Wish I'd been there

Last year I was lucky enough to go to the Museums & the Web conference in 2008 in Montreal. This year I didn't make it to Indianapolis, but I've been catching up on the write-ups.

As Mia Ridge observed, "some of the most important ideas weren't about presenting new, flashy things but rather reflected a maturity in approach, and a consolidation of the role of the web in museums." Some of the things that really tweaked my interest were:

• Discussions around APIs (application programming interfaces, which allow you to, for example, let other people make web applications using your collection records) especially Richard Morgan's paper challenging the assumption that your collection data is your most interesting asset.
• Geo-everything, particularly Aaron Straup-Cope: I love that feeling you get when you just start to grasp the enormity of an idea, and I get that from his presentation, even at a distance.
• Questions around whether your digital and physical experiences and attitudes should try to match each other, or not - see this earlier post.

Here's a selection from some of the people I follow:

Virginia Gow, DigitalNZ: sites and projects to check out, recommended papers, why Twitter ruled the conference.

Seb Chan, Powerhouse Museum: Apart from noting that "Indianapolis is a flat city surrounded by endless corn fields which accounts for the injection of corn syrup into every conceivable food item", Seb muses on the opportunities offered by cloud hosting, APIs, geolocation, and the online/physical experience debate.

Frankie Roberto, Rattle: recaps his workshops (which some really useful observations about what/how he'd do things differently), and talks about the occasions where we might be asking - so, we *can* do this, but *why* do it?

Mia Ridge, Science Museum: this was the first MW to feature unconference sessions (where time and rooms are set aside for people to fill with spontaneous topics for discussion, cf. the usual call for papers->presentation slot conference organising method) and Mia recorded the session on failure. Failure is hugely popular with museum web developers - check out Nat Torkington's presentation from Webstock this year to see why we're all so keen to talk about it.

Giving it away.

Today I'm veering off briefly into techydom, so bear with me.

Late last week the Brooklyn Museum released a API, which allows people to display Brooklyn Museum collection images and data in their own applications. You can read more about the release and the reasons for it in this blog post. In it Shelley Bernstein writes:

So, how did we get here? Recently, I was presenting at a conference in Amsterdam along with Nina Simon and Mike Ellis. Mike’s highly entertaining presentation was about encouraging the public sector to consider releasing their data so that the community of developers worldwide could take advantage and create wonderful things with it. In Mike’s own words “if you love something, set it free” and that idea was something that resonated with me. Mike is a practical guy and he talked a lot about the stresses of staffing at cultural organizations, that we can’t possibly do it all ourselves and he wanted to spread the news of the potential in allowing outside developers the chance to add their own talent and wealth to our data.

It's hard to predict what might happen when you release an API like this. Wonderful things might appear, or equally you could be met with a resounding lack of interest. In the Brooklyn Museum's case, something wonderful has already popped up; a developer named David Wilkinson has built an alternative collection browser using Adobe Flex.

Typically, this is the point where I would bemoan New Zealand cultural institutions usual late-to-the-party behaviour. But late last year Digital New Zealand launched an API that brings together data from other 30 organisations, including museums, galleries, archives and libraries. In her post Shelley gave a hat tip to DigitalNZ for their work in this area, so this morning I'm feeling proud & hopeful.

Last one, I promise

Okay - the final installment in my current obsession with the Flickr API - Tag Galaxy.

Is it the most efficient way of searching for images? Hell no. Is it intuitive, beautiful and surprising? Yes. Give it a try.

So beautiful it must be true

About a month ago I wrote about Multicolor search lab, a tool that let's you search Flickr images by selecting a colour palette.



Today I stumbled over another oldie-but-goodie, based on the Flickr API. retriever gives you a simple little tool to draw colour sketches, which are then matched to images in Flickr. Your drawings automatically generate urls: this was my attempt to get buildings at night time.

Again, imagine - just imagine - if you applied this search tool to your online collection. Is it for the hard core researcher? No. Is it an engrossing search experience? Yes.