As I’ve been speaking to other institutions both here in Australia and overseas I’ve started to realise that more of us should be using Opensearch to allow others (or ourselves) to aggregate our deep content – whilst still retaining full control of said content. I blogged about this ages ago but I think everyone was [...]
Entries from October 31st, 2006
Dragon & The Pearl – a blog for children
October 24th, 2006 3 Comments
The Museum has launched another public facing blog called The Dragon & The Pearl. This blog supports a public program that is running until March 2007. A mysterious crate arrives at the museum containing what is thought to be a dragon’s egg! The blog allows children of all ages to keep pace with what the [...]
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Rich serendipity and Vander Wal
October 24th, 2006 Comments Off
Jonathan at the AGNSW pointed me towards this rather excellent piece on folksonomies which really resonates with our own experiences with our collection database. What Vander Wal realized is that socially exposed tagging for personal use introduces another organizing agent that compensates for the ambiguity of its vocabulary with high-value serendipity: people. We are much [...]
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Peer production and the ‘laws of quality’
October 24th, 2006 Comments Off
Interesting reading from Paul Duguid in his paper on First Monday, Limits of self-organization: Peer production & the laws of quality. (via Nicholas Carr) First, protagonists of the sorts of peer production projects discussed here should reflect on the extent to which, explicitly or implicitly, they rely on the laws of quality. If they don’t, [...]
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Computer game history
October 23rd, 2006 Comments Off
Fascinating archive project from venerable US gaming magazine Computer Gaming World puts archives of issue 1 (1981) through to 1992 online as PDFs. It has obviously been an enormous scanning and digitisation project. This is a great trip down memory lane and is an insight into not only how games have developed, but also how [...]
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Synonymiser Beta – proof of concept
October 23rd, 2006 2 Comments
Synonymiser is an experimental micro-application that returns related words from search data relationships held in the Powerhouse Museum’s collection database. These ‘synonyms’ are dynamically generated from realtime user interaction with the collection database. On the Synonymiser site you can enter any search word or phrase and it will return a list of ‘related’ words or [...]
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OPAC2.0 – New feature – more similar searches
October 17th, 2006 Comments Off
Continuing on the additions from yesterday. Today we added the top three search terms for each object to the USER KEYWORD section of an object page. This section is where folksonomy tags can be added and deleted. Here is a 1960s raincoat for example. Why did we add this to the USER KEYWORDS section? What [...]
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OPAC2.0 – New feature – similar searches
October 16th, 2006 Comments Off
Take a look at the new ‘related searches’ feature on our collection search. Now a search for ‘glass‘ will these ‘similar searches’ – glassware vase bottles bowl bowls This result will change over time. Hopefully we will implement a timescale simulator in our upcoming ‘experimental’ browsing section which will allow users to view the changing [...]
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