[MCN-L] Digital/Web jobs at Powerhouse Museum
All We've got FOUR jobs going in the Web Social Technologies Unit at the Powerhouse Museum. Two data analyst roles for those with museum registration, cataloguing and metadata experience. Two web developer roles for those with web application developer experience. As these are temporary positions they are open to overseas applicants who hold a temporary working visa. Find out more over here - http://bit.ly/bnQ7Yy Seb Sebastian Chan A/g Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 mob - 0413 457 126 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog -- This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message.
[MCN-L] Suggestions for Web Analytics software besides GoogleAnalytics
Actually it can be done much more easily than that by just using the GATAG.JS addon. One line of code and a JS file on your server. Grab it here - http://www.analyticsresults.com/search/label/ga.js Also tracks outbound links . . . Seb Sebastian Chan A/g Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 mob - 0413 457 126 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog -- This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Glen Barnes Sent: Thu 15/04/2010 7:55 AM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: [MCN-L] Suggestions for Web Analytics software besides GoogleAnalytics Hi Bilkis, You can track the downloads pretty easily using the _trackEvent tag [1]: _trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value) The key here is not to manually add this to _every_ link you want to track. I can't find the exact page[2] that you want to access now but basically on page load you have a default piece of javascript that adds the correct Javascript to each anchor tag. Here[3] is a script that does it using the old method of generating 'fake' page views (the new way of using event tracking is the recommended way). Hope this helps. Thanks Glen Barnes http://www.mytoursapp.com [1] http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html [2] http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=enclient=safarirls=enq=javascript+add+google+analytics+event+tracking+to+each+download+automaticallymeta=aq=faqi=aql=oq=gs_rfai= [3] http://www.goodwebpractices.com/downloads/gatag.js On 15/04/2010, at 7:00 AM, mcn-l-request at mcn.edu wrote: -- Message: 2 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 11:49:42 +0100 From: Mosoddik, Bilkis bmosoddik at museumoflondon.org.uk Subject: [MCN-L] Suggestions for Web Analytics software besides Google Analytics To: Museum Computer Network Listserv mcn-l at mcn.edu Message-ID: CBE3ED7D5509D54F9C4E1D614931DF0E066ADA20 at mail-mwh-2k3.museumoflondon.org.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Hi everyone, We use WebTrends and Google Analytics (GA) for analysing our web statistics at Museum of London. However, WebTrends has become increasingly very expensive for us and we want to move away from it to a new, preferably free, package and would appreciate all your recommendations. I am aware of some of the software out there that has been mentioned in previous emails, but I would like a recommendation of one that you think is really good. A couple of things that the software should do that GA doesn't: * Allow reanalysis of web log files * Allow analysis of visits to downloads Any other comments or suggestions are welcome. Thanks. Bilkis. Bilkis Mosoddik Web Content Manager, Web Team, Communications Museum of London 150 London Wall London. EC2Y 5HN Tel: 020 7410 2213 / 020 7814 5723 Fax: 020 7600 1058 Email: bmosoddik at museumoflondon.org.uk www.museumoflondon.org.uk Spectacular new ?20 million Galleries of Modern London opening at Museum of London on 28 May 2010. Find out more at www.museumoflondon.org.uk Before printing, please think about the environment ___ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/
[MCN-L] Useful website metrics?
Hi Ari Tracking downloads with GA is easy - especially if you can modify your CMS slightly. Here's the info - http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=enanswer=55529 Basically you need to implement this on everything you actually want to track. Now you might say, but this excludes people who use Google to arrive directly at the PDF! . . .to which I'd reply that you probably want to counting the people who actually access your content via the interface/branding of your own site as they are the ones you can 'convert' and interest in your other activities. Seb Sebastian Chan A/g Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 mob - 0413 457 126 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Ari Davidow Sent: Sun 7/12/2009 1:13 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Useful website metrics? Oh, yeah! that's a great article, Seb. Thanks for the reminder. You'll get no argument from me about the difference in credibility between GA and log analysis. It may be my lack of time with the tool, but I haven't found a good way to use GA to track downloads, though. In our specific case, as an online-only institution, geographic segmentation hasn't been of much use, other than when we talk with a funder based in a specific locale, to show that use of our site is local to them. But we could do much more with segmentation in general. For social media, we do use some quantitative measures (followers and fans; comments per post and retweets, referrals back to our home website), but none of those numbers seem terribly significant so far. I usually say that's an accurate reflection of the time we put into using those media. ari On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 9:42 PM, Chan, SebastianSebC at phm.gov.au wrote: Hi Ari I'd suggest you want to be segmenting these figures by geography at the very least. And probably by source and entry point. GA will give you much more accurate figures than *any* log analysis tool - 100% 'accuracy' is not possible (and wouldn't tell you anything in any case!). In the social media world you probably want to emphasise qualitative activity over the quantitative. Again, you'd segment by intention. My paper from MW08 is still reasonably valid - http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/papers/chan-metrics/chan-metrics.html Seb Sebastian Chan A/g Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 mob - 0413 457 126 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog -- This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu on behalf of Ari Davidow Sent: Fri 7/10/2009 4:50 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: [MCN-L] Useful website metrics? There are lots of things we can track about our websites and about the ways in which people interact with them. Here are some that matter to us: * Downloads of podcasts * Downloads of lesson plans and other website PDFs * New pages posted to the website: our blog posts, new articles * Ways to measure engagement or interactivity: comments/blog post; updates posted to our encyclopedia; blog comments/page views * Number of donations made to the organization online: how much raised, how many people contribute online, mean and median online contributrions * Subscriptions to our e-letters; turnover on the e-letters; % of e-letters opened; % of e-letters that leads to clicks * Site visits: unique visits, unique visitors, time on site * Links to site (google link:); Links to blog posts (technorati) External sites (these numbers should get big enough to be worth tracking!) * Mentions on twitter; RTs on twitter; followers on twitter * Fans of Facebook page; activity on Facebook * Fans, activity on Flickr exhibits Etc. We are relying on Google Analytics for most numbers (except for the absolute site visit numbers,
[MCN-L] Museum librarian blogs
Our research library has just started their own blog which covers the research enquiries they are working on. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/library/ Seb Sebastian Chan A/g Head of Digital Services Research Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 mob - 0413 457 126 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Ari Davidow Sent: Fri 13/02/2009 7:33 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Museum librarian blogs I take your point, but in our case, at least, it isn't that management is against such discussion, but rather that the blog is seen as an outreach tool, and staff haven't been interested in adding the meta dimension. I am curious as to whether the library bloggers you notice are their main institutional bloggers, or if they are blogging on their own time about their craft. I seem to have a long list of bloggers I follow from general cultural heritage institutions--in most cases, though, they blog outside the institution--Seb Chan at Australia's Powerhouse being one notable exception as I try to think on my feet and fail, yet again. ari On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Eric Johnson ejohnson at monticello.org wrote: Hi, Ari-- That last point is very much at the heart of my inquiry. I find it intriguing that museum librarians and archivists (and related information professionals) who are engaged in the day-to-day work of helping connect people to information spend so little time talking among themselves about the meta-level questions of what they're doing. There are certainly plenty of librarian blogs out there that address librarianship as such, but not many that I've found doing so with a focus on the museum world. I've seen quite a bit of discussion of museum/information connections, but it seems to be lead primarily by academics and programmers, with curators throwing in their occasional two cents. I'd like to see more sharing of information from other museum information practitioners (spoken of broadly, as the lines are often quite blurred). I suspect you're right about the institutional reluctance to support that kind of blogging, as it may result in negative reflection on the way things are being done at a given institution. But I don't think that negativity necessarily has to be the case at all, nor does the conversation really have to revolve around a single site. In any case, more food for thought. Thanks! --E. Eric D. M. Johnson Web Services Librarian Jefferson Library, Monticello P.O. Box 316 Charlottesville, VA 22902 Phone: (434) 984-7540 | Fax: (434) 984-7546 http://www.monticello.org/library/ ejohnson at monticello.org -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Ari Davidow Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 2:35 PM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Museum librarian blogs Interesting take on the subject. The Jewish Women's Archive blogs at http://jwablog.jwa.org but mostly we blog about current events and how they relate to our collections, or just about current events. Very little meta discussion about the archive, itself. There has been resistance here to using the blog that way. In fact, I blog at Musematic when I have something to say about the tools we use or the philosophical issues we face. ari ___ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/ ___ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/ =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are
[MCN-L] Powerhouse Museum joins Commons on Flickr
Folks 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. 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 . . . amongst many other things. More over at http://www.flickr.com/commons/ I've also blogged some background over at Fresh New - http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog Seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] Website benchmarking
hi nik and others i should weigh in here. i'm actually talking about this at MW08 in a few weeks. web analytics are a nightmare if you are trying to get any clarity out of absolute figures. matt, nik and others are right - the trends are what matters. however . . . page tagging solutions *don't* count bots and spiders (as they don't execute javascript). log file solutions suffer from bots and spider traffic (as well as counting every single RSS refresh etc) we've found the best option at the Powerhouse is to use a combination of approaches depending on what we are trying to measure, and for whom, for comparative stats we use Hitwise which is a local ISP-level solution. we are able to measure our AUSTRALIAN traffic (not international) against other sites and industries as a percentage of total traffic. it doesn't provide X visits but instead tells me the %age of Australian traffic to the Powerhouse site as a proportion of any particular sector's overall traffic. because it measures at the ISP layer it allows me to compare against other sites and mine search data as well as where visitors go AFTER our site (interestingly a fair amount go to ebay!). Hitwise does this by buying anonymised ISP proxy logs from the major ISPs around Australia. i'd argue that at a meta-level % of total internet traffic is more useful than counting visitors . . . . internet usage fluctuates seasonally but is also always growing . . . . even if your site traffic is growing at say 20% per annum, what if overall internet traffic is growing at 25% per annum? then your site is actually going backwards in terms of 'share' i am looking forward to Google Analytics' upcoming 'comparative benchmarking' stats . . . seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Nik Honeysett Sent: Wed 12/03/2008 8:27 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Website benchmarking Google Analytics is a page tagging service, its accuracy will depend on you and what you want. If you have comprehensively tagged all your pages, then it will comprehensively report on your traffic, but that traffic will include bots and spiders i.e. not real people. You can filter these out - up to a point - but are real-people numbers important to you? Its unlikely that you will ever get an accurate number of real people visiting your site, so its best to accept that. Assuming, you did have an accurate number and that number suddenly doubled or halved what would you do? What would happen? In either case you would want to know why, but you're not really interested in the number, only the change. You can figure that out whether you have real-people numbers or all-inclusive numbers. Your real concern should be trends and Google Analytics is fine for this, as long as you know what you're reporting and you don't change the filtering. -nik Jeff Tancil jtancil at tenement.org 3/11/2008 12:58 PM That seems to beg a question: what stats service is useful? As a fairly dinky Museum, we use the best free service, GoogleAnalytics. How badly do people think that skews? -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Nik Honeysett Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 3:53 PM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Website benchmarking Like you say, these sites are ok for trends but do not give anything close to accurate figures for traffic your numbers. -nik Russ Brooks RBrooks at mus-nature.ca 3/11/2008 10:43 AM When we noticed a shift in our web statistics we wondered if it was just our site or was it something that was affecting all other museums. We found the two following sites very useful in providing us with an opportunity to compare our performance to that of other museums. http://www.alexa.com/ http://www.compete.com/ These two sites allowed us to see the exact same patterns in traffic affecting nearly all other museums. These sites can also be useful when trying to determine Internet usage trends. Is Facebook still hot? Type in their address and you can see the results. On 3/11/08 1:26 PM, Leonard Steinbach lensteinbach at gmail.com wrote: I was wondering whether anyone uses any particular web traffic statistics to compare the performance of their website to the websites of other museums. In effect is anyone benchmarking their website against others, or know of any studies or papers which address this issue? Thanks ___ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l
[MCN-L] mass email query
janice at the Powerhouse Museum we use a product called Traction (http://www.tractionplatform.com/traction/) which allows us to segment and monitor responses to and interactions with email marketing as well as offering integration with SMS, MMS and future mobile telephony campaigns. it also offers a huge amount of customisation and personalisations options as well as competitions and multi-tiered interactions (email quiz competitions and sms voting - for example, send a SMS vote for your favourite museum object then get a personalised email bulletin back and an entry in a prize draw, all managed from the one system). it has APis for integration into your website. another option for email-only campaigns we have looked at is Campaign Monitor (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/) which is excellent, very cheap, and if email is all you need might be a good solution. both Traction and Campaign Monitor give the necessary tracking to help you make the most of your email marketing - which definitely needs to be much more than just send and forget. with tracking you quickly realise that ech message by itself will only get about a 30-40% read rate - which can be improved upon with more targetted and personalised follow up messages etc we send to about 20,000 addresses each month and have about 10 different segmented lists for different types of message and content. seb chan (Fresh + New blog - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog) Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Janice Sent: Fri 09/11/2007 7:50 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: [MCN-L] mass email query Has anyone researched the various services for sending out mass emails? We have been using Drupal to send out Enews to members/teachers or other mailing lists and thinking of switching to a service. What works and what doesn't? And what volume are you sending on a monthly basis? Janice Craddock IT Manager Amon Carter Museum ___ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] Job Posting - 2x Web developers at Powerhouse Museum in sunny Sydney, AU
All Folksonomies, mashups, data visualisation, UCD, usability, experimentation? I am excited to announce that we have two developer jobs going here in the Powerhouse Museum Web Services Unit. We are looking to fill two roles, one working specifically on the Collections Australia Network (CAN) project, and the other on a new experimental project called About NSW. Both roles involve developing next generation web services for large datasets and have a great deal of scope for creative experimentation. The Collections Australia Network (CAN) role involves the continued development of a national collections database portal as well as cultural tourism site. CAN works across the Australian museums, galleries, libraries and archives sector and there is a huge pool of data waiting to be explored, visualised, and made more useful. CAN runs on a custom CMS built with PHP and PostgreSQL. The About NSW position involves developing cross-government 'mashups' - pulling together data from multiple sources using harvesting and scraping methods and APIs, to create new services that mix this government content with museum data. The About NSW project runs on Plone CMS, but has a lot of room for experimental visualisation and mashup work outside of Plone. We are a PHP shop but there is scope within these projects for experimentation with Ruby on Rails. Both roles are based on a 35hr working week (rather than the 35 hr day that you might be more used to) and have flexible working conditions. The positions are both temporary positions. The Museum is located in central Sydney, a great place to be with summer approaching. The full position descriptions and application process - - Collections Australia Network Online Application Developer (Clerk 7/8 - total package up to AU$84,855) info at http://www.jobs.nsw.gov.au/JobDetails.asp?JobAdvertId=65179 - About NSW Online Application Developer (Clerk 7/8 - total package up to AU$84,855)info at http://www.jobs.nsw.gov.au/JobDetails.asp?JobAdvertId=65207 Come and join the team! Applications close for both positions on 29 October 2007. Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] Museums on Facebook? Examples?
Beth There is also an International Museum Web Professionals group for people who work in museums. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2435702276 Seb Chan Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Beth Kanter Sent: Mon 7/9/2007 12:33 AM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: [MCN-L] Museums on Facebook? Examples? Hi there, Wondering if there any museums with a Facebook profile/group? Anyone doing anything interesting on Facebook? Beth Kanter ___ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] Impact of new collection browsing/searching techniques on online visitation
All Some of you may be interested in reading a rather long post I have made on our digital media and museum's blog Fresh + New at the Powerhouse Museum about the first six weeks of our OPAC2.0 online project which incroporates a lot of web2.0 and folksonomy ideas since going live. The OPAC2.0 project is a collection database that exposes 62,000 objects from the museum's collection and it has been extremely popular and successful for us. There are a number of interesting trends that have emerged and I explain some of the ways in which OPAC 2.0 works which may be useful to how other museums and institutions explore new ways of exposing their collections on the web. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2006/08/10/initial-impacts-of-opac20-on-powerhouse-museum-online-visitation/ If you have any questions/comments either email me or post the questions in the blog comments. Cheers Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] Podcasting
Podacasting - we've started doing this on a more serious basis at the Powerhouse Museum but the amin issues for us are around resourcing of their production. Most of ours are currently event recordings - simple because these are easiest to do. Those we have made specifically for exhibitions tours etc have, interstingly (and somewhat anecdotally), been mainly used offsite - not for their Museum 'intended' use. We are a long way from the setup at Redshift (Otario Science Centre) or others where the production of podcast-able content is part of a traditional museum eductaion/research staff workflow. See our blog for some stats from Redshift - http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2006/04/13/redshiftont ario-science-center-podcasts-aggregators/ Seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Lloyd Swartz Sent: Friday, 14 July 2006 1:51 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: [MCN-L] Podcasting I just had the question raised of the pros and cons of adding POD casting. Anyone with any feelings or interesting updates? Lloyd M. Swartz Manager of Information Systems and Technology UTSA's Institute of Texan Cultures Desk 210-458-2220 Pager 210-203-3033 ( Best way to reach for urgent items ) Personal Cell Phone ( doesn't always work in building ) 210-724-7390 Lloyd.Swartz at utsa.edu www.texancultures.edu A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit. - John C. Maxwell ___ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
Re: STEVE folksonomies / was subject keyword searching
On the subject of STEVE, we are doing a similar prototype trial here at the Powerhouse Museum with our Electronic Swatchbook project (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/electronicswatchbook) The swatchbook has a lot of high resolution public domain (in Aust) fabric swatches available for download. Unfortunately, as they come from a series of physical fabric swatchbooks they have been catalogued by the Museum as three separate books. Each book contains numerous swatches, all of which are unlabelled. We have, since the launch, been inviting users to describe the swatches. As these descriptions are added by users of the site they go into a database as search terms alongside the particular swatch record. Once we have a critical mass of descriptors then we will turn on searching which will enable searching by colour and pattern etc. We are now looking at adding similar folksonomy tools to other collection-based projects. Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - s...@phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: Matt Morgan [mailto:m...@concretecomputing.com] Sent: Friday, 18 November 2005 2:20 To: mcn-l@mcn.edu Subject: Re: subject keyword searching in CMS and DAMS This looks like a great place to plug social tagging, (an approach to folksonomy, i.e., using popular terminology for subject categorization) like what STEVE (http://steve.museum) promises. Folksonomies are a way to address the reality that Museum and Library professionals often use subject categorizations that don't reflect the terms most people use when searching online. STEVE is an open-source tool for enabling social tagging of museum object images to create folksonomies. Alongside the folksonomies, I still think it's worthwhile for museums to make their internal subject terms more public. Exposing the insides of the Museum in a demystifying, educational way is a great community-minded thing to do. Deborah Wythe wrote: This doesn't make a lot of sense to me--why would museums not publish subject terms in their web/public versions of the catalog? Isn't the purpose of creating subjects/keywords to make the collections more accessible --to everyone, not just inhouse users? Museum staff are likely to be looking for a specific object and have key data--title or accession numbers--but members of the public (including picture researchers who might buy our images!) may want to ask a system: show me all the cats. Deborah Original Message Follows From: JanaH jana.h...@cartermuseum.org Reply-To: mcn-l@mcn.edu To: mcn-l@mcn.edu Subject: RE: subject keyword searching in CMS and DAMS Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:04:12 -0600 Deborah, Museums don't always publish their subject cataloging to their websites. Usually only select fields are exported from the collection management system, and for several reasons, the subject fields don't make the cut. I think you'll find that the depth of information stored in collection management systems isn't really reflected in museum websites. So I guess what I'm saying is that just because you don't see it on the Web doesn't mean someone isn't recording that information. That said, I think most of us probably use a vocabulary based on the Getty Art Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), with local terms added where necessary. We don't use LCSH because they are usually too conceptual/vague for our needs, but maybe someone else will weigh in on that? Jana Hill Collection Database Coordinator Amon Carter Museum 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd. Fort Worth, Texas 76107 817-989-5173 817-989-5179 fax All opinions are my own and not those of my employer. -Original Message- From: Deborah Wythe [mailto:deborahwy...@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 2:12 PM To: mcn-l@mcn.edu Subject: subject keyword searching in CMS and DAMS I'm curious to know if your museum assigns formal subject headings and/or keywords to works of art in their collections management or digital asset management systems. A little poking around on the Web seems to indicate it's not too common -- artist name, title, medium, collection, maybe a general category, yes, but something approaching the depth of the subject headings used in library catalogs--maybe no? If you do assign subject headings, which authorities are used -- LCSH? AAT? Thanks, Deborah Deborah Wythe Brooklyn Museum Head, Digital Collections and Services 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, NY 11238 tel: 718 501 6311 fax: 718 501 6125 email: deborahwy...@hotmail.com --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: jana.h...@cartermuseum.org To unsubscribe send a blank email
Re: STEVE folksonomies / was subject keyword searching
Hi Jennifer When do you decide that you have a 'critical mass of descriptors'? We were thinking that this would be reached at 50% of total swatches available. We are about to add another 300 or so so that will push the timeline out further. With a bit of time we will, ourselves, go through and add a whole lot of descriptors to objects which will speed the process. it's true, that only having a few terms to search on isn't very functional, but is it demotivating to users if they put in terms but then can't see the effect of their work? We did consider this but there were three barriers - - the inability to effectively block/censor spurious entries (we could have added a banned word list etc but as a pilot study it was going to be overkill) - linked to the above is the need to verify for accuracy. At the minimum a quick visual check to see that something described as red in colour is infact something approximating red. We are not checking the more subjective fields. - the immediate effect for users is only useful once we reach the critical mass otherwise I think it is potentially more demotivating. Flickr gets around this by sheer volume and the way their API has been used in nifty ways. Eg http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/ and http://www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/ What kind of response have you had? About 40% have descriptions and so far no bad language or spurious entries. But once we add another 300 the %age will drop again. We are looking into adding similar functions to a few other sites we have in development at the moment which will launch soon. One of them is a historical photo collection and we will be offering users the ability to enter additional information about the photographs if they know things about them that we have not yet captured such as exact location, names of subjects etc. This information along with contact info will be stored in a separate database and sent to the curator for verification. If verified, the object record can then be updated. Seb jt At 5:04 PM +1100 11/22/05, Chan, Sebastian wrote: On the subject of STEVE, we are doing a similar prototype trial here at the Powerhouse Museum with our Electronic Swatchbook project (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/electronicswatchbook) The swatchbook has a lot of high resolution public domain (in Aust) fabric swatches available for download. Unfortunately, as they come from a series of physical fabric swatchbooks they have been catalogued by the Museum as three separate books. Each book contains numerous swatches, all of which are unlabelled. We have, since the launch, been inviting users to describe the swatches. As these descriptions are added by users of the site they go into a database as search terms alongside the particular swatch record. Once we have a critical mass of descriptors then we will turn on searching which will enable searching by colour and pattern etc. We are now looking at adding similar folksonomy tools to other collection-based projects. Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - s...@phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: Matt Morgan [mailto:m...@concretecomputing.com] Sent: Friday, 18 November 2005 2:20 To: mcn-l@mcn.edu Subject: Re: subject keyword searching in CMS and DAMS This looks like a great place to plug social tagging, (an approach to folksonomy, i.e., using popular terminology for subject categorization) like what STEVE (http://steve.museum) promises. Folksonomies are a way to address the reality that Museum and Library professionals often use subject categorizations that don't reflect the terms most people use when searching online. STEVE is an open-source tool for enabling social tagging of museum object images to create folksonomies. Alongside the folksonomies, I still think it's worthwhile for museums to make their internal subject terms more public. Exposing the insides of the Museum in a demystifying, educational way is a great community-minded thing to do. Deborah Wythe wrote: This doesn't make a lot of sense to me--why would museums not publish subject terms in their web/public versions of the catalog? Isn't the purpose of creating subjects/keywords to make the collections more accessible --to everyone, not just inhouse users? Museum staff are likely to be looking for a specific object and have key data--title or accession numbers--but members of the public (including picture researchers who might buy our images!) may want to ask a system: show me all the cats. Deborah Original Message Follows From: JanaH jana.h...@cartermuseum.org Reply
[MCN-L] Auto-generated tagging - a museum Open Calais implementation
Folks Down here at the Powerhouse Museum we have just switched on an implementation of Reuters' OpenCalais service on our OPAC/collection database. This allows for auto-tagging of content into a variety of categories. I've blogged about it over at Fresh New (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/03/31/opac20-opencalais-meets-our-museum-collection-auto-tagging-and-semantic-parsing-of-collection-data/). Whilst there are some immediate problems with the way some phrases are picked up by the parsing, the overall result is incredibly positive and powerful, extracting significant extra value from collection records. We are now able to extract people, place, companies and much more from plain text and auto-create structured metadata to enhance search and discovery. For those interested in a real-world museum example of the potential of the 'semantic web' this may be of particular interest . . . . Seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] Google Custon Search (was: Effects of Google's 'search within site'? Anyoneelseaffected?)
Hi Tamara The 'search within site' on Google seems to have been rolled out based on either a random sample, or a weighted sample based on volume of search traffic. (probably the latter actually) We *do* use a Google Custom Search as our generic 'site search' on our site (www.powerhousemuseum.com/search) BUT we have built our own (and quite well known) collection search application (discussed in detail on Fresh New as well as written up over at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/chan/chan.html). The Google CSE is excellent for our generic search and does pretty much everything a 'general' visitor needs. Our collection search is much more complex and does a lot more than just search - we continue to build extra features, the latest of which will go live in a few days, all of which enhance the user experience and functionality). Google CSE has the advantage of - a) being free (and without adverts if you are govt or non profit) b) familiar to users c) forces you to work on exposing your deep web content to Google (c) is the main game. Not only should your deep web content be exposed to end users, it also needs to be exposed to search. Seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Tamara Georgick Sent: Friday, 28 March 2008 10:15 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Effects of Google's 'search within site'? Anyoneelseaffected? I noticed this for the first time yesterday when searching for the King County Library System, here in Washington State. I thought it might have been something specific they did to facilitate having the extra search box appear. Now that you mention it, how does Google determine which site searches will return that feature? Does the end site need to have the Google search tool embedded locally? We are in the midst of building a more database driven web site and I am curious about the approach others have taken. Did you build global navigation yourself, or opt for a 3rd party tool like the Google search? We have lots of products that require their own search capabilities, so we figured as long as we were doing that, we might as well just build our own global search tool for greater integration. However, to search all of the products at once, I am thinking of going for a commercial federated search product like Aquabrowser. I think it will be able to search across products and platforms and has a nice tag cloud on the results screen. If anyone has experience with a federated search product, I'd love to hear your experience. Thanks! Tamara Tamara Georgick Washington State Historical Society From: Chan, Sebastian [mailto:s...@phm.gov.au] Sent: Thu 3/27/2008 3:36 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: [MCN-L] Effects of Google's 'search within site'? Anyone elseaffected? Folks I'm curious to hear if anyone else has been affected by Google's 'search-within-site' feature they have recently rolled out . . . . I've blogged in detail about what it is over at Fresh New . . . . http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/03/27/google-tele portation-googles-search-within-search/ If you are affected, what, if anything are you doing about it? if you are not (yet), what might you do. Curious. Seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] First International Museum Blog Survey Closing Soon
All We are conducting the first comprehensive survey looking at museum blogs and blogging practices. If you write for, or operate a museum or museum-related blog, please fill out the survey http://survey.museumblogs.org/ on the Museum Blogs http://www.museumblogs.org/ website. Jim Spadaccini (Ideum http://www.ideum.com/ ) and I are the conducting the survey. The results will be presented in a session, Radical Trust: The state of the museum blogosphere http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/abstracts/prg_32778.html at the Museums and Web Conference in San Francisco in April 2007. We will also link to our paper from both the Ideum blog http://www.ideum.com/blog and the Powerhouse's fresh + new http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/ blog. The purpose of the survey is to capture a snapshot of the technologies, aims, policies, uses, and impact of blogging in the museum sector. 2006 has been an amazing year for the field, what were 20 blogs back in January is now a community of nearly 100 museum-related blogs. The results from the survey will help organizations plan and justify future projects utilizing blogs and other social technologies. Please feel free to repost or otherwise pass this on. Thanks Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com =Important Notice= This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. Whilst every care has been taken, the Powerhouse Museum cannot guarantee that the integrity of this email has been maintained nor that the email is free of errors or viruses. The Powerhouse Museum advises all organisations and individuals to undertake their own virus scanning and security measures. ==
[MCN-L] Fwd: folksonomy article
Nick Well said! You've saved me blogging the same frustrations with this article. I would add to your response that folksonomies are often about aiding discoverability rather than about classifying. Whilst the Steve project may be more about 'how do i desribe this' other implementations of folksonomies (Powerhouse Museum's collection or del.icio.us etc) are more about opening up new ways, dare i say rhizomatic ways, of finding objects. When combined with free text searching and traditional ontologies, folksonomies often aid users in discovering other objects/records/items that otherwise would be near impossible to dredge up from the information depths. seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Nick Poole Sent: Mon 11/20/2006 4:39 AM To: 'Museum Computer Network Listserv' Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Fwd: folksonomy article Jeanette et al, I was really interested in the post around the 'Beneath the Metadata' article. I actually think the article has some pretty deep flaws. First of all, it is not entirely clear why you would apply these philosophical constructs to Folksonomy in the first place and secondly I don't think it helps to further the understanding of what Folksonomy and 'traditional' cataloguing are and how they might work together. The article essentially says that classification is about absolutes - this horse is white, that box is empty - whereas Folksonomy is about subjectivity and relativism. It goes on to compare classification with propositional logic and states that Folksonomy by its nature gives rise to logical contradiction. It strikes me that this misses a significant part of the real value of the approach. In her article, Elaine Peterson says that when we catalogue, we are asking the question 'What is it?'. I couldn't disagree more. What we are really asking is 'What are we going to call this thing (and things relevantly similar to it)?'. In this sense, 'traditional' classification is an act of collective relativism, and is equally subject to the flaws of subjectivity as Folksonomy. I have no doubt that the wave around Folksonomy will eventually pass, and I very much hope that what will be left is an enriched approach to professional classification. There is considerable strength in a hybrid approach which retains the intellectual rigour of ontological standardisation but which equally recognises the additional potential value of large-scale subjective term-attribution. For example, would it not validate our professional beliefs if the subjective interpretations of tens of thousands of people translated up into patterns of meaning which confirmed them? And similarly, if they don't, wouldn't there be considerable value in asking why not? Finally, whatever the linguistic consistency or validity of folksonomic thesauri, we must never underestimate the importance of letting people in. The act of tagging is only partly to do with classification. It is an affirmative act which says 'I want to be involved' and for that alone, it is of tremendous value. Nick Poole Director Museum Documentation Association Nick Poole Director MDA The Spectrum Building, The Michael Young Centre, Purbeck Road, Cambridge, CB2 2PD Telephone: 01223 415 760 http://www.mda.org.uk http://www.collectionsforall.org.uk The revised edition of SPECTRUM, the UK museum documentation standard, is now available. Download it for free at: http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of amalyah keshet Sent: 18 November 2006 11:00 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Fwd: folksonomy article Thanks for forwarding this. Good article. Amalyah Keshet At 20:33 17/11/2006, you wrote: Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 09:41:44 -0800 Sender: Visual Resources Association VRA-L at LISTSERV.UARK.EDU From: Jeanette Mills jcmills at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Subject: folksonomy article To: VRA-L at LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Hello everyone -- Considering the recent discussions of folksonomy, I thought this article in the most recent issue of D-Lib might be of interest. I don't think it's been mentioned yet. Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy Elaine Peterson, Montana State University http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november06/peterson/11peterson.html Jeanette = Jeanette C. Mills, MA + MLIS Director of Visual Services Newsletter Editor School of Art, University of Washington jcmills at u dot washington dot edu 206-543-0649 = -- Diane M. Zorich 113 Gallup Road Princeton, NJ 08542 USA Voice:
[MCN-L] Drupal vs. WordPress MU as content management systems
WRT the digg effect and Wordpress - wordpress installs MUST have a cache-ing plugin installed. We use WP Super Cache which has saved us from a lot of pain. I'd not suggest a high traffic site uses WP as a CMS for the whole site but for small orgs Wordpress can do the job quite well and has a flatter learning curve than Drupal. Seb Sebastian Chan A/g Head of Digital, Social Emerging Technologies Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 mob - 61 (0) 413 457 126 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog -- This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose or distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views expressed in this message and attachments are those of the individual sender and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this message. -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Ryan Hartman Sent: Tuesday, 23 February 2010 9:02 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Drupal vs. WordPress MU as content management systems Hi Eric, I can't really say I've done a comparison between Drupal and Wordpress MU as a CMS but I do have some thoughts to share. Fundamentally I've found Wordpress to be quite different from drupal. First off Wordpress is a blogging platform, and MU is for running more than one blog on a single install. Lot's of people use Wordpress as a CMS but it's generally referred to as a hack, to which I tend to agree trying it in the past. Drupal on the other hand is a CMS through and through. It is much better suited for running an institution's website. We use it here, so I am quite biased. In my honest opinion, I would not consider Wordpress for anything besides a dedicated blog. For something like a website (and one with social interaction) Drupal word be my choice. With that in mind, I will focus on Drupal as I touch on your bullet points. As an PHP developer, I find Drupal extremely powerful and flexible. If you don't like something, you can override it yourself, install a module, or do it some other way. There is a huge community for Drupal, each module has an issue queue where you may report bugs and questions. There are active mailing lists, IRC channels, forums etc and best of all Google where you can find all kinds of info and developer blogs. There is a learning curve but if you know html / css and basic PHP eg print, foreach, and working with arrays as well as some linux experience you should be fine. In a few weeks you will know your way around the admin area, have a basic understanding of views, panels, and CCK. Once you are proficient, you can build a moderately complex site within a week easily. Content editing by multiple staffers: We have setup roles for each dept that provides content, and then assigned one person in that dept to manage posting (someone comfortable with posting blogs and pages to the web, and can understand BASIC html.) Once a user has a role you can pair down hundreds of permissions to limit them, and again, if it not there you can code a permission yourself. Social media integration: Hundreds of modules are available for this. Search projects on drupal.org and see what you can find, more than likely something exists. Speed: Drupal's performance is directly related to how many modules you have within your installation. We have our PHP memory limit set to 128mb which is recommended. If your site is slowing down, you just throw more hardware at it. Drupal's performance is much faster than Wordpress which is notorious for succumbing to events like the Digg Effect. Upgrades: Core upgrades, especially point releases are usually quite simple and do not require anything more than patching. We patch our installs following this site: http://fuerstnet.de/en/drupal-upgrade-easier which makes patching a 10 minute affair. Major releases obviously require reworking of templates and modules, as code is depreciated for better functionality, but the hassle rewards itself with everything else you are now able to do. The core upgrades are fairly easy to do and is directly related to how complex your site actually is. I hope this helps anyone considering Drupal as a platform for their next website or redesign. I would also like to add that Drupal is open enough that we are currently developing direct integration with our collection management system to allow the
