Thank you to everyone who has been tagging the collection with our bulk tagging mini-application.
Since announcing it 2 weeks ago we’ve had 515 new tags added to previously untagged objects. That’s a lot.
If you are one of the many who have added some tags – thank you. If you haven’t tried it yet, then what are you waiting for?
Thank you also to everyone who emailed in or left suggestions in the comments.
One of our most successful, and earliest public facing blog experiments, Walking The Wall is almost over.
Even though the Great Wall of China exhibition moved on from PHM a while ago, our intrepid Great Wall walkers continued their trek, blogging as they went.
146 post and 630 comments later, they have finally finished their walk which is still being documented at Walking The Wall.
Brendan and Emma have walked thousands of kilometres and taken gigabytes of photos along the way. As you may remember, they were injured and had to return to Sydney to recover before continuing their journey. It is important to remember that Brendan and Emma approached the Museum as volunteer walkers and have done the whole trip at their own expense!
The blog of their travels has received over 150,000 visits during their trip and has been extremely successful with national radio coverage as well as several broadsheet stories, both locally and internationally. These online visits are in addition to the thousands who stopped by the blog as an interactive in the galleries in Sydney and Melbourne.
You can continue live vicariously through their stories and images and feel free to leave comments – they do read them frequently.
I’d like to thank Brendan and Emma for their generous efforts.
Another long awaited change to our website has rolled out – a slightly updated front page and navigational redesign.
Obviously we are not in a position for a wholesale site redesign – something that is probably becoming a luxury these days – not just in terms of money but also in terms of user familiarisation. (Why change your website on a grand scale if you have a significant number of ‘regular’ visitors?)
However, we’ve managed to squeeze some more ‘value’ out of our front page, increasing the promotional banner spaces to six as well as allowing for horizontally scrolling ‘extras’. Not much else has changed – the navigation remains the same.
We found that 800×600 and less only represented under 8% (49% use 1024×768) of our site visitation and thus moving to a slightly longer home page (although not wider) would not impact on the majority our users.
A small footer change is coming soon.
Today we finished our long awaited ‘bulk tagging’ application.
I’d encourage you to give it a go and send us some feedback.
We are particularly interested in museum professionals and amateur collecting organisations adding tags in volume to our collection. The application currently targets the user tagging of objects in our collection that have not been formally catalogued, or whose formal cataloguing data is not visible in the online database for various reasons.
Bulk Tagger is an experimental application to give quick access to tag multiple objects in our collection database from the one webpage. One of the key problems we have identified with social tagging of our collection is that there just isn’t enough tagging going on and although the tags that are added do have significant benefit in terms of making certain collection records more easily discoverable only about 3000 records have been tagged so far.
Bulk Tagger is currently being targetted at specialist user communities as a way of rapidly increasing our pool of user tags.
We are tracking tagging behaviour and tags added via Bulk Tagger are identified as such and can be quarantined from the mass public tagging if needed in future research.
Each screen shows five objects which have not yet been tagged. Users can add multiple comma separated tags to these objects and then submit them. Upon submission, another five objects will appear. Clicking on an object thumbnail will pull up more information about the object.
This is an early release experimental product only.
Concept and programming Luke Dearnley & Sebastian Chan, Powerhouse Museum.
Information Architects Japan have produced a lovely and witty map of the most popular websites on the Net at the present time. Unlike a lot of other similar projects they have used the Tokyo JR network map as a visualisation method meaning that if you know the JR lines you can make further inferences about the ‘stations’ . . . If you have been to Tokyo you will know which are the ‘cool’ parts of town, and which appeal to different demographics.
The interactive HTML version is particularly useful, and they have included a whole slew of sites that are usually missing from other ‘maps’.
Everywhere seems to be bubbling over with Facebook action at the moment – largely as a result of them opening up their system as a platform for developers. Most applications, so far, have been quite gimmicky but no doubt there will be some interesting ones to emerge in coming months.
If you have been pulled into the procrastination vortex that is Facebook then you may want to join the ‘International museum web professionals’ group.
Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve implemented a new look for the blog. I am currently making a few modifications to enhance readability (the font size has been increased and the quote font colour darkened) but if you have any other comments please tell me.
The previous look/skin on the site had been around for nearly 3 years and so it was time for a change. Some have asked me about the image I used for the header of the old skin – I can reveal it was a photo I took of a colleague in a completely machine-operated bar in Berlin. We were in Berlin presenting some museum work at the new media art festival and conference Transmediale 2004. Everything was operated by coin, conveyor belt and computer – no human staff at all – and there were internet terminals, surveillance monitors, and a Euro to Deutschmark change machine (all the slots took Deutschmarks!) . Access was by ‘membership’ card only so as to keep out vandals. Sadly the place has vanished by 2005.
Since Friday at UK Museums and the Web 2007 I keep being asked about my scepticism over explicit tagging in museums. “Why do I think that users don’t really have much natural incentive to tag our collections or content?”
Over at Bokardo there is a post dating back to 2006 which looks at why Del.icio.us has been succesful titled the The Del.icio.us Lesson.
The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.
As people use Del.icio.us more, and in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later. Tagging isn’t even the primary function of Del.icio.us. Most of the tagging done on Del.icio.us is done secondarily, and for personal use.
The social value of tags on Del.icio.us is only a happy side-effect. Even though most of the ink spilled about Del.icio.us is about the social value, it’s really not the reason why people use it.
Now this is again a case of strategy first, technology second – those who attended my recent workshops will know clearly what I mean. If Forresters is correct and about 15% of US internet users have tagged something in the preceding month then we need to be careful to not make the leap to this being the same as 15% tag frequently let alone tag on all sites that offer tagging. Situational relevance and motivation also play a big part in the choice of which services people use.
If tagging is about engaging users and “bridging the semantic gap” then what other strategies might achieve the same end result?
We cannot give the same user incentives as the tagger who tags their images in Flickr nor the tagger who tags their bookmarks in Delicious. We can target our committed volunteers and amateur and affilated societies however but the user needs and UI design may be very different for those communities.
SearchCrystal is a very nifty search visualisation tool. Above is the results of an image search for ‘Sydney’ across multiple engines – you can see clearly in the visualisation where results crossover and there is similarity. I really like the different types of search that can be done in this way – web searches, image seraches, video, news, blogs, tags . . . . below is a web search for ‘Powerhouse Museum’.
A very interesting new development in the digitisation space as reported in The Chronicle (via Siva Vaidhyanathan).
Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business.
Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with university libraries and a technology company.
But, unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes.
And Amazon will sell only books that are in the public domain or that libraries own the copyrights to, avoiding legal issues that have worried many librarians — and that have prompted publishers to sue Google for copyright infringement.
Whilst I agree with Siva’s argument that this is “a massive privatization of public treasures”, at the same time this activity of effectively republishing, in physical form (via on-demand), can potentially bring older books, especially those that do not already have a large re-print value, to a much larger audience beyond just scholars and researchers.
The privatisation process began long ago with economic rationalist politics and the scaling back of the public sector and public institutions. This has left us in this situation where in some countries only the private sector has the resources and capital to make grand idealistic projects like this a reality – something that used to be the preserve of visionary government (although the reality was often different).
Depending upon the quality of the print on-demand I can also see this opening up a whole new genre of coffee table ‘cultural capital’ enhancing books . . . .