Fresh & New(er)

discussion of issues around digital media and museums by Seb Chan

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Entries Tagged as 'Metadata'

Things clever people do with your data #65535: Introducing ‘Free Your Metadata’

September 26th, 2011 2 Comments

Last year Seth van Hooland at the Free University Brussels (ULB) approached us to look at how people used and navigated our online collection. A few days ago Seth and his colleague Ruben Verborgh from the University Ghent launched Free Your Metadata – a demonstrator site for showing how even irregular metadata can have valued [...]

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Australia Dress Register – public site goes live

March 31st, 2011 1 Comment

The first iteration of the public front end of the Australian Dress Register went live a few weeks back. This release makes visible much of the long data gathering process with regional communities that began in 2008 and continues as more garments are added to the Register over time. The ADR is a good example [...]

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Making use of the Powerhouse Museum API – interview with Jeremy Ottevanger

November 4th, 2010 No Comments

As part of a series of ‘things people do with APIs’ here is an interview I conducted with Jeremy Ottevanger from the Imperial War Museum in London. Jeremy was one of the first people to sign up for an API key for the Powerhouse Museum API – even though he was on the other side [...]

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OPAC – Connecting collections to WorldCat Identities

December 7th, 2008 2 Comments

If you were at the National Library of Australia’s annual meeting a while back then you might have spotted Thom Hickey from OCLC mentioning that the Powerhouse Museum has started to use the WorldCat Identities to connect people in the collection to their identity records and library holdings in WorldCat. This is now public in [...]

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DigitalNZ – API access to New Zealand collections launches

December 2nd, 2008 4 Comments

One of the best things I saw at the National Digital Forum in Auckland last week was DigitalNZ. Being a Kiwi myself, I am immensely proud that New Zealand has leapt forward and produced a federated collection product that aggregates and then allows access through a web interface and an open API. That it has [...]

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A web citation tool – dealing with impermanent references

July 9th, 2008 5 Comments

We’re all working hard to ensure that our own content is identified with persistent URLs – a referrer that will stand the test of time – but often when we are writing a paper we need to refer to someone else’s URL, most of which are not designed to be permanent. Traditionally when we reference [...]

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Collaborative collective classificiation – BBC Labs on using Wikipedia as metadata

June 14th, 2008 1 Comment

Chris Sizemore at the BBC’s Radio Labs demonstrates an experiment in automated metadata, much akin to Open Calais. Sizemore has taken Wikipedia and has built a simple web application that uses Wikipedia to disambiguate entities in a block of text and suggest broad categories for the content. Because Wikipedia has broad coverage of topics and [...]

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24 hours later – Powerhouse on the Commons on Flickr

April 9th, 2008 4 Comments

The first 24 hours of our presence on Commons on Flickr has been fascinating. I wrote about the launch yesterday but now let’s take a look at what has happened over night. In short, we’ve been excited by the response. Here’s some quick figures. Plenty of views (4777), and stacks of tags (175) – in [...]

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OPAC2.0 – OpenCalais meets our museum collection / auto-tagging and semantic parsing of collection data

March 31st, 2008 3 Comments

Today we went live with another one of the new experimental features of our collection database – auto-generation of tags based on semantic parsing. Throughout the Museum’s collection database you will now find, in the right hand column of the more recently acquired objects (see a quick sample list), a new cluster of content titled [...]

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Flickr Commons – mass exposure of historical images

January 17th, 2008 4 Comments

As a lot of museums (and libraries) have been using Flickr in lightweight ways for various purposes from image storage to building community engagement for quite a while, it is exciting to see a new formal collaborative project between Flickr and a major institution launch. Flickr Commons is a project between Flickr and the US [...]

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