Sourcey

Tyler Green's post The collection catalogue is dead, long live the catalogue piqued my interest this morning. In it Green writes about the Getty's project to move from print publishing to digital publishing for public access to its collection information.

From Green's post:

The Getty's project is ambitious: It aims to replace the expensive dead-tree scholarly catalogue with an open-source, web-accessible-to-all, digital catalogue format. For now the Getty is working with eight museums on the initial stage of the project: the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian's Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA.

Digital catalogues are nothing new, although the existing examples vary wildly in terms of the proportion of the collection that's available, the quality of the metadata and the usability of the interface. But the phrase in this quote that really interests me is open-source, because it indicates that the Getty will be releasing its cataloguing software for anyone to use and add to. However, while the 48-page report (note:PDF) the Getty has released contains many persuasive arguments institutions could use when trying to convince funders to stump up for online catalogues, and a lot of common sense (hey everyone - let's used standardised cataloguing terms!), it makes no mention* of the software being used or plans to release it to the wider community.

Tyler promises more info on the initiative tomorrow. The magic words I would like to see are: "the project includes releasing a public-access API'".

*Admittedly, I skim-read this and am very happy to be corrected.

Getting it right ...

The exhibition 'Heroes and Villains: Australian comics and their creators' closed yesterday at the State Library of Victoria. I didn't see the exhibition in the flesh, but I like what they've done with their web accompaniments.

Heroes and Villains online activities

The Library ran a three day blogging session with Australian cartoonists, loaded up a podcast for use in the exhibition or for using for a virtual tour, and created an interactive Flash thingie (with too many exclamation marks for my liking).

The first thing that caught my eye was the online competition, where people (mostly - purportedly - kids and young teens) could submit drawings of their own superhero, with a few snippets of information:

The Tunnel Killer (Nicholas, age 6)

My superhero wears: He wears black pants, a chain mesh shirt, and a mask with spikes on his arms.

My superhero looks like: He looks tough and strong.

My superhero has a gadget: Spikes and weapons.

My superhero can: He has spikes and weapons and is very strong.

My superhero lives: In tunnels.

An adventure my superhero has had: He was trying to get some people that had crawled into some tunnels and he won.

That's Anggry Dud, by Callum, age 7, at the top of the post.

Superhero Gallery

But I'm also really impressed by the online catalogue:

• it's in HTML, instead of being a PDF of a print publication, making it more accessible and eliminating download time
• the left-hand nav replicates a contents page, making it easy to move through
• despite the all-caps font, it's still clean and easy to read
• the design seems to have been made for the online environment instead of transposing a print design onto a website.

Heroes and Villains online catalogue