I’d tried to make sure the event was open to linked data sceptics as well as the converted, and to people who worked in museums but didn’t consider themselves technical, so that the discussions could be grounded in the reality of quotidian museum work.  The original event page talked about who might come and why the meetup was being organised, but I’m not sure anyone quite knew what to expect.

After some time to introduce ourselves and mingle, we broke up into smaller groups to discuss topics suggested by the group. Topics included ‘find all paintings by Stubbs (or Boucher or Picasso)’, real world use cases and ‘what is useful for real people and audiences?’, ‘ useful types/formats of museum data’ and ‘interestingness’.

There were varying levels of experience with and understanding of linked data, so some discussions included an overview of what linked data meant to various people. You may be wondering yourself, so I’ve included Rhiannon’s description from her ‘interestingness’ group discussion:

Linked data means the idea that it would be really great if everyone (museums and anyone who has information in a digital format either about their collections or about their events) released it to an agreed standard so that developers could build really cool things with it that would be really useful to the general public in the real world.

Each discussion has been written up in more detail on a wiki page, Linking Museums write-up, and comments are still being added. If you’re interested in the technical discussion or helping out, that’s the best place to start.  I’ve summarised my thoughts briefly, and also included those of two other attendees, Gemma and Rhiannon, in order to bring the less geeky museum voice into the discussion.

Personally, I was delighted by how well it went.  The discussion was beautifully challenging and provoking, and I learnt how much people want our data to be out there for them to play with.  Getting a glimpse of how people saw museums was interesting (even when I felt I had to apologise for how slow we are at some things). Before the event I’d said I wanted to break out of the ‘chicken and egg’ problem of not knowing what format to publish in to reach a critical mass of potential users – the message I got very strongly from people there was:

stop worrying and start doing

It’s too soon to worry about formats, just get your data online – ideally as one structured page per ‘thing’, then link to other things. Include a licence so that people know whether or how they can use the data.

Talking to people who weren’t familiar with museum work forced me to examine assumptions I held about our audiences and our data. Explaining the contexts in which we worked – often with limited resources, and little time to experiment or think beyond the current project or task list – hopefully helped others understand why museums move slowly despite the best intentions of their staff.

To me, it also shows that we need to do a better job of outreach to tech people – they don’t know how to get in touch and offer to help, we’re still working out how we can make the most of their expertise and energy; but we also need to explain exactly how bad or messy some of our data is and why ‘just getting it all out there’ won’t necessarily help if a record consists only of an accession number.  You can help here – leave a comment with your favourite example of crap data in your collections database.

Gemma’s report

“Our group was given the fantastically broad title of interestingness or serendipity.  We spoke about the ways people could stumble across museum data or information. This developed into talking about how to keep people exploring data and staying on your site.

The ways people could come across your data hinged on making it accessible to developers, using a common language.  For example using thesauri such as Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) or Union List of Artist Names (ULAN).

Although there are difficulties in getting museum staff to agree on terminology or choosing a thesaurus, there are clear benefits to organising data in such a way.  For example drawing together works by the same artists.  We then speculated about the ways people would enjoy being able to search for all of an artist’s work using one site.  And how eventually they may even be able to select a work and order a print, thereby generating income for the institution.

We discussed how people enjoy playing games such as six degrees of separation, and how this could be a way of drawing in visitors to a site to see if, using museum data they could find ways of linking themselves to famous historic people or people associated with museum collections.  We speculated about tapping into the genealogical sector to attract people to such sites.

We spoke about foursquare type games where people can collect awards or keep people drilling down through data, and using metadata to keep them interested and continuing to search or play a game on your site.

I found the evening inspiring, and really enjoyed spending time with such knowledgeable techies who were so interested in using museum data.”

Rhiannon’s report

“I was a little nervous about attending this event because my knowledge of Linked Data was sketchy to say the least (I required, for instance, a refresher on what it actually meant!). I was persuaded to attend however and I’m glad that I did. 

I was on a table that was discussing ‘what might real people use it for’? There were about 8-10 of us on the table and I think the majority were coming at the question from a developer rather than a museum perspective.

I took a few things away with me which I hope sound more realistic than negative.  The first was that it seemed to me to be a great knowledge divide between the people who want the data and the people who have the data.  The message from developers was very much ‘we could do such cool stuff, it would be so useful to so many people, and would really benefit museums, why aren’t more museums publishing the data for us to do this?’  The immediate answer that sprung to my mind was ‘because they don’t know that they should be for a start’.  Now I’m not talking about bigger museums here, I’m possibly not even talking about London museums, but I’m talking about your regional museum, which might only have a couple of members of staff, or even, one voluntary curator who only comes in once a week.  It seems to me that those museums might not even think of themselves as having data, let alone know that other people might want it, or how to go about publishing it.  Even if they do know these basic things, they may have other worries.  We all know museum professionals who are still quite skeptical about digital, and about web 2.0, and about the risks to authority, copyright etc etc and it felt to me like there was a colossal amount of work to be done in explaining to these people why releasing their data would be a good thing.

There is also, however, a probably-equally important explanation that needs to happen (and this evening was very important towards that) so that the world of developers understands the worries of these museum professionals, which, whilst they can seem frustrating, are often very real and important.  There are also some very practical reasons why museum data just may not be in a state to be released either because it’s not that detailed, or because it’s not in a state to be made public, for whatever reason.

The second big thing I took away occurred once the discussions began to round up, when discussion turned to ‘so what are you going to do now?’  It seems to me that two key barriers that need to be overcome before any of us can effect any real change are a) the lack of influence and b) the lack of time that most people who believe that all this is a good idea has to actually influence any national or international change.  It may be that these things can change, but my feeling is that there is a lot of work to be done at this basic level before we can really start achieving the undoubtedly more exciting and useful goals that linked data could achieve.”

What next?

If you want to help get some more real examples out there in the wild, I’m trying to get some object pages published based on the suggestions, sample markup and concrete examples collected at Sample NMSI objects as Linked Data and Thoughts on linked data and the Science Museum.

If you want to ‘stop worrying and start doing’ there are also some good examples of use cases and possible solutions in the ‘What is useful for real people and audiences? (Use cases)’ section of the event summary.

The first event went so well that a number of people asked for another one – get in touch if you want to help, or organise one yourself if you’re feeling impatient! All you need is a space and some way to tell people about it.

The wiki is useful as a place for publishing information, but would a mailing list or some other way of working together also be useful?

Thanks

My thanks to Paul Rowe, whose visit to London inspired the timing, and Ian Davis, whose response to a tentative tweet reassured me that linked data people would be interested in meeting with museum people…  And more than anything, thanks to everyone who turned up and participated, and to those who’ve kept editing and commenting and sharing on the wiki.

About the writers

Gemma is Assistant Collections Officer, Croydon Museum Service. Rhiannon is E-Learning Officer (Web), Museum of London. Mia is Lead Web Developer, Science Museum. We’re all committee members for the Museums Computer Group.  Sign up to the MCG email list for discussions between museum, gallery and higher education professionals about the various uses of computing in museum contexts and advance notice of any future events.

Linda Spurdle

[This week's guest post is by Linda Spurdle, Online Resources Manager at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery]

I think I may be cheating to focus on my week in ‘cultural heritage online’ rather than any big news stories, but worries about budget cuts, the desire to develop innovative projects and the need to pursue funding have been my main concerns of the week.

On Tuesday I attended a funding surgery for the Digital Content Development Fund at Arts Council West Midlands. We discussed an idea that is in the early stages of research and development. I had hoped to make an application to JISC’s  Developing Community Collections Fund but JISC put this on ice in December 2009. This was because HEFCE decided to re-evaluate what it was going to fund in the light of cuts to their budget. The good news of the week is that this funding stream has now been reinstated. BMAG is working with the Interactive Cultures team at Birmingham City University to submit a proposal.

This week the news story broke that Birmingham City Council is to cut jobs, possibly including posts at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. These are difficult times for many museums but BMAG is extremely lucky to have some exciting projects in development, such as the Birmingham History Galleries project and the plan to acquire the Staffordshire Hoard.

Jim Richardson’s ‘Follow A Museum’ initiative appears to be continuing to have a positive effect on the number of followers we have on Twitter. @BM_AG has seen a faster rise in the number of followers since the 1st February event than it did before. We first started to use Twitter in October 2009 when the Staffordshire Hoard came to BMAG and it has been great to see @StokeMuseums tweeting away about the Hoard this week ahead of the exhibition opening there on February 13th.

It was interested to read the results of Mia Ridge’s survey  ‘is it friendly or weird when a museum twitter account follows you back?‘. We continue to follow most people back, but now I find myself hovering over the ‘follow’ button wondering if it is what that person wants!

BECTA have commissioned a video about the BETT 2010 award winners which includes BMAG’s Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource.  On Thursday a film crew went down to Lordswood Boys’ School in Birmingham to film a class of Year 8 kids using the website. The kids then visited BMAG and were filmed looking at some of the paintings they had examined in class. When they entered the Pre-Raphaelite galleries they were quick to recognise the paintings they had viewed and there was a lovely energy as they crowded around to look. They were asked if they preferred seeing the pictures on the web or in the gallery. All thirteen boys answered ‘in the gallery’. Just the way it should be!

Taking the baton from Mike Ellis to share some links and comments on stuff this week, it’s been hard to focus on what I’ve found interesting in our profession, as my attention has been so taken by the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. It does prompt reflection for us in that much of a capital city has been destroyed, including historic buildings and the lives and works of some practising artists. I can’t imagine how we would deal with that. Scientists now think that extreme storms, increasing in frequency with climate change, can trigger earthquakes. The susceptibility of  Haiti to natural disasters (repeated floods & hurricanes) is probably due to deforestation by its French colonisers. So much of the value of cultural heritage institutions has been about preserving things and buildings, but in some places like Haiti and as time goes on for many more places, that may become a very difficult challenge. That’s one reason why I believe digitisation of culture and knowledge is so important (as long as we do it as efficiently as we can). And digital tools aren’t just useful for posterity but for the ‘here and now’, for example in the way they’ve been so rapidly deployed to help the rescue effort, with satellite maps and data services for locating relatives and so on.

I wonder if the ‘emergency’ facing our sector, in the form of funding cuts to education and culture, will give us the impetus to deploy digital tools in more agile ways. This week both the Conservative and Labour parties made funding statements for culture at the RSA State of the Arts conference. Here’s a useful comparison and summary. In a scenario of funding cuts can we convince politicians that digital strategy can actually save money and produce value, and not just be a drain on budgets, with vague outcomes?

As we run up to the election, our various quangos are jostling to advocate the value of culture either through bold statements (like this from NMDC), through holding expert enquiries (like this from MLA) or through consultations (like this from ACE).

In the meantime, there is much to celebrate as museums & culture shift towards openness and collaboration. Here are two great examples:

The BBC and British Museum launched their major History of the World project. A positive reception has been obvious from so many tweets from regional partners announcing their contributions and schools getting excited about adding objects to it (e.g. Thomas Tallis @creativetallis on twitter).

The other good news is Culture24 releasing some sets of data feeds (venues, resources, events/exhibitions) with 3 levels of access (open, redacted, full), available in RSS, OAI-MPH & SOAP formats. This is just a pilot with more data & formats in the pipeline.

There’ll be more news to come over the next few weeks about open cultural data (for example about Culture Grid and DCMS digital strategies) and I’m pretty sure you in the Museums Computer Group will be the first to know. And the first to comment, bless you! Next to take the baton is Jim Richardson from Museum Marketing.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be inviting guest authors to curate this post, writing about the things they’ve read which they think are interesting, important, funny or just plain silly. If you’d like to volunteer, use this form to get in touch.

This week, some random bits and bobs that I’ve spotted…

- Nick Poole from the Collections Trust kicked off an interesting discussion on the MCG list about digital and real: ”…we’re likely to see more ‘back to basics’ rhetoric as the Public Sector Recession bites deeper and there are fewer opportunities for speculative digital projects“. See also the Kids in Museums Manifesto.

- BoingBoing’s post “Burning the library in slow motion” has a take on copyright extensions and suggests that these are leading to orphan works..

- Stuart Jeffries wrote a great thought-piece on the use of camera phones: “…when another friend visited the Taj Mahal recently, he noticed how few people, on arriving, actually looked at the building with their naked eyes. Instead, they would lift their phones immediately to capture an image that everybody in the world has already seen a million times”

- While the ongoing financial future of HE in the UK looks particularly bleak, The Smithsonian reported a 20% leap in museum visitors. Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy announced funding of £680 million to go towards digitisation of the content of French museums and libraries

- Finally – for some reason(!?) this piece on “How to make the most of a museum visit” has been generating a fair amount of Twitter buzz. “…although some of the staff may not be approachable, most people who work in museums do it because they love it and love talking to people about the museum and its collections…”