To summarise an event that was so packed with valuable information, insights and discussions is quite the challenge and I am aware that this blog post is much longer than any blog post should be. So please follow the quick links to the different sections of the post below to get straight to the information you are looking for, or, if you must, read it all.

Keynote Address
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Museums in a Digital Nation – Keynote

Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the Collections Trust

In his keynote address Nick Poole described his vision for museums as institutions that can help society to reconnect with itself. They should be accessible through a wide range of media, but should also provide high quality interaction between real objects and real people. While describing the strength and importance of museums, he also emphasised that it will be necessary to find alternative ways of funding in order to step away from the current situation of government dependency. His speech didn’t hide his strong conviction that museums can make money and should make money with their digital and online activities. These activities, according to Nick Poole should be aimed at satisfying audience needs, rather than provide what we think visitors want. Additionally, the use of technology should no longer be regarded as an ‘add-on’ to our existing programmes and activities. Our audiences are becoming more confident in using technology and this technology becomes easier to use and access at a fast rate. Museums have to adapt themselves to these changes, and develop products that can compete with commercial standards. However, no museums will be able to achieve this alone. Therefore, Nick encouraged us to collaborate within and outside our own field of work, we have to share our experiences and knowledge and be open about our lessons learned and the methods that we used. In his speech he seemed to advocate an all for one and one for all approach, encouraging ‘museum techies’ to fight the necessary battles within their own organisation, but to also look beyond the walls of their own museums in order to join forces and rise to the challenge together.

Nick Poole’s complete speech can be found on the Open Culture blog.

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Fund Imaginatively

Online Fundraising
Alex Morrison (Managing Director, Cogapp)
Alex Morrison talked about the opportunities of online fundraising. With 30.1 million adults in the UK accessing the Internet on an (almost) daily basis there is a very large potential online audience. What is even more interesting is that a large part of this audience is comfortable with making online donations. The UK website Just Giving makes it possible for people to raise funds online for their charity and currently has 12 million personal accounts. On average the charities represented on here raise £77,000 each, although some charities raise much more and others considerably less. Currently very few museums and galleries are represented on Just Giving, and Alex believes that using Just Giving could offer interesting funding opportunities for the museum sector.

Using a case study of the online archive and collections related to the Airborne Forces. Alex continued to describe how museums could build successful online donation opportunities into their website. With regards to the design of the donation form, he referred to a paper by Jakob Nielsen. When it comes to the content of the form his two tips were: Make it easy for people to engage and make it easy to give. Originally, people who wanted to use the online collections and archive of the airborne forces museum had to pay a registration fee. However, this didn’t prove successful. After changing this to free registration and an optional donation it turned out that 5% of the registered users made a donation with an average of £15 per donation and sometimes even more than one donation per user. Because many people register to use the service, the museum can contact the remaining 95% of its registered users to keep them informed on the work that can be done with the use of donations, encouraging them to make a donation as well. The aim is to make the service, including its staff, self-sufficient through the use of the donation scheme.

The presentation, as well as a list of useful statistics and other Cogapp presentations are available online.

Tate Online
John Stack (Head of Tate Online)
John Stack discussed how various teams worked together on the Gaugain exhibition to create a coherent online experience for their visitors and to raise the revenue generated through the website. Like Alex Morrison, John emphasises the importance of visitor engagement. Visitors that feel engaged with a museum or exhibition are more likely to donate. John described three ways in which Tate’s web presence can generate income. Besides donating money, visitors can also purchase products through the online shop. Additionally, through targeted advertisement people are encouraged to visit the exhibition, which has an entrance fee. The online team, curators and marketing department have worked together to create an online environment in which people are stimulated to use one or more of these opportunities to donate or spend money. The exhibition has its own webpage, but instead of making this a highly designed (and expensive) page, it is kept relatively simple and is backed up by a wider web-presence for the exhibition. For example, people that have visited the Tate website will find banners for the Gaugain exhibition on Google and Facebook and instead of an automatically generated newsletter subscribers will receive a more personal message from a curator. Additionally, the exhibition curator has a blog on which she regularly publishes new posts. Just like the Airborne Forces Museum, Tate stimulates visitors to their website to register. After their physical visit to the museum people will automatically receive a request to review the exhibition, with the aim to keep them engaged after their visit and to stimulate them to be an advocate for the exhibition and the museum in their online communities. Although this wider web presence seems successful, John acknowledged that the curator’s engagement meant that more tasks were added to her workload. It was interesting to see how two museums that were very different seemed to benefit from using the same approach to generating online funding. Encouraging people to register on the website and providing them with an engaging online experience, rather than using more traditional marketing tools seemed to be the key points in both museums’ approach.

John’s presentation can be found on slideshare.

From grant funding to online funding
Martin Bazley (Online Experience Consultant, Martin Bazley & Associates): & Peter Pavement, (Director, Surface Impression)
Martin Bazley & Peter Pavement approached the issue of funding from a slightly different angle. They have developed an online learning resource called MyLearning which makes it possible for content providers, like schools and museums, to create their own online learning resources. It is designed so that teachers can easily grab content from the website and leave again, because studies have shown that this is often how teachers work. A current aim for the project is to make it a national rather than local resource, which means it will be accessible for a wider range of content providers. Additionally searchability and findability of the different types of resources can be made more coherent, with links to Culture24 and Europeana as a result. This project was commissioned and funded by Renaissance Yorkshire and funding will probably be in place for another two years. However, when this runs out another funding model should be in place to fill the gap. In theory, schools could be charged for using the website and research has shown that they would be willing to do so. The bottleneck here lies with the actual process of registration and payment, which is something most teachers are not willing to spend time on. Therefore, in this case Martin and Peter suggested that it would be more effective to find external funding for the project. Securing funding is something that could be done by either a freelancer, an agency or by somebody within the organization.

Because finding and securing funding can be a laborious process with uncertain outcomes, it can be difficult to predict how much money will eventually be available for the project. A way to solve this problem could be the use of the Income Pipeline model. In this model all (possible) funding for the project gets classified based on the various phases of the funding process. Is the funding merely an opportunity, are you in the process of discussing the opportunities with the possible funder, has a proposal been written, are you awaiting a decision or has the funding been awarded? All these phases of the process are then awarded a percentage, representing the likelihood the funding will be received. When a funding opportunity is being discussed with a possible funder, there is a relatively small chance the funding will indeed be awarded. Of all the discussions held with possible funders, maybe one in 10 will prove to be successful. This can be translated to a likelihood of 10% for any funding that is being negotiated. For funding that has been awarded, the likelihood of receiving it is close to 100%. By adding up all the funding in the various categories and multiplying it by the likelihood percentage, it is possible to predict the total amount of funding that can be secured for a project. This process works well if you are trying to secure funding on an ongoing basis and have the opportunity to pursue large numbers of funding opportunities. With a small number of opportunities the percentages are less usable. Possible ways of funding a project like MyLearning are public funding, grant funding, revenue income through a commissioning structure and the use of advertisements through websites like Adify.

After this presentation questions from the audience focused on the fact that charities already have much more experience in online fundraising than museums and the issue of collaborating in the fundraising process. Is it possible for museums to work together on this point?

Keynote Address by Nick Poole (Chief Executive, Collections Trust)
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Collaborate Creatively

Partnerships between museums and communities
Angelina Russo, Associate Professor, RMIT University, Melbourne andwww.museum3.org)
Angelina Russo has been working on collaborative projects for several years and in her experience museums today are less anxious to work together than several years ago. Funding models often support collaboration, although they are, according to Joanna, not necessarily designed to support sharing resources and outcomes amongst museums. Angelina was involved in setting up Museum3. This online space was originally developed as a space where museum professionals could share knowledge and develop new partnerships. Users can create a profile and join in discussions on the forum and respond to blog posts. Just like MyLearning, Museum3 originally received funding, but when this funding ended a new model to generate income was needed, or it wouldn’t be possible to maintain the website. After positive feedback from the community, the decision was made to reshape Museum3 into a ‘real’ organisation. The constitution was written together with the community. To generate income users are encouraged to become paying associate members and this model seems to be a success. Angelina stressed the importance of finding ways to engage and creating possibilities to participates in ways that are not one-off projects. By stimulating ongoing engagement, museums can demonstrate their value to their community. As an example she mentioned the possibility to work with communities of ‘makers’, like people involved in arts and crafts, but also movements as DIY Citizenship. Additionally, Angelina encouraged museums to look for unexpected partnerships, like the partnership with the Australian Football League she was involved in and which was funded for entirely by the Football League, without the need of any government funding.

Partnership with BT
Joanna Pollock (Knowledge Transfer Strategy and Development Manager, Arts and Humanities Research Council, John Seton (Head of Regional Strategic Partnerships, BT Innovate and Design)
John Seton introduced the work of BT Innovate and Design. At their offices, which John described as “100 acres of nerds” BT Innovate and Design are doing research in collaboration with universities, governments and customers. The main strand of research looks at creating faster networks and the uses customers could and would have for them. Where it’s relatively easy for BT to find and approach big organisations, they also want to work together with smaller institutions. BT works together with a wide variety of clients and in the past had worked on digital heritage projects in an EU context. In order to do more research on this subject in the UK, BT has been collaborating with AHRC. The AHRC brokered a workshop that enabled BT to get in contact with organisations from the arts and heritage sector. With the use of AHRC funding for collaborative research networks, five of these networks formed a research community around the use of digital media in a museum and heritage context.

Although these five networks each did their own strand of research, they got together regularly and discussed and shared progress, outcomes and information on their projects. One of these projects was LIVE!Museum, which was launched at UKMW09. According to Ross Parry, what was special with these projects was that the research questions rose from within the museum community, rather than from the academic field. It also released the potential of the Museum Computers Group as a place where people can meet and collaborate. This collaboration with AHRC has provided BT with a wealth of new contacts within the arts and heritage sector from University College Falmouth, to a number of Welsh Museums and from the Science Museum to Goldsmiths. BT is hoping to continue this kind of collaboration in the future and is hoping to make use of future AHRC calls for funding to further their collaboration with the heritage sector.

John’s presentation can be found on slideshare

Variables and must-haves for successful collaboration
Kevin Walker (Research Officer, London Knowledge Lab)
Kevin Walker discussed various possible models for successful partnerships, but emphasised that a consistent vision was key for any form of collaboration. As an example he mentioned A History of the World in 100 Object, the successful collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum which was very much shaped by Neil MacGregor’s vision. He also briefly spoke about projects he worked on at Kew Gardens, Centre Pompidou and the Foundling Museum. By discussing this wide range of projects, a number of variables became discernible: has the end product one voice, or many voices? Does it involve a large number of objects, a few or just one? And how many stories are being told? For example, can visitors all give their own interpretation of an object or is there one very clear story line? These variables might be useful to create a clear outline of a project from the beginning. Besides these variables, Kevin also discussed a number of elements that he deemed crucial for a successful collaboration. Firstly, the clear single vision can bring consistency and makes clear branding possible. Secondly, working with a commercial partner can guarantee quality of technology and design. And lastly projects that are education-led tend to be more successful that the ones that are led by technology. It avoids the “we should do something with pda’s/tablets/wifi/qr-codes” trap and allows the museum to question its needs, before deciding what technology to use.

Kevin’s presentation led to a discussion on the role of story telling in museums. Kevin stressed that story telling should always aim to help visitors connect with the museum and its collections and Angelina drew attention to the fact that Neil MacGregor spoke about museums as cultural broadcasters and curators as cultural publishers. This challenges the way some museums and curators perceive their role.

Keynote Address by Nick Poole (Chief Executive, Collections Trust)
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Aggregate Smartly

Europeana
Jill Cousins (Executive Director, Europeana)
Jill Cousins talked about how Europeana aims to bring museums, archives, audio and visual collections together in Europe by aggregating the aggregators. In 2008 a prototype was launched and what started with 2 national aggregators has grown out to a database that is being fed by 28 national aggregators with over 1000 participating institutions. So far there has been no marketing campaign for Europeana and instead of actively collecting data, Europeana is trying to convince aggregators to feed into the database. This makes standardisation easier, but it is still challenging to overcome issues relating linked data, data enrichment and multilingualism of the system. To avoid broken links, a persistent identifier is needed. Instead of copying the actual content, Europeana only keeps the metadata on its server and one of the goals for the future is to make this metadata interlinked open data. The current agreement that the content is for non-commercial use only means that it is not possible to share content with Wikipedia. Currently Europeana is working on Collective Licensing and a structure that can provide participating organisations with fair compensation. The goal for Europeana is to distribute, facilitate, aggregate and encourage people to engage with the content, because they believe access to culture nurtures creativity, which can stimulate growth.

The slides for this presentation can be found on Slideshare.

The importance of online collections
Linda Ellis (Project Manager Online Collections, Wolverhampton City Council / Black Country History) and James Grimster (Director, Orangeleaf Systems Ltd)
Linda Ellis and James Grimster talked about their project that aimed to open up the collections of the Black Country, but also looked at the challenges museums face when it comes to engaging online communities. As James put it poignantly: More people farm electric sheep in Farmville than use digital collections. Why are people willing to become a mayor of a car park with foursquare, but are they not consulting our databases as often as they could?

Black Country History aims to make collections of institutions in the region accessible to an informed audience in a way that is Google-friendly and cost-efficient. It is trying to reach its audience through a main website, microsites that are all aimed at different target audiences and through social networking tools. The content is being delivered by four museums and four archives and currently +127800 records are available. Besides these eight partners, another eight parties are involved in the project. Because the records are aggregated from different databases issues with regards to terminology, spelling, data quality and missing data had to be overcome. The use of different date formats in the various collection management systems also proved to be a problem. The content that is available on Black Country History is also available through CultureGrid and Europeana. It is also part of a wider project called Digital Midlands which provides access to a quarter of a million records.

James drew attention to an issue that is not only of importance for the Black Country History project, but will probably resonate with many museums that are working with online collections: how can we show our importance to the online community? Can we create an environment where people can earn virtual rewards or do location based treasure hunts? Should it be possible to digitally discover your local area during a sponsored pub crawl? James is interested to find out in what ways other museums have tried to engage online audiences with their collections. What are the experiences? What works and what doesn’t?

After this presentation there was a discussion on finding new ways to engage users with our collections. Linda Ellis mentioned how they were looking into the possibility of letting people comment on the objects and their information and Jill Cousins described how some museums try to engage people through their passion for a certain subject. Laura Whitton from Collections Trust suggested that maybe museums shouldn’t be suggesting new uses of their collections, but that they should encourage users to be creative. She referred to the hack day that will be hosted in the Midlands. In response to this Jill mentioned how some museums themselves still need to be convinced of the importance of opening up collections online, because they fear loosing income in the future. Any comments or thoughts on this subject (or any others mentioned in this blog post) are more than welcome.

Keynote Address by Nick Poole (Chief Executive, Collections Trust)
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New Media in the Museum of London
Paul Clifford (Programme Manager (Digital Learning), Museum of London)
At the end of a very long day filled with little geek talk, but mainly inspirational examples and useful tips, Paul Clifford talked about the use of digital media in the Museum of London. The Museum of London tries to use open source software where possible, to make it possible for visitors and school groups to use the same software at home or at school. As an example he mentioned easy to use digital cameras (such asFlip cameras and Prezi as an alternative for Powerpoint. Because there is only a limited amount of time available for a blended learning session in the museum, any software and hardware that is used during these sessions must be easy to use. The Museum of London has an impressive array of gadgets and software available, from digital cameras, interactive whiteboards and QR barcodes to Bluetooth, WIFI and WordPress. However, Paul emphasised that “It is not what you’ve got, it’s how you use it that counts.” He encouraged us to take time to play with open source software and to “build fast, build cheap and build often.” With products and services being updated and improved all the time, we have to change the way we work. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” Paul advised. It seemed like his boundless enthusiasm and energy rubbed off and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people present at the conference have since taken up his advice and are testing out new cheap and easy ways of introducing digital media into their museums.

How open source influences our way of working
Mark Polishook (Open Source artist)
After Paul’s enthusiastic talk, Mark Polishook talked about how the use of open source can change the way we work. He described how, when he first started using open source, he felt it was easier to collaborate with a wide range of different people. Everybody was keen to share their knowledge and experience with others using the same open source software. According to Mark, because of this open source seems to foster collaboration much more than conventional software. Because everybody can change and add to open source, we are also more likely to have a deeper sense of ownership. The traditional: “What does it do?” makes place for a new question: “Can we make it do this?” This characteristic of open source was described by Mark as potential energy. Where open source can help different departments within an organisation work together, it can also be a battle to convince colleagues of the use of new working methods and software. Introducing open source is often hard work and Mark warned us that we have to seriously consider the risks of stimulating change. Introducing a piece of software that doesn’t work well within the organisation may put colleagues off using open source all together. With this message the presentations of Paul and Mark counterbalanced each other perfectly. Wonderful things can be achieved when using open source, but it will require organisational change, which always bring its own challenges with it.

Open Source and Open University
Trevor Collins (Research Fellow, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University) & John Lea (Open University)
In the last presentation of the day, Trevor Collins and John Lea again emphasised the positive aspects of open source. It is generally quick to install, it is tried and tested, easy to use and reliable. They described a photo competition they organised in a museum during which teams of children had to take three photographs, each of another pre-determined topic, within an hour. These pictures where then shared and discussed. To establish a network in the museum, they used an open source web server on one of their computers. When they were explaining how this server worked, I realised that a certain amount of geekiness is sometimes still required, no matter how user-friendly software has become these last few years. But then again, maybe that’s just me. And I must admit that throughout the day there had been very little ‘geek talk’ indeed. It seems like we have really come to a point where everybody can get involved and I certainly intend to follow Paul Clifford’s advice and play more.

Keynote Address by Nick Poole (Chief Executive, Collections Trust)
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Open Mic

It is a UKMW tradition to have an energising session in the day where, through a series of super short ‘micro presentations’, members from the floor have just 4 minutes to update on a project, call for partners, pitch an idea, ask for support, highlight a new initiative, or just contribute to the event and the life of the MCG more widely.

Danny Birchall from the Wellcome Collection talked about Things, a recent participatory event that was held at the Wellcome Collection. Visitors were encouraged to add to the collection by bringing in anything they thought valuable or special during the bring-a-thing-athon. The only rule was: It can’t be bigger than your head. All things were accessioned (either temporary or permanent), displayed and photographed. Volunteers then added the pictures and any additional information to the Wellcome Collection website, using Flickr. Displaying the objects online as well as in the exhibition space gave the objects and the project much more visibility. By using a well-known and free system like Flickr meant little training was needed and the project could be run with limited costs. Finally, working with artists provided a chance to experiment and to work outside the boundaries of normal institutional procedures.

Charlotte Connelly described the Public History of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine project at the Science Museum. Since the late 90’s the Science Museum has been rethinking the way it talked about science. A more participatory approach was introduced for developing new exhibitions and with the Public History project the museum wants to introduce this way of working in the more historical galleries. A workshop on co-curation and Social History was held in the museum during which various museums came to share their experience with co-curation. For more information on this workshop, you can visit the wiki. With a couple of one-off exhibitions and events the museum wants to investigate how it can give audiences more chances to participate and how it can use the web to encourage visitors to create content and help the museum to improve its knowledge about the collections. The first exhibition will aim to have visitors engage with one iconic object from the museum’s collections: an early music synthesizer, whose samples could me made available online for visitors to remix.

Oliver Vickers-Harris is a consultant who worked on the Louis Vuitton Young Arts project. This project is the digital expression of a wide-ranging education programme, which has three key themes: Collaboration, integration and co-creation. Five galleries worked together with Louis Vuitton, which was a partner as well as the sponsor. The online presence was to be integrated in other activities the partner organisations were already undertaking. The young people who worked on the project were seen as the ‘key client’ and their ideas fuelled the project. They also decided on the project name and brand. Crowd sourcing was used to express the project’s identity. Of course, working with multiple partners as well as young people was a challenge, but it was also a great opportunity. Oliver believes that it will become more common in the future to work in this way.

Simon Ford works at Prescient Software a tech start-up specialising in using linked data. They are working on a project that uses intuitive thinking patterns of users to enhance the flexibility and future proofing of web content. Users will be better able to define their own journeys, which will make it possible to increase the stickiness of content. It gives people the opportunity to search through databases using filters and database queries. It uses the concept that ‘navigation is the data’ in creating a web environment for users. Simon was interested to find out if the delegates thought this could have a useful application in a museum context.

Gemma Sturtridge works at the Museum of Croydon, a local authority museum that is threatened by closure due to government cuts. She was wondering what MCG members could do to assist museums in similar situations. She suggested to create a statement about the importance of digital heritage, which can then be shared by museums as a tool to prove their relevance and importance. It is agreed that members that are interested can develop this statement together. Gemma will write a draft version. After the conference there has been a discussion about this advocacy statement on the MCG website.

Keynote Address by Nick Poole (Chief Executive, Collections Trust)
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Peter James, IT coordinator at the museum, started the proceedings with an overview of the museum’s IT strategy. The current process – which took 2 years to complete – began with an independent review by CCTA of the museum’s IT provision which uncovered a familiar story of lack of understanding by the existing IT section of the fundamental requirements of the museum users, no practical service level agreement, and a mish-mash of unrelated software and hardware. The CCTA recommended that the museum acquire and implement:

• • Client-server architecture
  • LAN and WAN
  • Image capability
  • Windows-type software
  • Industry standard hardware, communications and operating systems
  • A standard for support and maintenance.

The office and collections tools of choice were

• • An office automation suite (e.g. Microsoft Office)
  • Specialist collections management software
  • Specialist Library Management software
  • Internet connection

The museum then embarked on three separate procurements:

• • A main service provider to supply project management, up-to-date IT knowledge and IT support.
  • Collections information and management system
  • Library and archives management system

The project team was composed of members from all business areas and issued a definition of service requirements in November 1994. There were 75 responses to the European Journal advertisement for a service provider and 33 serious follow-ups. Data Sciences UK was finally chosen from a shortlist of 6. They recommended Netware, Windows for Workgroups (“since Microsoft were not being entirely honest about the future of Windows 95″), and Microsoft Office. Hardware was supplied by Data Sciences on a lease-lend basis over three years. The service contract is for 3 years after which a review will result either in a new contract or a new procurement.

The software requirements were sent to 9 possible suppliers, with the final choice of collections information and management software being Willoughby Systems’ Multi-MIMSY (MM) via their UK agent Lusis (which has grown from the Heritage Services section of the Welsh Water Board’s IT department). Agreement was reached only 2 weeks prior to the MCG meeting. The Library and Archive system (of which the choice was Oracle Library) had to be postponed following budget cuts and the library will be catalogued using the bibliographical capability of MM instead.

Expected benefits of the new systems include:

• • Improved communications and document transfer (e-mail, fax, Internet)
  • Common training programs
  • Improved information handling
  • Help desk on site
  • Access to trained experienced IT professionals
  • A monitored service level agreement

IT is now managed by a centralized IT Steering Committee which ensures that business needs are met; that value for money is obtained (via a newly-centralized IT budget); agrees priorities and a common policy framework; and monitors development work. Future plans include an image archive, Internet and Intranet (a web page is to be launched in 2-3 months), public access facilities in galleries (including touch screen access), multimedia publishing, and data-voice integration.

Richard Avery of Data Sciences (a subsidiary of IBM) presented the case for outsourcing – a term they had invented. Major benefits are considered to include cost saving, allowing existing resources to focus on core business needs, and access to emerging technologies and knowledge of existing ones. (For more information on the company see http://www.DataSci.co.uk.) Paul Duggan, the Data Sciences MOL account manager, commented on the basics of a successful procurement: a good statement of requirements, and a thorough audit of the existing system. It is also essential to get high-level support for the project.

It was too early to say yet what major benefits the procurement had brought. E-mail was an instant hit, but users were still getting to grips with the other software. A questionnaire had been circulated to gauge user satisfaction. In answer to queries from the floor, Richard affirmed that out-sourcing was not to be feared and that the presence of the CCTA analysis was vital to the success of the project, however, those going down this path must be prepared to pay accordingly for such detailed analysis.

Andrew Roberts described the background and planning required for the project. The MOL is looking to catalogue and manage some 185,000 objects in its core collections, a large archaeological archive, the Docklands Museum Project, nearly 400,000 photographs and ephemera items and the museum library of over 25,0000 books. The MOL’s information systems and documentation procedures were reviewed in 1989 and 1992. Some of the latter shortcomings were addressed by the installation of a Documentation Officer and Registrar in 1993, but problems with the existing IT solutions continued to grow. The in-house system did not offer a long-term solution; furthermore the development of a new in-house system was seen as too expensive and risky. A review by the CCTA recommended separate collection and library applications, and standardised hardware and office software. In June-November 1994 a detailed Operational Requirement (OR) was drawn up by a working group of lead users who examined the museum’s documentation and collection management objectives in the light of the experience of other museums, the LASSI proposals, and national documentation standards. Of the final list of functional requirements, 111 were flagged as mandatory, 104 highly desirable, and 127 medium to low desirable. The available packages were reviewed and a preliminary assessment made. The resulting shortlist of 9 vendors were sent the OR in November 1994. The responses were carefully analysed and evaluated. Only two products unequivocally provided the mandatory requirements, 4 failed. The final shortlist included Multi MIMSY and Advanced Argus. After a full analysis and detailed demonstrations the former emerged as the option of choice. It is an Oracle-based client-server application running under Microsoft Windows.

A major part of the process was data migration. Not only were there the object records to transfer, but many thousands of collections care, management and conservation records needed to be converted. Terminology standards needed to be decided upon and data cleaned to match the new requirements. Syntax and terms had to be standardised, and errors reduced. For example the 8,000 object names latterly in use have been reduced to 4-5,000 names, all matched to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus. The process took over 18 months. Rationalization of the names of places and persons offer even more of a challenge. During the transfer process some data had to be reassigned to new fields, and coded entries were expanded to full text. A great deal of customization has been found necessary to accommodate MOL data fields. MIMSY has many more fields than are actually required and care is necessary to ensure that different fields are not being used for what is essentially the same data.

Training for lead-users and initial training of end-users was still going on and it is anticipated that 6-9 months will be required to get to grips with the software. Target date for live use of the museum MIMSY database was July 1996.

Afternoon Sessions

After lunch, delegates were shown various aspects of the package by different members of staff. Delays in formalising the contract meant that the system had only been installed at the MOL the day before the MCG visit (!) and, owing to the so recent implementation of the package, and the staff’s understandable unfamiliarity with the software, these demonstrations often asked more questions than they answered. Nevertheless, the day was a very successful and interesting one, the venue and hospitality excellent, and MCG members will be very interested to hear more of this major development.

The final presentation was an update of the LASSI project by Alice Grant, Head of Collections Information at the Science Museum. The complexities of the LASSI Framework and Enabling Agreements were described, whereby the MGC and Willoughby contract together to provide an umbrella for consortium members who contract with the MCG to become an Authorized Demander and then contract direct with Willoughby via LUSIS, their UK agents, to acquire the product and arrange installs, data migration and training. Readers will not be surprised to learn that the development of these contacts took a long time and engaged the attentions of 8 museum services (each with their own legal departments), hosts of acronyms – including MGC, DNH and CCTA – Willoughby, Lusis, 16 solicitors, lots of money, time, and effort. This long-drawn-out process was illuminated by a wonderful edited photograph of the “other” Lassie with a gun to her head and the caption “Sign the contract or the dog gets it.” How we laughed…

Much work remained to be done on upgrading the product to the LASSI standard. The LASSI-compliant version of Multi MIMSY (version 2) will be available in the summer of this year.

Future plans at the NMSI were outlined, including exciting projects on public access for both real and virtual visitors with the aim of producing a multiple-use knowledge base, a £14m “imaging frontiers” project at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, the “Challenge of Materials” gallery, database and CD-ROM and virtual exhibition on the World Wide Web. Less sexy, but vital, background work included revised collections management procedures (with cross-fertilisation to Spectrum), and the development of a thorough names authority file.

User Friendly Terminology Control

You will be familiar with the term GIGO: garbage in – garbage out. A database will only be useful if its content is accurate, coherent and consistent. Sometimes non-specialists may enter information which leaves something to be desired. Even among period specialists, there can be a variety of terms used to denote the same object type. It is hardly surprising that confusion and frustration can ensue. The logic of the approach given below is intended to provide an example where terminology control can be helpful, rather than ogreish. Any implementation of terminology control that its worth its salt should not require detailed knowledge of the system or of its codes. Users should be able to enter natural language terms which enable searches.

Having inherited and laundered a stream of consciousness database of some 10,000 archaeological objects (described in ACN 34 and 36), it made sense to ensure that some form of checking at source was introduced wherever feasible. This task was facilitated (for specific item names) by the Bedfordshire Artefacts Typology (BAT) and generally (e.g. for period) by the National Archaeological Record (NAR) compiled by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments in England (RCHME).

An example BAT record from Luton Museum is shown below. The underlines show “Symbolic Data.”

“Symbolic data” is provided by the system rather than keyed in. For example Prehistoric Flint Tools is derived from the first element of the BAT code (15); adze (flint) is culled from a related record. In this example, the note field is used to remind users of period (using NAR abbreviations). With use, the BAT continues to expand as more objects are categorised and added. In time, objects may be listed under more than one category.

Every archaeological artefact on Luton Museum’s database is cross-checked by a BAT record. Data entry is both more structured and simplified. Use of standard terms, expansion of approved (NAR) and user-defined abbreviations have also been implemented. Thus if a user enters ne or neo into the Period field, it is automatically expanded to neolithic. If required the process can be reversed. If we need to target or group together types of artefact, the BAT makes it much simpler to do so. The BAT is implemented using Microsoft Access at Bedfordshire County Council, and Advanced Revelation (version 2.12) at Luton Museum.

Having implemented a synthesis of the BAT with the NAR at Luton, it was considered worthwhile to put into effect some form of consistency checking. To avoid anachronisms, a program was written to check period against simple and full name entries. As the BAT is a developing system, it was thought unwise to make the period checking mandatory. The program advises the user, rather than changing any information. It should be relatively straightforward to apply the same logic using any other programming language. Copies of the code are available upon request.

Listing of BAT for flint artefacts

References

Bedfordshire County Council Archaeology Service, The Bedfordshire Artefacts Typology, (unpublished paper).

Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments in England, Recording England’s Past, A Data Standard for the Extended National Archaeological Record, 1993.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Holly Duncan (Bedfordshire County Council Archaeology Service) for proof reading (and half rewriting) this article. The implementation of the program (to check names against period) is based upon information compiled by Dr Robin Holgate (Curator, Luton Museum Service), Holly Duncan and Carolyn Wingfield (formerly of Bedford Museum, now at Doncaster Museum). Any errors remain the responsibility of the author.

Mark M^cCall, Documentation Office, Luton Museum Service
Wardown Park, Luton LU2 7HA
(01582) 746750, Facsimile (01582) 746763

The autumn 1995 meeting of the group took place at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. We were treated to a very broad range of talks and demonstrations covering a wide selection of Kew’s operations.

First up, Ken Bailey explained the networking and hardware strategy at Kew, describing a dizzy range of impressive hardware (8 Novell servers, more than 800 PCs, 24 Macs, Data General Aviion server, 4 Unix workstations, fibre optic cabling etc etc). This is supported by a team of 4 programmers and 4 support staff. PACE and VMark Universe are used for most system development.

Mark Jackson then described the development of a multimedia system for visitors. Multimedia Toolkit software has been used to develop this system which it is to be networked around the gardens.

Steve Ruddy demonstrated the KewScape mapping system which provides a graphic representation of the gardens and collections. Data is taken from Kew’s Living Collections Database of 89,000 accessions held on the DG and displayed on a site map on a portable screen-based data collection unit (Gridpad). The Gridpad is used in the gardens, the AutoLisp software allowing plant records to be updated. AutoCAD is used to record 30 layers of information, including services, buildings and vegetation.

Milan Svanderlik of the Media Resources department explained how Kew is using Kodak PhotoCD to archive and access images. A database of images is being created using Kodak’s Shoebox software.

After lunch, Ken Bailey and Steve Ruddy reported on Kew’s World Wide Web pages and how these have been authored. The present trial system has been compiled largely from existing publicity and promotional material, but longterm aims are to distribute scientific information and to give outside access to Kew’s databases. (Kew’s Home page is at http://www.rbgkew.org.uk).

Francis Cook then talked about terminology standards, including the Dictionary of Plant Names and Genera and the taxonomic standards working group.

The last speaker, Liz Dauncey, gave an excellent presentation on Kew’s prize-winning identification system for poisonous plants, PLATO. This expert system has been developed in conjunction with the National Poisons Unit for use by medical professionals in hospitals. Your Chairperson was nominated (thanks guys) to prise apart an evil-looking specimen and use the system to identify deadly nightshade (A. belladonna). She also lived to see another day . . .

After tea (and frantic handwashing), a panel discussion ranged widely over the publication and sale of information and training. Internet and the production of Web pages (inevitably?) featured strongly. Thank you to the panel members, most of whom were persuaded into action at very short notice.

Many thanks to Bill Loader and the staff at Kew for organising such a fascinating and wide-ranging day – and an excellent meal the night before.

Fiona Marshall

ASK SEPASAL!

For the past three years the SEPASAL unit has been collating information about plants from the dry tropics that have been reported to be useful (in any way) but that have not been commercially exploited on a large scale. Information regarding life forms habit, life span, toxicity, economic importance, uses, environmental requirements (soil pH, salinity, moisture, altitude, frost tolerance and rainfall range) and distribution have been obtained where possible, and the information has been computerised so that SEPASAL can operate as an enquiry unit.

So what kind of questions can you ask the SEPASAL database? The computer can display:-

1) a list of all the useful plants in a particular geographical region

2) a list of all the plants in the dry tropics that have been found to be reportedly useful for sand dune stabilisation (or famine foods or thatching or any of the 600 or so other uses recognised)

3) a list of plants that are found in a particular geographical region that also have a specified use or uses

4) a list of plants that we have recorded that are in a particular plant family or genus

5) questions regarding habitat requirements can also be formulated eg lists of plants which occur in dry, wet or aquatic habitats or plants which are frost or salt tolerant or plants with preference for alkaline soils may be obtained

6) similarly it displays lists of plants with particular life form characteristics eg epiphyte, climbing shrubs, etc.

7) more complex questions can also be posed which combine life form, habitat requirements, uses and distribution eg lists of unarmed, evergreen, non-toxic shrubs that are useful for browse and which occur in Somalia can be provided.

Agenda

[The c1996 (?) note on the original MCG site said: 'This is only a partial record: an initial paper plus certain figures. If any members have retained more from the day please let us know. Figures are linked where present.']

Documentation and computerisation in the Museum

Documentation…continued

General documentation procedures

Documentation project 1977-1981

Documentation project 1977-1981 continued…

Documentation project staffing and finance

Documentation project developments

Documentation project developments cont…

Documentation project conclusions

References

Figure 1 – Equipment

Figure 2 – Software in use at Bristol

Figure 3 – Network plan for SIRIUS

Figure 1 – Acquisition documentation flow

NB 2009: if you find yourself transcribing this content, please consider copying and pasting it into a comment below so that everyone can benefit!

Spring 1986 meeting

Databases: STATUS, GENUS INDEX

A VERY BRIEF GUIDE TO STATUS

STATUS is an Information storage and retrieval package called by typing ISR on the computer. Within Status there are a number of different databases, which can all be accessed from any terminal.

Each database is divided into chapters. In Status each record is called an article. Each article is divided into Named Sections which may contain free text and/or Keyed Fields, and has an area designated as the title. Within a database, you can see the chapters by typing INDEX and the Named Sections and Keyed Fields by typing STRUCT (for structure).

Help on any command may be obtained from within Status by typing HELP command, eg HELP DISPLAY.

SEARCHING

1 . Status does not recognise any difference between capitals and lowercase letters; when searching you may use either.

2. To find an article or articles you want the basic commands are Q word? or SUBQ word?, where word is any word or phrase which will occur in the required articles. Q searches the Whole database while SUBQ dearths through articles already found by a prior Q or SUBQ command.

Examples:

• Q Quercus?
• SUBQ Mexico ?

3. More complicated searches may be done by using the characters ‘ + ‘ ( and ) ‘-’ (but not) or ‘,’ (or)

Examples:

• Q Australia + New Zealand ?
• Q Australia – New Zealand ?
• Q Australia , New Zealand ?

DISPLAYING

4. To see the articles retrieved type D n, where n is a list of the articles to be displayed. Omitting n will display the current article (usually the first on the retrieved list). ALL will display them all.

Examples:

• D
• D ALL

5. The command T will display the title only; it is used in the same way as D.