Another week and another set of new features are now live on our Collection search. While most local readers of the blog were at Web Directions South (congratulations to Museum Victoria for taking out the Web Excellence award – perhaps the most strict clean code award around!), we’ve been working to get two key new [...]
Entries from September 30th, 2006
Museum blogging and WordPress plugins
September 26th, 2006 4 Comments
Mal Booth over at the Australian War Memorial emailed the other day to tell me about their first exhibition blog, and asked about blog recommendations. Thinking it might be sensible to share the information to help other museum bloggers, here’s what I sent (and a little bit more). Please add your own recommendations in the [...]
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A new Powerhouse Museum blog – Free Radicals
September 15th, 2006 1 Comment
Today the Powerhouse Museum launched the Free Radicals blog. The blog promotes a monthly talks series at the Museum of the same name which covers current issues in sustainability and science. The blog is intended to expand the Museum’s coverage and response to the issues raised by the talks series, as well as allowing community [...]
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OPAC2.0: A better search is here
September 13th, 2006 Comments Off
Today we finally ironed out one of the major problems with the search engine on our OPAC2.0/collection database. There are still some tweaks to be done on the results, and the advanced search needs to implemented but the new search is much better than the original. If you have some spare moments and feel like [...]
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Current dialogues
September 12th, 2006 Comments Off
Its a busy time at the museum at the moment with the Great Wall of China exhibition coming up in a few weeks. And there are a lot of deadlines so here’s a couple of interesting blog posts I’ve been reading recently. Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School leaps to the defense of experimentation of [...]
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What does a song look like
September 11th, 2006 1 Comment
There is a nifty new visualisation tool for ‘visualising repetition in MIDI files’ called The Shape Of Song. What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the [...]
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A new look at who writes Wikipedia?
September 5th, 2006 Comments Off
Aaron Swartz in his article Who Writes Wikipedia? takes a new look at the oft-repeated claim by Jimmy Wales, and thus almost everybody else, that Wikipedia’s content is really mainly contributed by a small core group of about 500 people. Swartz, at Stanford, cleverly unpicks the claim that “the most active 2%, which is 1400 [...]
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Google Image Labeller
September 3rd, 2006 1 Comment
Everyone is talking about the new Google image labeller. Think the ESP Game but where your tags help Google deliver better image search results. O’Reilly nails it in their description of it. The launch of Google Image Labeler, a “game” that asks people to label images, and figures that images given the same label by [...]
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