Category: Collection databases

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Collection databases Powerhouse Museum websites

Australian Dress Register

One of the side projects the team launched recently was the Australian Dress Register.

The Australian Dress Register will document significant and well provenanced men’s, women’s and children’s dress in New South Wales dating up to 1945. It aims to assist museums and private collectors to recognise and research their dress collections and support better care and management. It will engender an improved understanding of dress in its wider historical context and help to ensure information about its origins is recorded while still available and within living memory.

This is a collaborative database project which will have a series of public facing views being made available mid 2009. During the interim period volunteers in the community and in regional museums are using the backend to catalogue and upload significant examples of Australian dress from their collections (private and publicly held).

When the database starts to fill up the contents will be made avalable on the Powerhouse site as well as providing XML feeds to Collections Australia Network, D’Hub and other federated collection services.

Like most community projects the technology is the easy part. The difficult part lies in getting the community to form around them and use them. Fortunately the Australian Dress Register will utilise the regional reach of both the Museum’s own Regional Services Unit and also Collections Australia Network.

Categories
Collection databases Metadata Semantic Web

OPAC – Connecting collections to WorldCat Identities

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 an early alpha form.

Here’s an example from a collection record.

Tucked away in the automatically generated metadata (using Open Calais) are some links from people to their World Cat Identities record over at World Cat – if such a record exists. At the moment there isn’t a lot of disambiguation between people of the same name going on, so there are quite a few false positives.

In this example, Geoffrey C Ingleton now links to his record on World Cat Identities.

In the alpha stage all this means is that visitors can now connect from a collection record to the name authority file and thence, on World Cat, to library holdings (mostly books) by or about the people mentioned in that collection record. Later you’ll be able to a whole lot more . . . we’re using the World Cat API and we’ve got a jam-packed development schedule over the next few summer months (it is cooler in the office than out of it!).

Not only does this allow visitors to find more, it also allows the Powerhouse to start to add levels of ranking to the person data identified by Open Calais – an important step in putting that auto-generated metadata to better use. Equally importantly, it opens the door to a whole new range of metadata that can associated with an object record in our collection. Consider the possibilities for auto-generated bibliographies, or even library-generated additional classification metadata.

For those excited by the possibilities offered by combining the collective strengths of each partner in the LAM (libraries, archives, museums) nexus then this should be a good example of a first step towards mutual metadata enhancement.

We’re also very excited about the possibilities that the National Library of Australia’s People Australia project holds in this regard too.

Categories
Collection databases Young people & museums

Light reading – two totally different audiences: researchers and young people

Two interesting pieces of reading for those of you who have to spend time on public transport.

First from the Research Information Network in the UK comes a report that looks at the need of academic researchers in discovering the content of museum collections using online databases. Not surprisingly “their most important wish is that online access to museum databases to be provided as quickly as possible, even if the records are imperfect or incomplete”. Read the report.

Second, and covering a totally different audience, is the long awaited report from the Macarthur Foundation on Digital Youth. This was a major piece of research involving a lot of different research teams and the final report is really quite excellent. If you are time poor then skip straight to the summary white paper (PDF).

Otherwise take the time and read the full report. I’d direct F&N readers immediately to the chapter entitled Media Ecologies. This chapter is particularly important because it reminds us that even the same young person can use different digital media in widely differing ways, and with different proficiencies. This chapter proposes that there is a distinct difference between use of digital media that are friendship-based versus those that are interest-based (in the minority). Often in the cultural sector we conflate these two groups or expect that the friendship-based users are actually interested in our interest-based content.

Categories
Collection databases Search Web metrics

OPAC2.0 – Examining Delta Goodrem’s dress again / more on search

The most popular object in our online collection database is still a dress worn by Delta Goodrem.

I’ve previously written about how the popularity of this dress was driven in part by coverage on a number of Delta Goodrem fan forums. But this neglects the criticality of search. Google has always driven traffic to this object and looking at last months analytics where Google search represented 86% of referrers to the object, the top 5 keywords used to discover this dress were these –

1. lisa ho – 11.24%
2. evening dresses – 4.55%
3. lisa ho dresses – 2.71%
4. formal dress – 2.13%
5. chiffon dress – 1.07%

Because of the frequency of the keywords ‘lisa ho’ in the title, description and body text of the object record, and the trusted PageRank of the Powerhouse Museum domain, we rank 11th in Google search results for ‘lisa ho’; 2nd for ‘lisa ho dress’; and 4th for ‘lisa ho dresses’.

Fortunately for us, this external traffic isn’t fleeting. Visitors to this object view almost double the average number of pages viewed by others on our site; and they spend more time on the site too.

Looking at the internal search terms for that same object the results are very different.

1. Australian fashion (also a subject classification)
2. tennis (user tag)
3. lisa ho
4. delta goodrem
5. elegant (user tag)

External search has effectively driven nearly 10 times the traffic of internal users to this object. It has also brought audiences to the object who have very little behavioural similarities to those who search within the context of our own site (internal search). This creates many new challenges in terms of usability and user experience.

Over the entire collection there are pockets of objects for which the difference between internal and external search is not as great however this needs much greater data analysis (and may be the subject of a future post or paper).

Categories
Collection databases

Powerhouse wins Gold at AAM 2008 Muse Awards

We’re very excited that we’ve won the gold award in the 2008 AAM Muse Awards in the category of ‘Online Presence’ for our collection database.

It is particularly exciting because for the Powerhouse the collection represents our core reason for being. The collection is not only what differentiates us from other institutions, but also what differentiates us from other leisure venues and social spaces. In every museum the collection, traditionally, has been the preserve of scholars, researchers, and experts and in most museums the only time it appears on show is through the highly interpreted space of exhibitions, or limited run print publications. Online, the traditional way of presenting the collection has also been highly interpreted – specialist microsites, ‘virtual galleries’ for the ‘general public’; and for the researcher – collection databases overloaded with complexity only an information scientist would appreciate.

We took a different approach – one that placed the casual user at the core, and attempted to simplify and inject a degree of pleasure into the experience of navigating the collection (much like the pleasure we hope that visitors through our doors experience in browsing our showcases). Behind the scenes we also broke the unsustainable level of ‘extra interpretation’ (additional curation, editing, etc) that we applied to collection microsites – opting for a direct publication of as much of our raw content as possible. Far from undermine the Museum’s ‘authority’ the exposure of this rich but uneven data has enhanced the Museum’s reputation and brand (“oh I didn’t know you had such a wonderful collection of . . “), as well as lay bare the reality that any museum’s collection is always a ‘work in progress’.

Judges said:
The Powerhouse Museum’s new relational search and collections database is a model for organizing, exhibiting, and promoting museum collections. Alongside detailed traditional search functions, the site invites users to add their own metatags (folksonomy), search, and browse by tag cloud, by “relatedness” of items/objects, or by special collections in an easy-to-use, transparent interface that offers consistent and near-instantaneous feedback and results.

Beyond the metadata and search functionality, the depth of database entries “opens the bank vault” of the museum to visitors, enthusiasts, and researchers as many entries are presented with not only tombstone metadata, but article-style contextual information and one or more images — with three-dimensional objects photographed from multiple angles and accompanied by an indication of scale/size. This not only makes the site rewarding to casual browsers and researchers alike, it provokes thought about the function and purpose of museum collection and preservation. The Powerhouse has already begun to to realize the value of lay expertise via its embrace of folksonomy (an innovation alone worth emulating throughout the museum community), as online users have brought to the museum’s attention objects for potential physical exhibit that were previously considered to be only of ephemeral or specialized interest. An exemplary site.

When we first made our tentative steps with our new collection database that some readers might remember went public as a ‘beta’ site in mid 2006, we had no idea that it would be the success that it has been. We are continually astonished by the volume but more importantly the diversity of use the site gets. It is this evolving usage that drives our continual addition of new features, and hopefully ‘improvements’ to the site.

Categories
Collection databases Geotagging & mapping MW2008 Search Semantic Web

MW2008 – Data shanty towns, cross-search and combinatory approaches

One of the popular sessions at MW2008 in Montreal was a double header featuring Frankie Roberto and myself talking about different approaches to data combining across multiple institutions.

Data combining was a bit of a theme this year with Mike Ellis, Brian Kelly and others talking mashups; Ross Parry, Eric Miller and Brian Sletten all talking ‘semantic web’; and Terry Makewell and Carolyn Royston demonstrating the early prototype of the NMOLP cross search.

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Categories
Collection databases

Opensearch – it isn’t all that hard

Finally I’ve started to see more museums picking up the absurdly easy to implement Opensearch method of delivering a live search result from their website as RSS/XML.

The National Maritime Museum in the UK is one who has recently made their implementation of Opensearch available. Here’s a feed of a search of their collection for compasses.

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Categories
Collection databases Imaging Web 2.0

Powerhouse Museum joins the Commons on Flickr – the what, why and how

Yes, you read that right. The Powerhouse Museum is the first museum to join the Commons on Flickr! And we’re excited because it went live today!

In the tradition of ‘slow food’ we have decided to do a slow release of content with an initial 200 historic images of Sydney and surrounds available through the Commons on Flickr and a promise of another 50 new fresh images each week! These initial images are drawn from the Tyrrell Collection. Representing some of the most significant examples of early Australian photography, the Tyrrell Collection is a series of glass plate negatives by Charles Kerry (1857-1928) and Henry King (1855-1923), two of Sydney’s principal photographic studios at the time.


(Sydney Cricket Ground)

We have also done something a little different to the Library of Congress – we have also started geo-tagging as many of the images we are uploading as possible. You can jump over to Flickr and see the images plotted on a map, then zoom in to browse and navigate. We are really excited by the possibilities that this opens up – suddenly ‘then and now’ photography becomes possible on a mass public scale. Because these images are being added to the Commons they are provided as having “no known Copyright” allowing maximum reuse.

We joined up with Flickr because we knew that the Tyrrell Collection were still largely unkown by the general public. This was despite fully catalogued sections (275 images) of the collection having been available on our own website for many years, as well as some of the semi-catalogued images (680 images) more recently in our collection database. We had also syndicated a feed of the fully catalogued Tyrrell images to the National Library of Australia’s Picture Australia. There are nearly 8000 Tyrrell images in total.


(Bondi Beach)

What Flickr offers the Powerhouse is an immediate large and broader audience for this content. And with this exposure we hope that we will have a strong driver to increase the cataloguing and digitisation of the remaining Tyrrell glass plate negatives as well as many more the previously hidden photographic collections of the Powerhouse.

There is a little bit of a back story here too. Joining the Commons happened rather by luck. Thanks to Maxine Sherrin and John Alsopp at Web Directions, George Oates from Flickr and I were speaking at the same event (Web Directions South) last year and were introduced. George visited the Museum during her time in Sydney and met the Image Services, Web Services, and Photography teams and we resolved to do something together. At that stage, the Commons was not public knowledge, and after it launched, George, being an ex-pat Australian, and I planned to get the Powerhouse Museum involved as soon as possible. Thanks to the swift work of Paula Bray and Luke Dearnley at the Powerhouse, as well as the support of internal management, the Museum has been able to seize this fantastic opportunity and react quickly.

George has blogged about the Powerhouse in the Commons over at the Flickr blog, and Paula will be blogging it over at Photo of the Day in a couple of hours.

Categories
Collection databases

OPAC2.0 – New search result interface

Today we launched our new-look search results page for our collection database.

Finally we have been able to implement many of the minor UI changes that have been sitting in a long list of ‘fixes’ – fixes that have become more and more critical as we have added new types of search.

When a search is now performed the results are broken up into five categories – each of which are reported in a yellow box at the top of the results.

Selecting any of these categories automatically displays the category – quickly and neatly – with no additional page load.

The ‘result browser’ box now gives us additional room to add future search categories (such as semantic tag types – people, places etc), and the right-hand side has been re-organised as well. The ordering of search filters has been changed and we feel that it is now more logical and responsive.

Take a look.

Categories
Collection databases Web metrics

OPAC2.0 – Top search phrases and statistics for 2007

Here’s some of the latest figures from our collection database for the calendar year 2007. Because our search tables run on a rolling 3 month basis we have had to wait until April to generate the results for 2007.

In 2007 there were 15,121,291 objects viewed in our collection database (including views on dHub and via Opensearch). 5,447 tags were added during this period.

Here’s some more interesting facts and figures.

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