Wikipedia works from the perspective of those who edit and improve it. We knew Liam from his work with the Dictionary of Sydney and thus knew he was aware of the complexities of the heritage sector.

(image by Paula Bray, Powerhouse Museum, CC-BY-SA)

From our perspective, Wikipedia is hugely important. Wikipedia is the highest referrer of traffic to our main website after search. Regardless of whether all our research staff are personally enamoured with Wikipedia, it is clear that our research output is made more visible by being cited in Wikipedia. In fact, if citations are a measure of the success of academic research then perhaps Wikipedia citations are a measure of ‘assumed authority’ and accessibility. (More on that in my metrics workshops though!).

At the same time word has it that laptops destined for high school students across the State may come pre-loaded with a snapshot of Wikipedia, so it makes sense for museums to have their knowledge linked and connected to as many relevant articles as possible.

Around the same time as Liam approached the Powerhouse, Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum asked us to participate in Wikipedia Loves Art. We really liked the idea but had two organisational issues – firstly, we don’t (currently) “do” art; but most importantly our onsite photography policy needed to be clarified and within the short time frame that wasn’t going to be possible (we are still working on it!). Shelley’s been blogging about the experience of WIkipedia Loves Art over on the Brooklyn blog – and that more open approach to the ‘city’ that is Wikipedia has yielded interesting and complicated results.

So on the 13th of March, Liam rolled up with a motley group of Wikipedians – the youngest was only 13 years old (we hope had a sick note for his teachers!) – and the curatorial staff, along with a photographer, set about giving them a guided tour of the Museum and then our basement collection stores before retiring to a networked meeting room to exchange ideas. All up we ended up dealing with a very manageable group of ten Wikipedians. These weren’t just any Wikipedians, they were paid up members of Wikimedia Australia – the kind of the community leaders you might want to get onside in your neighbourhood.

This made a huge difference.

Even so, Wikipedians are a diverse bunch and like normal people they don’t necessarily understand all the intricacies of how museums work – the timescales, the processes, the conception of significance, the complexities of Copyright in museums. They don’t all agree about the solutions to licensing – and collectively we have widely varying opinions about the viability and usefulness of Wikipedia’s ‘neutral point of view’.

(image by Paula Bray, Powerhouse Museum, CC-BY-SA)

(image by Paula Bray, Powerhouse Museum, CC-BY-SA)

But, as we learnt about how Wikipedia editors think about how to document and improve articles in Wikipedia, our Museum staff spoke of how we document, classify and research. Unsurprisingly between the Wikipedians and the Museum staff we found a lot of common ground.

One of the Wikipedians who came, Nick Jenkins, generously wrote on the Wikimedia-AU listserv,

It was very interesting, and the amount of material and knowledge (at the museum, in the heads of the curators, and in the internal databases at the museum) is truly vast; but the issues that are being grappled with seemed (from my perspective) to be how to fulfil the museum’s mission in an increasing online environment; how that relates to the Wikipedia and finding areas where there’s a good synergy and commonality of purpose, and also questions and complexity of licensing (for images of items and details about items), and all the cultural issues of interfacing the two different cultures and ways of operating.

I thought it was a very positive day, and I left very much with the impression that these were good people who genuinely wanted to help.

From our perspective, the Museum has a whole lot of changes being actively made to Wikipedia articles incorporating its areas of expertise, but most importantly, we’re putting faces to names and beginning to understand the safe and unsafe areas of the city that is Wikipedia.

(image by Paula Bray, Powerhouse Museum, CC-BY-SA)

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500 posts on Powerhouse Photo of the Day! Win a print!

March 27th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Today our Photo of the Day blog is celebrating 500 posts!

There is a little prize of ‘a print of your choice’ going for the best suggestion or comment on the Photo of the Day for the next 500 posts.

The blog has been a great success for the Museum over the past 500 days and has brought a great deal of exposure to our photographic, digitisation and imaging services as well as a wealth of content and user contributions.

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Crosspost – Powerhouse seeks C64!

March 9th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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If you were like me and grew up with a Commodore 64 as your introduction to the world of programming and hacking then this is for you.

Over on our 80s exhibition blog a call has gone out.

We are seeking one or more C64s and games! We are looking for old C64s with an interesting provenance and plenty of good stories.

Can you help us?

For the record, I had (and still have) a Trilogic Expert Cartridge – these were amazing and were invaluable for working out how things worked inside games as well. The Expert Cartridge was especially good because it was reprogrammable, meaning that every few months a 5 1/4″ floppy would arrive in the mail from the UK with updates and patches for it. My parents used EasyScript to write several long academic publications and printed them out for the publisher on a ridiculously slow daisywheel printer; and my first forays with a drum machine were with Simon Pick’s Microrhythm – a quite excellent C64 drum sequencer.

Of course I am lobbying hard to get the intro sound sample from Epyx’s Impossible Mission into the gallery – “Another visitor . . . stay a while . . . stay forever!”

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ROI Revolution’s Google Analytics Report Enhancer

March 5th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Anyone who attended my double web analytics workshops today at the Transforming Cultural and Scientific Communication conference in Melbourne today saw this lovely little Greasemonkey script in action.

And I thought I better link it for everyone who is not already using this to install.

What GARE does, amongst other things is go some way towards addressing the ‘time on site’ problem that is inherent in most if not all web analytics packages. In short this problem is that single page visits to a website are counted as having zero time spent on them and count this zero figure when creating the ‘average time on site figure. Similarly the time spent on the final page of a visit is left at zero. Blogs are especially susceptible to low time on site figures as most readers visit only one, albeit long, page before leaving.

With GARE installed you are presented with the standard ‘average tiem on site’ as well as a ‘true time on site’ which removes these single page visits from the average calculation. GARE also adds a number of other nifty user interface fixes to make your use of Google Analytics even better.

(My longer paper on web metrics from last year is available at Archimuse and the next web metrics for cultural institutions workshop happens in Indianapolis at MW09 – or on request of course!)

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QR codes in the museum – problems and opportunities with extended object labels

March 5th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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I think QR codes have a lot of potential – potential that hitherto has not been realised. The underwhelming uptake of the codes outside of Japan has a lot to do with the poor quality marketing campaigns so far run with them. If I am going to have to install or worse still, find on my phone, a QR code reading application then the reason I am going to all this trouble has to be really really worthwhile.

I am yet to see a commercial campaign that delivers that compelling reason to install the reader.

On the otherhand, quite a few local artists are experimenting with them in interesting ways. If you are a Melbourne reader then maybe you spotted a guerilla art installation at Federation Square by Radical Cross Stitch!

Now QR codes are probably best seen just as mobile-readable URLs. If these URLs are just going to send me to a website that isn’t tailored for my context and device then they are going to be just a gimmick. But if, on the otherhand, they can deliver timely, mobile-formatted content to me that addressed my specific ‘need’ at the time then they might just work. I know there’s no way I am going to bother typing an URL into my phone whilst I stand in front of an advertisement. Even on the iPhone, typing of URLs is more painful than it should be (in fact I’d wager that most iPhone users follow links from other applications – Twitter, email etc – or use their bookmarks – anything to avoid typing URLs). On a standard numeric keypad mobile, forget typing URLs.

Now regular readers will remember our experiment with QR codes in August last year. We learnt a lot from that and now we’ve rolled out an experiment in a new display on the floor of the Museum.

As part of the Gene Sherman Contemporary Japanese fashion display each object label is now augmented with both a QR code and a longform object URL (just in case you can’t use the QR code).

Here’s a quick breakdown of the process.

Generating the codes

Once again we did this in-house – the main reason being that every mistake made internally helps us learn and grow. Sure, we could outsource the mistakes but in so doing we outsource the learning. And that’s not a good long term idea.

Problem #1 – All QR codes are not the same

Perhaps you thought that there was just one standard type of QR code? Well that’s not exactly true. QR codes can be generated at a number of ’sizes’ (actually more like density than fixed dimension), with different percentages of error correction (in case a scan is blurred or partial), and the content can be stored in a number of ways. The first pass we made at generating codes for each object ended up working on most but not all of the QR code readers we tried. Finally we generated a series of codes that worked on all the readers we could find.

Problem #2 – Inconsistent size

One issue with QR codes is that they do change size as the content the are encoding increases. This is inrrespective of the density that you choose. A medium density encoding of “The Powerhouse Museum” is going to be smaller in size than one that says “The Powerhouse Museum is making QR codes”. Add higher error correction (tolerance) and they get bigger still. Now this isn’t usually a going to be a problem when single codes are going to be printed but when they need to go on object labels then, rightly, the exhibition designers want to have a standard size for the whole exhibit. This meant finding the longest possible code and designing for it.

Getting the content ready

Problem #3 – Making the mobile site

As we found in our initial QR trial last year one of the key failures was that we never built the encoded URL as mobile-friendly. This time we’ve changed large parts of our website and especially the collection database, to which the QR coes point, to be mobile-ready.

Installing the codes

Problem #4 – Perspex

So we now have QR codes that can be read by a variety of readers on a variety of phones with 2 megapixel to 5 megapixel cameras, and we have a website that is going to work on a phone. The next hurdle to be crossed was physical. At the Powerhouse we put our object labels behind 5mm thick perspex. This stops visitors from writing things on our labels (oh, the trust!) and means they last a lot longer in the galleries.

Another round of testing was required to work out the minimum size at which the QR codes could still be scanned with a 2 megapixel phone camera through the 5mm perspex.

Problem #5 – Shadows

And so off the labels went to be printed.

Installation day rolls around and I was in the gallery with my phone looking at the QR codes being installed below the written labels and thinking to myself “finally we have codes in the galleries!”.

Then I noticed the lights. Not just one light but multiple lights shining on the objects from behind where the visitor would stand. With this set up dark shadows were cast over exactly where the QR codes were being placed meaning that although the codes could be photographed, the shadows interfered with the ability to decipher the data in the codes.

Lights have been moved around a bit and now we have a better situation.

We are keeping an eye on usage and will report back once the display ends.

If you are in Sydney, come in and give it a go.

I am recommending free QR code reader application called BeeTagg mainly because it has different versions available for a range of phones – Symbian, Palm, Blackberry and iPhone.

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Readability – reducing clutter with a bookmarklet

March 4th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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I’ve become a fan of a bookmarklet tool called Readability.

What it does is remove the clutter from a content-rich webpage and optimise it for ‘readability’ (which of course, itself can be customised). Now museums tend to be serial offenders on text-heaviness – we love long text and I’m not one to argue that we should shorten it.

So whilst everyone emulates the ‘Print Version’ stylesheets that newspaper websites have these rarely make content more readable on-screen – that’s not their point. What Readability does is leaves the ‘Print Version’ to the end-user’s discretion and re-renders the content in a form that is immediately more readable on-screen.

To check it out install the bookmarklet in your browser bar then visit a content rich page, click the bookmarklet and voila, a more readable version!

It works on most browsers and seems to do a good job on most websites.

Here’s what happens to our very own collection records.

Before

After

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We are (partially) mobile – Powerhouse on your phone

February 28th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Today we went live with a mobile version of the Powerhouse Museum site. Open up http://www.powerhousemuseum.com on your phone browser and you’ll see a stripped back version of the site with the bare necessities and a slimmed down architecture.

It is a still a work in progress – we’ve been greatly impressed with how SFMOMA incorporated a mobile version into their recent website redesign – and there’s a few more tweaks to be done.

We’ve been thinking a lot about how our site might translate on a mobile – and the sorts of information users might privilege over other information when looking on their phones. Obviously separate pages for prices, location, etc that exist on the ‘normal’ site are just an annoyance on a hard-to-navigate phone interface so we slimmed it right back to one key information page, three pages of exhibition listings and what’s on information, and the collection search. You’ll notice that exhibition pages, themselves, revert to the full web version at the moment.

Here’s what it now looks like on an iPhone.


(home page 7″ edit)


(featured 7″ edit)


(collection object 7″ edit)

Designing for mobiles is still a challenge given the diversity of devices, screen sizes and plugin support. But the real challenge is information architecture. Mobile browsing is all about getting timely, pertinent, situationally relevant, slimmed down information – and most cultural organisations have spent a lot of time, money and effort doing the exact opposite.

In our sector, plugin-heavy exhibition websites still abound – especially in the art museum world, and in the science and social history museum world we go all out on deep information heavy resources. All this is wonderful (well, maybe not always the plugin stuff) if you are sitting in front of a broadband connected modern computer with a large monitor, a hot beverage, a comfortable chair and plenty of time to kill.

But on a mobile phone when you are making a snap decision as to where to take your date – or maybe you are just looking for the street address – these bells and whistles just don’t cut it. In fact they get in the way.

Next week you’ll see why the collection was so important to have working on mobiles . . .

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Twitter and upcoming presentations and workshops

February 24th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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As many of you know I’ve got a large number of workshops and presentations coming up.

Next week I’m speaking at the State Library of NSW’s Perceptions and Connections conference then later in the week running two workshops on metrics and giving a presentation at the Transformations in Cultural and Scientific Communication conference in Melbourne. A little later it is Museums and the Web 2009 and then Museums Australia.

Now I can almost be certain that I and a lot of other presenters these days are coming to terms with the #backchannel. Twitter is suddenly taking off in an almost mass culture big way and this year at MW09 you can be sure it is going to be almost ubiquitous.

The question then is, how does a presenter cope with mass Twittering?

Olivia Mitchell has some good ideas – both for presenter and audience. Here’s an excerpt.

1. Ask a friend or colleague, or a volunteer from the audience to monitor the back channel and interrupt you if there are any questions or comments that need to be addressed. Jeffrey Veen calls this person an ombudsman for the audience.

2. If you can’t find someone to take on this role take breaks – say every 10 mins – to check Twitter. Robert Scoble calls this taking a twitter break. You can combine this with asking the audience for “out-loud” questions as well. It’s good practice to stop for questions throughout your presentation – rather than leaving questions till the end.

3. If you’re courageous and know your content backwards, display the back channel on a screen that everyone (including you) can see. This is potentially distracting for you and has the downside in that the visibility it provides can provoke silly tweets from some (eg: “Hi Mom”). But it does mean that you can react immediately to any issues. Spend some time at the beginning of your presentation explaining to your audience how you will respond to the twitter stream and audience members are more likely to use it responsibly.

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Mapping your social network

February 24th, 2009 by Seb Chan
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What you see above is a map of my Facebook friends and their interconnections. The core mesh shows the tight interlinking of my social friends who I went to university with or are involved in some way in musical pursuits. The smaller, less dense cluster to the right are my ‘museum tech’ acquaintances – drawn from all over the globe and less connected to each other.

There’s been quite a few Facebook applications that have offered simpler maps but Nexus is probably the best as it lets you navigate your network and explore similarities and visualise your network map in different ways. (Like any Facebook app, read the Terms of Service first).

How diverse is the social network map of your organisation’s fans/friends?

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Sydney Observatory and astrometry bots

February 22nd, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Over at the Sydney Observatory blog you can read about our astronomy curator’s experiments with the ‘astrotagging bot’ behind the Astrometry project and group on Flickr.

Today 20 February 2009 (Sydney time) the above image and five others were posted on the image sharing website Flickr here. Within a few minutes astrometry.net found the image and analysed it to provide full details such as the astronomical coordinates of the image centre, its scale, its orientation and marked the main objects visible on the image.

About the Astronometry project –

The removal of astrometry as a barrier to using legacy and badly archived (or not archived) data will greatly extend astronomical time baselines into the past, and greatly increase time sampling for sources all over the sky. It facilitates work with distributed, heterogeneous data sets. It also provides a channel for professional and amateur astronomers to collaborate, as the installation of correct WCS makes currently hard-to-access amateur imaging data interoperable with professional projects.

It is a quite amazing use of citizen-contributed data (via photographs of the night sky) to hard science. The use of Flickr as a data source is quite magical – read the interview with Christopher Stumm from the Astrometry project.

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The Powerhouse Museum library now blogs

February 22nd, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Another thing I’ve neglected to mention is that our Research Library now has a blog. They are the fourth internal unit to blog publicly about their day to day work (joining our Image Services and Photography team, Conservation team, and of course the Digital group – which you are reading now).

The Library is home to a great collection of books and journals with a particular speciality in design all of which can be browsed in a ‘research visit’. Other libraries can make an inter-library loan request.

The Library is a bit of a hidden treasure known primarily to researchers, although we do a brisk trade for design students doing courses at the nearby UTS. The blog is intended to document some of the results of the ’specialist research services’ our reference librarians undertake. This research is often fascinating and has, until now, been locked away in monthly reports and the like.

Now we hope some of the great discoveries and interesting people – filmmakers, designers, writers – who ask our library to undertake research for them, will be revealed to the public.

Enjoy another side to the Museum’s research work and services.

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Attempts at quantifying social behaviour in the Commons

February 22nd, 2009 by Seb Chan
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Over at the fantastic Indicommons blog there has been a flurry of activity around generating data from the various collections in the Commons on Flickr.

Patrick Peccatte initially posted on his blog a set of figures extracted using the Flickr API across the institutions in the Commons. Patrick has reworked these figures a little and they’ve been re-blogged on Indicommons.

The Powerhouse Museum figures work out like this – (as on Feb 7/8)

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia

Launched on 7 April 2008, currently has 1,101 photos in 27 sets.
1,464 comments,for an average of 1.33 per photo. Max = 97
4,619 tags, for an average of 4.20 per photo. Max = 34
305 notes, for an average of 0.28 per photo. Max = 19
Images with no social behaviour (identified in a separate post) – 336 out of 1,101 (30%)

(source: Patrick Peccatte)

Incidentally these images have been viewed just over 600,000 times at the time Patrick generated the data – which gives some indication of the participation rate (0.2% comment/view rate).

Now as with any quantitative measures these figures have problems. For some institutions the way the Flickr API extracts and reports data has been an issue. But for us these figures are useful given the very Australian and Sydney-centric content of images we’ve been uploading.

Anecdotally we’ve seen a huge increase in viewing as our relatively geographically-specific images have been exposed more widely by Indicommons and others.

Some questions worth exploring further –

- Who is doing the commenting, tagging and note additions?
- Are the repeat viewers?
- How diverse are they? Is it a lot of people doing a little, or, a few people doing a lot?
- Do those who ‘participate’ become ‘contacts’ (do they want to stay notified of future uploads?)

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