This week I came across the launch of the Connected Histories Project.  Once completed this aims to become the first port of call for researching historical sources by linking up existing databases. This sounds like an exciting project for archives, historians and academics. But it got me thinking, what about our sector? Could we actually create a search facility for researchers pointing at basic catalogue records across museums? I know that Croydon’s embarrassing offer Research Croydon, hidden away on the internet, generates legitimate enquiries and even the odd image sale. Would the number of satisfied researchers increase if they were able to search through one interface? I feel that if we got this right, it would be a resource that researchers would actually use. Even so, with the best will in the world I also realize that this is a long way off.

On Monday this week, the Museum of London posted a new video to their YouTube channel; curator Meriel Jeater introduces the new War, Plague and Fire gallery. It was fun to have a virtual nose around the gallery and interesting to listen to Meriel explain what they’ve done. Yet 3 days later and 161 views there isn’t much interaction from users. No comments, or video responses and only 1 rating. I noticed the figures tell a similar story for videos on YouTube channels posted by other museums, such as the V&A’s trailer for their Quilts exhibition.

The Museum of Croydon had its moment of fame courtesy of Harry Hill’s TV Burp on 6th March. Harry has immortalized our museum and specifically our Riesco gallery of Chinese ceramics in his ‘I love Croydon’ ditty. There are at least 4 versions of the relevant clip and song from the show on YouTube that I have come across, totalling over 30,000 views with 100s of comments and ratings. For the following 4 days our web stats showed that we had doubled the amount of unique visitors to our site, the majority of which came from Harry Hill related referrals.

This plug was quite timely for us as through the National Regional Loans Scheme we’re working with the BritishMuseum on a revamp of our Riesco Chinese ceramics gallery. So this autumn, in the words of Harry, “Get your ancient Chinese ceramics in Croydon”!

What can all of this tell us? Museums are creating YouTube videos but only a small number of users watch them and an even smaller number interact with them. YouTube’s front page shows us their most popular videos. Users are catching up on TV programmes, getting their celebrity fixes and watching those random funnies. We were lucky with the ‘I love Croydon’ song, it’s funny, catchy, encompasses lots of the good facets of Croydon and the Museum comes across fairly well. I am however yet to be convinced that museums can create meaningful content that YouTubers want to watch.

[This week's guest post is by Danny Birchall, editor of the Wellcome Collection website]

A remarkable gallery closed its doors on Valentine’s Day. The Museum of Everything was a temporary collection of outsider art in a former recording studio in Primrose Hill. It brought together artists from beyond the art world’s mainstream, like Henry Darger, George Widener and Josef Karl Rädler (whose work appeared in Wellcome Collection’s own Madness and Modernity ). The museum was very much IRL rather than online, but it’s interesting to see that they make no distinctions between mainstream news and blogs in their page devoted to ‘press’ coverage.

‘Book’ might become as abstract a concept as ‘press’ if iBooks establish the same reach as iTunes, but could AAAARG become the Ubuweb of theory books? In an interview with Masters of Media , AAAARG founder Sean Dockray discusses the website created to share and discuss hard-to-find texts. While treading a fine line between acceptable use and cease-and-desist letters, Dockray takes what he calls a ‘positive’ approach: “at the root of it all, I hope we’re all on the same side, which is to say that we’re interested in the dissemination of ideas”.

The Digital Economy Bill, just through its committee stage in the Lords, is threatening to put photographers and cultural organisations at each others’ throats. In a letter to The Times two weeks ago, culture org big cheeses from the BFI’s Amanda Nevill to the Tate’s Nicholas Serota came out strongly in favour of the Bill’s Clause 42 which liberalises regulations on the use of orphan works, arguing the greater benefits to education and research. This week,some photographers were up in arms about the potential threat to photographers’ livelihoods. It must be serious: Facebook groups have been formed .

When financial woe approaches the arts and heritage sectors from all sides, even the highest-profile organisations aren’t immune. The debate about the grand old dame of the avant-garde, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, continued in the grand old dame of net/art publications, Mute magazine. In a lengthy, and heavily-commented article , JJ Charlesworth investigated the financial crisis at the heart of the ICA’s current round of redundancies. Further debate took place on the Net Behaviour list . It might not be surprising that criticism of the ICA should come from these quarters: the ICA conspicuously turned its back on (new) media art two years ago.

While the announcement of Google’s Buzz seemed to raise more hackles about invasions of privacy than it did industry cheers, my social media dilemma this week was wondering which museum Ning networks I should join. A network I joined last year, Screen Research, was closed in January by its creator, the British Library’s Luke McKernan because even with 300+ members it was “hard to justify the effort needed to keep the site effective” (don’t worry, the indefatigable McKernan hasn’t given up, he’s just refocused his efforts on the BL’s Moving Image blog). I realised that while Screen Research was a community that I felt a strong identification with, it wasn’t one that I contributed to often. While the supermarkets of social media like Facebook and Buzz may seem unstoppable, some of our online communities may be more precious, like local independent bookshops: use them or lose them.

On MuseumNext’s Ning network, Finkelstein asked provocatively whether, with the proliferation of social media platforms, the museum website is dead. The answer seemed to be a resounding no, combined with a recognition that “a museum must be in all places at once”. For the discovery of said debate I owe the obligatory HT to @m1ke_ellis because of course where I find out what museum/tech people are actually talking to each other about is still Twitter.

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!