fresh + new(er)

The most popular object in our online collection database is still a dress worn by Delta Goodrem.
I’ve previously written about how the popularity of this dress was driven in part by coverage on a number of Delta Goodrem fan forums. But this neglects the criticality of search. Google has always driven traffic to this object [...]

We’re very excited that we’ve won the gold award in the 2008 AAM Muse Awards in the category of ‘Online Presence’ for our collection database.
It is particularly exciting because for the Powerhouse the collection represents our core reason for being. The collection is not only what differentiates us from other institutions, but also what differentiates [...]

One of the popular sessions at MW2008 in Montreal was a double header featuring Frankie Roberto and myself talking about different approaches to data combining across multiple institutions.
Data combining was a bit of a theme this year with Mike Ellis, Brian Kelly and others talking mashups; Ross Parry, Eric Miller and Brian Sletten all [...]

Finally I’ve started to see more museums picking up the absurdly easy to implement Opensearch method of delivering a live search result from their website as RSS/XML.
The National Maritime Museum in the UK is one who has recently made their implementation of Opensearch available. Here’s a feed of a search of their collection for compasses.

Yes, you read that right. The Powerhouse Museum is the first museum to join the Commons on Flickr! And we’re excited because it went live today!
In the tradition of ’slow food’ we have decided to do a slow release of content with an initial 200 historic images of Sydney and surrounds available through the Commons [...]

Today we launched our new-look search results page for our collection database.
Finally we have been able to implement many of the minor UI changes that have been sitting in a long list of ‘fixes’ - fixes that have become more and more critical as we have added new types of search.
When a search is now [...]

Here’s some of the latest figures from our collection database for the calendar year 2007. Because our search tables run on a rolling 3 month basis we have had to wait until April to generate the results for 2007.
In 2007 there were 15,121,291 objects viewed in our collection database (including views on dHub and via [...]

Today we went live with another one of the new experimental features of our collection database - auto-generation of tags based on semantic parsing.
Throughout the Museum’s collection database you will now find, in the right hand column of the more recently acquired objects (see a quick sample list), a new cluster of content titled “Auto-generated [...]

Last year there was an incredible presentation at TED which featured a demonstration of Seadragon, a technology that Microsoft licensed and has continued to develop.
Whilst the BBC and others have been using the Seadragon spinoff Photosynth quite effectively, Seadragon itself seems to have the most immediate use within the cultural sector with our large [...]

The ever-busy crew at the Brooklyn Museum made live a nice and simple Facebook application called Artshare late in 2007.
This allows you to add selected objects from museum collections to your Facebook profile. These object images then link to your museum’s collection records, the idea being that people can effectively ‘friend’ objects in your collection, [...]

As promised some of the new features of our collection database have started to go live.
We have been spending a lot of time working through a range of legacy issues to do with how collection data is structured in our collection management system and how this affects the options for its more flexible use on [...]

Here’s a short piece from the NYT Tech Blog on how the New York Times is using realtime analysis of site search to improve results.
Regular readers will know that we’ve been doing this over at the Powerhouse on our OPAC for a long time. The principles are the same and the use of actual users [...]

Peter Brantley over at O’Reilly has put together a short post on his vision of the future of collections - specifically those held by university libraries - which should have resonance with those in collecting museums.

Another paper from the Steve researchers has gone online and is generating interesting discussions. It elaborates on the content of an earlier summary podcast. To be presented at ICHIM07 the paper describes some of the emerging patterns in tagging behaviour in the different interface trials.

Web Directions South 07 was lots of fun and there were some great presentations over the two days. Unfortunately conferences are always full of choices and I missed several presentations I’d been looking forward to catching. That said, overall the quality was high and there were only a handful of dull moments. Most of the [...]

Two weeks ago we made a simple ABC book for young children available on our children’s website. It is called ‘C is for collection‘ and is a very basic extension of our online collection built in Flash with an XML file supplying the necessary collection data allowing for easy expansion.
A longer term objective of [...]

We’ve added a whole range of new features to our OPAC that we think further enhance its usability.
Tooltips -
Each ‘feature’ on the search results and object view pages now has an explanatory tooltip. Given the OPAC has become quite complex and there is a lot going on on the screen now, we felt CSS [...]

Thank you to everyone who has been tagging the collection with our bulk tagging mini-application.
Since announcing it 2 weeks ago we’ve had 515 new tags added to previously untagged objects. That’s a lot.
If you are one of the many who have added some tags - thank you. If you haven’t tried it yet, then what [...]

Today we finished our long awaited ‘bulk tagging’ application.
I’d encourage you to give it a go and send us some feedback.
We are particularly interested in museum professionals and amateur collecting organisations adding tags in volume to our collection. The application currently targets the user tagging of objects in our collection that have not been [...]

Museums on the Web UK 2007 was held at the slightly rainy and chilly summer venue of the University of Leciester. Organised by the 24 Hour Museum and Dr Ross Parry with the Museums Computer Group the event was attended by about 100 museum web techies, content creators and policy makers.
As a one day conference [...]

I’m busy preparing a couple of new and remixed presentations for delivery in the northern hemisphere in the next few weeks and Tony Walker over at the ABC reminded me about this excellent summary of Participation Inequality by usability evangelist Jakob Nielsen.
How to Overcome Participation Inequality
You can’t.
The first step to dealing with participation inequality is [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion on the web about Microsoft’s Photosynth but this demonstration from TED really reveals the real possibilities. The image navigation opportunities offered by Seadragon are quite amazing but as Blaise Aguera y Arcas points out in the short demonstration, what a collective Photosynth experience offers is the ability for one [...]

We have added the first of a batch of videos to our collection database.
The first one features Tom Crawford, a former train driver who drove one of the locomotives in our collection discussing his experience.
Rather serendipitously Tom’s family made contact with the Museum and Irma Havlicek from the Web Services team organised for Tom [...]

How very exciting!
Our collection database comes in 16th place in Ross Dawson’s (Future Exploration Network) round up of the top 60 Web 2.0 applications developed in Australia over on Read/Write Web. Apparently we’re up amongst some of the real heavyweights and it is nice to be noticed outside of the cultural sector.
The sites are ranked [...]

Kalevi Kilkki from Nokia writes an interesting essay titled A practical model for analyzing long tails over at First Monday. For those anaysing how visitors dig into their websites, use their collections, this is useful reading.
This essay offers a dozen of examples of phenomenon, from books to square kilometers, that manifest themselves with a long [...]