2005 The Digital Object - UK Museums and the Web: MCG

Abstracts and biographies

Publishing
Chair: Jon Pratty, Editor, 24 Hour Museum

How do leading mass market online publishers and web publishing technologists view the cultural web sector? The 24 Hour Museum support the view that developments like XML and RSS could radically change the way educational resources are discovered online and believe that museums urgently need to consider getting involved with these new waves of web technology.

Patrick Towell, Founder and Strategic Advisor of Simulacra and one of the leading thinkers on innovations in services and markets enabled and stimulated by digital media technologies. Peter Bale is Editorial Director of the new Tech and Net sections of the Times Online and the Sunday Times website, one of the UK's top news and technology web sections. Both have been invited to comment on how they see the sector.

Peter Bale, Online Editorial Director of The Times and The Sunday Times:
The Internet opens the doors of museums 24 hours a day and extends their catchment area to the world rather than their city or even neighbourhood. Net methods also open entirely new opportunities for the display and mining of information and may also challenge established notions of what people want from museums. The challenges faced by museums are comparable to those of the conventional media, particularly newspapers, as highly capitalised, centralised institutions trying to retain their audience against intense competition and also take advantage of the opportunities of reaching a much larger audience over the Net.

Patrick Towell, Simulacra:
The industrial revolution stimulated radical institutional reform in the public sector and rapid structural change to market. The information revolution is no less significant a change and yet our governments don't have the reforming zeal of the Victorians and markets are much more tightly regulated. Creating compelling and sustainable online cultural services requires a diversity of skills, significant investment and high levels of innovation. The way we fund, manage and evolve online cultural services needs to change - reflecting the realities of other online consumer brands, the complexity inherent in IT infrastructure and the need to come up with new ways to share and create knowledge.

Defining the Digital Object

Ross Parry [Powerpoint]

Biography

Dr. Ross Parry is Lecturer in Museums and New Media at the University of Leicester in the Department of Museum Studies – one of the largest and most well-respected museum studies programmes in the world. He is leading the development of Leicester's proposed new postgraduate degree programme in Digital Heritage. His research is interested in the relationship between new technology (including pre-digital technology) and the ways memory institutions such as museums manage information and display knowledge. He has spoken around the world to professional and academic audiences, and his work has appeared in material culture, computing and historical publications. He has just completed a piece with Dr. Andrew Sawyer on in-gallery digital interactive design for a new book Reshaping museum space: architecture, design, exhibitions (Routledge), and another with Nadia Arbach on museum e-learning for a forthcoming book from MIT called Digital Cultural Heritage. He is also compiling a new addition to the series of Leicester Readers in Museum Studies entitled Museums and New Media, as well as working on a computer-assisted study of a Renaissance exhibition space for the forthcoming edition of the Complete Works of Ben Jonson - to be published next year by Cambridge University Press. His main project, however, is a major book (to be published with Routledge) on the theories and histories of digital heritage.

Charlie Gere

Charlie will talk about the failure of the Tate Gallery to deal with net.art, an immaterial, distributed form of cultural production and the implications this failure has for the gallery in the digital age.

Biography

Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research in the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University, Chair of Computers and the History of Art (CHArt), and the Director of Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc... (CACHe), an AHRB-funded research project looking at the history of early British computer art. He is the author of Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002), and is currently undertaking research into the relation between art and speed from the early nineteenth century up to the present day, to be published as a book, Art, Time and Technology: Histories of the Disappearing Body, by Berg in 2005.

Accessing the Digital Object

MLA’s Web Accessibility Report (www.mla.gov.uk/action/learnacc/00access_03.asp) launched on 12 April 2005 is set to frame and focus discussions on web accessibility. Its key findings can be a summarised as:

Museum, library and archive websites are not very accessible to disabled people (approx 42% meet WAI guidelines Level 4)
Most access problems for disabled people can be fixed (the 11 most common problem types accounted for 68% of all problems encountered by disabled users)

Prof Helen Petrie from City University, who undertook the research will give detailed insights into the methodology and findings.

The accessibility of museum and gallery websites is about far more than meeting technical accessibility guidelines. In conversation with Marcus, Brian Kelly, UKOLN will sketch out key elements of a holistic model for web accessibility. Speakers and delegates will explore what it really takes to access the digital object. One of the answers contained in the Report’s recommendations is that online collections need to be presented and interpreted in ways that are accessible to specific groups of disabled people.

12 April was also the date when the Jodi Mattes Web Accessibility Awards for the most accessible museum, library and archive websites were announced. Marcus, who chaired the Panel of Judges, will enthuse about the finest qualities of Winners www.pewsey-heritage-centre.org.uk (Excellence with Low Budgets Award), www.milestones-museum.com (Commendation for Innovation) and www.imagine.org (Commendation for Technical Excellence). The biannual Awards are co-ordinated by MLA in partnership with Leicester University and the mcg.

Brian Kelly

Biography

Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus - an advisory post funded by the MLA and the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee). Brian advises the cultural heritage sector and the higher and further education communities on standards and best practices for the provision of Web-based services. One of Brian's particular areas of interests is in Web accessibility. Brian has written papers on accessibility for e-learning and will be giving a paper at the International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A) in Japan in May 2005 on "Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World". Brian is based at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management, located at the University of Bath.

Marcus Weisen, Health and Disability Adviser, MLA Council for Museums, Libraries and Archives

Biography

Marcus started working on access for disabled people in 1986, when he initiated “Blind People on the Move – Experiencing Oxford”, a cultural tourism tour for all the senses. As RNIB Arts Officer and Leisure Policy Officer (1987-2002), he promoted visually impaired artists, access to museums and theatres for visually impaired people and played an active part in the early developments of audio description on television. He joined MLA in 2002. Key commitments included the MLA Disability Portfolio and promoting the accessibility of museum, library and archive websites. He is Vice-President of Tactile Vision, an Italian educational charity which produces tactile books.

Digital technology - expensive substitute for the real thing, or
justifiable motivator for learning?

Martin Bazley:
This session will consider the benefits and downsides of using
videoconferencing, video, audio, web and other digital technologies to
stimulate learning. We will reveal the technical and other factors behind
setting up and delivering www.VictorianLearningJourney.org an interactive
learning programme for schools, running in its pilot phase Feb-May 05.

The semantic web for beginners

Mike Lowndes [Powerpoint]
A mostly non-techy introduction to possible semantic web futures, with examples of current developments and experiments, based on my own observation of this development. Contributions from the floor welcome: this will hopefully be an interactive discussion, as I try to tease out what Museums and virtual museum visitors could gain from the WWW MkII.

Biography

Dr. Mike Lowndes is Interactive Media Manager at the Natural History Museum, London, where he is responsible for the operational management and technical development of the website and intranet, and acts as technical advisory on e-applications to the Museum. Previously, he narrowly escaped from a career as a neuroanatomist by learning web skills while a Departmental Lecturer at Oxford University. Before that he spent seven years studying learning and memory: this however, did not lead to any improvements.

Ongoing interests are in content management [PDF], interoperablity and exposing the 'deep web', web analytics, 3D reconstruction and visualisation, and building content - rich websites.

Digital Rights Management and the Lifecycle of a Digital Object [Powerpoint]

Naomi Korn

Abstract

Within the context of the digital environment, rights issues are present within almost anything to do with digital content, from its creation, adaptation, reproduction, negotiation, dissemination and repackaging. It is therefore essential that in order to fully exploit digital content museums embed suitable mechanisms within their daily work to take account of these issues. This session will consider the role of rights issues within the lifecycle of the digital object and, in particular focus upon the role of suitable documentation and clearance procedures, the importance of licensing, how rights can be managed, protected and exploited.

Biography

Naomi is a freelance consultant specialising in copyright and licensing issues. She is an approved MDA trainer and has run training across the country for staff from museums, libraries, archives and the HE sector. Naomi is also the author of the MDA’s Copyright Essentials training module and copyright fact sheets, MINVERVA’s “Guide to Good Copyright Practice” as well as contributing to several articles and European projects. Naomi is currently the Secretary of the Museums Copyright Group, the former Copyright Officer of the Tate and worked for five years as an Assistant Curator of Archaeology. Naomi’s particular interests include digital rights management, tracing rights holders, developing strategic approaches to handling copyright, the development of IPR policies and rights exploitation.

Naomi can be contacted at naomi AT naomikorn.com and more about Naomi can be found at http://naomikorn.com

Managing the digital object
Best and future practice in digital object management and recording
Chair: Nick Poole, MDA

MDA is the UK's lead organisation in documentation and the management of information about collections. This session will look at the implications of recording and managing information about collections of digital objects in the context of the revised edition of the SPECTRUM standard. It will begin by exploring the parallels between the documentation of physical and digital objects, then go on to explore some of the deeper issues around born-digital and digitised media.

Gordon McKenna Powerpoint presentation

Ian Edelman

Engaging with the challenges facing small museums

As web manager of Hampshire Museums Service since 1998 and latterly the Council's Recreation and Heritage department, Ian Edelman had a wide experience of the benefits, perils and pitfalls of having a museums presence on the web. This session will be a relaxed look at some of the issues faced in creating, managing and maintaining a museum website, particularly for smaller museums faced with many competing needs. Delegates will be encouraged to share and discuss issues that they face and perhaps find solutions from others experiences