Museum Computer Group meeting
I attended today’s Museum Computer Group meeting at the London Transport Museum and gave a short (7 minutes!) presentation about OpenCulture and some of the wider strategic and political issues affecting the Digital agenda.
It was a great meeting - a lot of the usual suspects, but also many new faces. Particularly striking was the sheer quality of the work being presented - from the London Transport Museum’s website to the use of Google Maps on My Yorkshire. Lots of good clean design, interesting interfaces and some really powerful ideas.
Bryan Wills from LT museum gave an excellent presentation on the issues they had faced when incorporating User Generated Content into their site. The system they have used - built for them by System Simulation Ltd - is interesting. It’s an ‘offsite’ UGC server which has a minimal impact on the museum’s systems. This looks like a really promising mechanism for embedding UGC around collections with minimal risk.
James Watson from the National Maritime Museum gave a really storming (albeit brief) exposition of their experience of putting their collections into Flickr Commons. Although he didn’t make a big deal about it, one of the most interesting things is that they did some work on the copyright risks, and decided that the benefit of large-scale public access outweighed the risks. I think they will turn out to be right on this one.
Finally, the ever-brilliant Claire Sussums gave an overview of her experience of planning and developing Information Management Policies across both the Museum of London and the other Hub museums. Structurally and theoretically very sound, it was also really impressive for the depth of thought which went into it and the way in which Claire has secured management buy-in.
Ultimately, it’s a similar proposition to the idea which did the rounds when Freedom of Information was first mooted - information is what museums do, and even if they aren’t covered by FOI, an Information Management Policy is a very important thing to have.
Overall, a really good day. Museums are really forging ahead with technology and online service delivery and it was great to see such interesting and innovative work.
Tags: mcgautumn08
