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Wordpress help
April 7, 2013 - 7:19amhi all
Both the people who normally help with configuring simple Wordpress stuff are unavailable for a while, and I have a couple of projects needing input in the next month or so. Anyone know someone who might be good to work with?
Ideally:
- quick and experienced at setting up and tweaking Wordpress.org sites (sometimes bit of graphic design needed, prob hardly any for these two projects)
- integration with eHive (and /or Omeka for one of the sites)
- works normal UK hours
- flexible, not too expensive! [...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 12:24pmLast comment on this thread, I promise, before I go off and find a pub to buy Mike that pint in...
It feels to me like the discussion has reached a really important point by positing the question of what all this lovely collections data/content publishing is for. If, as Trevor has eloquently pointed out, we can't articulate clear bottom-line value for our museums or their users, then we're barking up the wrong tree. Thankfully - I don't think we are. [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 12:03pmtwo pence..
I join the general bewilderment that RDF, CIDOC are useful today. After
that there's a caveat: they are extremely accurate (knowledge) mapping
models that may well serve an important purpose in time. Right now they
feel like dublin core and html embedded metadata all over again (which
of course have served an incredibly useful model of how to do things,
even though the standards themselves were really no more than
guidelines). So, lets just say it might be another case of TBL's vision
is so far ahead of the curve here that it might take the rest of [...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 10:07am'CIDOC isn't that hard' - neither was explaining the precession of the
perihelion of mercury for Einstein- it is after all relative :-)
Having created a CIDOC CRM representation of the Fitzwilliam museum data,
accessible using SPARQL, getting any feedback other than a technical 'yes
it works' was pretty problematic as the number of real systems able to
make use of the data appears to be low. Realistically, as other contributors
have already discussed, at the moment this type of solution can only be
viewed as one of a variety of possible mechanisms and formats for
syndicating/exposing content, each applicable [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 8:26amOn 5 Apr 2013, at 12:41, Andy Powell wrote:
>
> Well... I just read the 1 paragraph Introduction to the CIDOC-CRM and nowhere did it mention that it was conceptually hard... but maybe that aspect will crop up somewhere in the other 179 pages! :-)
I'm sure it makes sense to those involved, but as a casual observer? [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 7:41am> Really? You think? I'd say it's not only hard conceptually but technically difficult too
Well... I just read the 1 paragraph Introduction to the CIDOC-CRM and nowhere did it mention that it was conceptually hard... but maybe that aspect will crop up somewhere in the other 179 pages! :-)
Andy Powell
Head of Product Research [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 7:36amIt is a bit tricky describing CIDOC as hard or easy. It is based on
things having relationships to other things which is very simple. The
difficulty comes into play when you realise it could be used to describe
the universe, or your own little universe :-). Then you end up with the
potential for huge numbers of simple little relationships, which is
where the difficulty comes in. [...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 6:57am> CIDOC isn't that hard
Really? You think? I'd say it's not only hard conceptually but technically difficult too, and the benefits aren't readily available because there just aren't any really good demonstrators. But: I am a bear of very small brain, and readily admit I have a huge mental block about the reality of making this linked stuff happen in big enough chunks that it'll make a difference. [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 6:52am>> CIDOC isn't that hard, it's just under-documented.
The concepts aren't hard but they are quite different from the way people (curators, historians and the general public) naturally think, read and write. Also the notation and vocabulary is a terrifying!
Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage
tel: +44 (0) 1904 601905. 37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP [...]
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Fwd: [MCN-L] What is a Museum Technologist Anyway?
April 5, 2013 - 6:44amIf the discussion of publishing museum data hasn't sent you to sleep, you
might be interested in this survey...
Cheers, Mia
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Stein
Date: 4 April 2013 13:43
Subject: [MCN-L] What is a Museum Technologist Anyway?
To: Museum Listserv
Dear MCN,
I wonder how many of you may have been asked this question at some point in
time? Perhaps you've even asked it of yourself. [...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 6:41amAhem, young man, don't start putting words in my mouth! As Joe and others
have said, CIDOC isn't that hard, it's just under-documented.
I think we gravitate to questions about museum collections because a)
collecting and sharing knowledge about objects is what museums do, b)
objects randomly end up in different museums and being able to look across
everything that collected museums have for particular types of material
culture is useful for many reasons, and c) it's more specific to museums
than events listings, as important as they are. [...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 6:28am>>On Behalf Of Nick Poole
>> it really comes down to whether your organisation has embraced the marketing, engagement and professional (internally and externally) benefit of being open.
I must admit it still seems to me that the main argument is "its a good thing" and that hasn't won funding/resourcing arguments here for a long time. [...]
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Help with developing a 'living archive'
April 5, 2013 - 6:26amDear MCG members,
I am a research fellow at the Institute of Education (University of London) in the process of hopefully developing a partnership with the Museum of Childhood around an archive we have on children's composition from the 1940s-1980s.
We would like to develop a digital resource to allow children visiting the museum to interact with and contribute their own compositions to the archive. [...]
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ICOM Costume Committee vocabulary
April 5, 2013 - 5:05amHi,
I'm looking to rescue the ICOM Costume Committee's vocabulary of basic
terms [1] from HTML-bound obscurity, and would welcome feedback from the
community on how it is actually being used.
While the Introduction makes it clear that the creators of the system
were motivated to define a controlled vocabulary for costume, in
practice they have come up with a resource which could equally be used
as a SHIC-like classification system. The analysis into the form of
clothing and the part of the body covered gives us an abstract
breakdown, which is codified by a numerical scheme, e.g. [2]. The
[...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 4:35am~adds 1 pint to "Nick owes Mike" list~
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 4:35amThanks Mike for giving me the opportunity to plug the Culture Grid Search Box Builder - a simple point & click interface which generates a code snippet (JS form or iFrame) which can be copied and pasted into a web page to give instant integration into your museums' website.
The tool is free to use at http://www.culturegrid.org.uk/sru/buildQuery. [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 4:28amHi all
It's interesting to me (and I think partly misses the real need) that this conversation has turned its focus to collections and how you'd repurpose those, rather than - for instance - media files, promotional material, exhibition dates, etc. Although the collections sharing side of stuff is obviously of interest I think it's this latter stuff which is more of a daily problem to the vast majority of museums. Inputting event information once and then being able to multi-surface this throughout your web presence - thus providing some "interested in X? have a look at Y" cross-linking: [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 4:27amDear Stephen,
Many thanks for this. I think this is why CT launched the SPECTRUM Partners Scheme (see http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/programmes/spectrum) a few years back - to provide a forum for Collections Management System providers to share intelligence about current and future needs, and to map out a development path to meet them which builds on established practice and systems but opens them up for more flexible re-use. [...]
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Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 5, 2013 - 2:54amHi everyone,
It probable that one way to reach a critical mass with LOD uptake is to embed the key bits of functionality in the systems, making the operations reasonably straightforward for the user, as Richard is aiming to do, and Adlib and others are also planning.
I wonder if there's any scope for a joined up approach from the main system suppliers, in dialogue with user groups and maybe workshops at LOD events such as Nick is suggesting? [...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds
Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace
April 4, 2013 - 11:25amOn 04/04/2013 16:09, Mia wrote:
> In terms of practicalities, are there any use cases for other organisations
> testing out the BM's model? One potential use might be using it as a basis
> for linking to collections across various museum sites e.g. Wellcome links
> to similar objects on the Science Museum site which links to others on the
> British Museum site which in turn links out. To a large extent those
> object-specific links wouldn't be automagically machine-discoverable, so it
> would require both a willingness to link to other collections sites and
> some curatorial [...]
Categories: Museum [Tech]: other community feeds