David Wilson Library, University of Leicester [campus map]

organised by the Museums Computer Group
sponsored by Culture 24

How (and why) should museums connect their online collections?

• Should museums pursue a policy of standardised and heavyweight national integration, or a mixed portfolio of more localised lightweight solutions?
• Should the sector continue to plan for users visiting museum Web sites, or is the future instead of more agnostic usage of distributed content?
• Might semantic technologies (rather than a ‘Semantic Web’) hold part of the answer?
• And what role is there for non-sector partners and specialist (perhaps commercial) Web services in making museum collections discoverable and useful online?

By drawing together an impressive range of national and international speakers, from academia, from industry and from the sector, this year’s UK Museums on the Web conference explores how a raft of new projects and initiatives are beginning to take museums into a new era of online integration.

Some slides and reports are still available online (plus photos on Flickr):

• Tom Loosemore – UKMW08 Keynote speech
• Making sense of cross-museum collections websites
• The Mashed Museum Event
• A collection of UKMW08 posts at Open Objects

There’s also a report on the Spring meeting at Open Objects, and the Autumn meeting at Making information work for us: the 2008 Museums Computer Group autumn meeting (with photos on Flickr).