How very exciting!
Our collection database comes in 16th place in Ross Dawson’s (Future Exploration Network) round up of the top 60 Web 2.0 applications developed in Australia over on Read/Write Web. Apparently we’re up amongst some of the real heavyweights and it is nice to be noticed outside of the cultural sector.
The sites are ranked in approximate order of how prominent they are (or should be), based on four criteria:
– Web 2.0 characteristics
– Coolness/ Innovation
– Maturity
– Commercial success/ number of usersThe first comment to make is that coolness and maturity are often inversely correlated. What used to be hot is now ho-hum, while the more innovative applications just out the door haven’t had the time to become mature or gain commercial success. That means some extremely cool and promising applications such as Outback Online, Particls, Vquence, or even SmoothBudget (ranked 59) are outside the top tier on the list, not because they aren’t very interesting and exciting, but because they are in alpha or beta, and so don’t yet score well on the maturity and commercial success factors. Hopefully that will rapidly change. In other words, you can still find some very interesting early stage applications further down on this list, so please don’t just look at the top.
If you visit the collection database today you’ll find we’ve added a stack of new images – 7 gigabytes! – predominantly for the newer objects in the collection. Many objects now have multiple points of view and a lot of the black and white images have been replaced with shiny new studio shots at high resolution. The 7gb update is the first of 7 such major image uploads.
2 replies on “Our collection database gets 16th place in the top Australian Web 2.0 applications”
Wow, congratulations – that’s a huge achievement for you and your institution!
Well done!
Having just spent the past six weeks talking ‘social media’ shop across multiple museum forums I have to admit that the reach of the collections database is far and deep! In fact, is there a museums forum that DOESN’T mention the PHM collections database?
One question that came up and I couldn’t answer – are the ‘related objects’ drawn from an aggregation of the PHM record AND the folksonomy tags or just the record?
Cheers