Re: CMS
At 10:24 27/05/05 -0400, Andrew Macdonald wrote: A CMS can be costly and so complicated that no one wants to use it. When it comes down to it, many times hiring someone with knowledge of the web will save you headaches and money. There's a lot of truth in that. A CMS really comes into its own when you want it do more than run one website. The one we used on the TAMH project - managed the website, a local touchscreen application and a CD-ROM for school use. It also output images and generated whatever flavour of XML had to go with them at the time for other projects' use. There are some papers on it at http://www.tamh.org/tamh/papers/index.php (they are rather out of date as we've spent more time in recent years implementing the strategy than talking about it) Would never have occurred to me (having no money) to go out and buy an off-the-shelf solution. Ours was built in-house over time and versions of it work with museum sites and commercial applications such as a holiday booking system and a real estate database where vendors add and edit their own property details. The level of difficulty in implementing something like this depends largely on where you start. It's a lot easier if you begin with an existing database (even one in a horrible proprietary Collections Management System) which you can export elsewhere and re-fit with link tables, SQL and scripting. Everything we have done in this area has been built around LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) which has the great attraction of being free. The Clearances site www.theclearances.org is built on a CMS which manages everything including things like passenger list output in XML and proprietary formats. We have also developed an exhibition tool, a CMS which sits on top of a CMS allowing quick generation of temporary exhibitions combining existing assets with whatever new material curators wish to add. This may never see the light of day as a commercial product but it certainly proves the ease with which different databases and media types can be combined and managed. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: Web standards and museum sites Summary
At 11:59 09/01/04 -0500, Andrew Macdonald wrote: As the discussion for web sites based on standards seems to be falling into the usual web based battle about why should we use standards It certainly wasn't part of my argument. My point was if you want to control the output of your content to different media it is better to do this by holding it all in a database not in a tagged document. Sean thought this couldn't be done. I assure him it can. The last 30 large-scale websites I have been involved with have all been built this way and the same databases have been used for print output, CD-ROMs, touch screen displays and, with appropriate XML filters, data exchange with other applications and organisations. Discussion of standards, though, has a deeper significance. This seems to dominate in Web development in periods when creativity has dried up. E-commerce salesmen in finance and insurance a few years ago were using metaphors of shanty town building of websites being replaced by a recognised building code in an attempt to woo conservative institutions to reinvest in the latest Sun boxes and Oracle software: we've no new ideas so buy some new kit in the meantime. I feel quite despondent about museums and Web use at the moment: I can't remember when I last saw a genuinely new idea implemented and things we talked about at conferences 5 or 6 years ago are just being trotted out time and time again: cauld kale rehet, which I trust is a phrase familiar to someone called Macdonald ! The most glaring deficiency, to me, is a general failure to use the Web to create genuine educational experiences in museum websites and to reach new audiences or even existing audiences in a way with which they feel comfortable. Of course all institutions have different missions and remits, and I don't pretend to know that of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The last US census, though, showed 28.1 million people in that country speak Spanish in the home, only slightly more than half claimed fluent English and 2.2m of these Spanish speakers live in NYC. Should engaging this audience not be a higher priority than catering for those who choose to use text-only Lynx browsers? I bet there are a few people around the world who would be interested in reading about the museum's Egyptian collection in a language other than English too. And, if you do intend to produce a multilingual website, creation and maintenance is an awful lot easier if all your content is in a database with web-pages built on the fly. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.512 / Virus Database: 309 - Release Date: 19/08/03 --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: Web standards and museum sites
At 17:10 08/01/04 -0500, Sean Redmond wrote: dominant. Netscape used to be dominant. That changed very quickly. Now IE is dominant but *that* could change very quickly. Wouldn't put my own money on it though And "context" and "platform" doesn't mean just IE vs. Mozilla or Windows vs. Mac, I mean screen vs. print Which really gets to the crux of it. We both probably agree that reusability of museum data is important, not least economically. Your argument seems to be that this is best achieved by freezing the output in a Web page standard. I would argue (to the point of jumping up and down until frothing at the mouth) that what is best for a desktop screen is not necessarily the best format for the printed page, a handheld device or a machine-based search tool. One might also want to vary the output on any given device according to the audience (curator, tourist, research student, kindergartner etc) but all based on the same source data. If this is all in a database, and every form of output is generated from this, according to the best formatting rules for the particular device and audience (rather than the current flavour of Web coding), it is much easier to add new options and take advantage of new interfaces or devices. Yes, CSSs are very useful when generating web pages on the fly from a database but it is the underlying structure which is important, not the top gloss. 5 years down the line, after your putative death of Microsoft, would you rather be managing the migration of your data from an Access DB to a Linux-based mySQL database or developing a parser to convert all the data tags in a markup language? (I've done both: the first in minutes; the second in years - and that was just the committee meetings). The database approach also makes the production of multilingual websites an awful lot easier. to have Estonians and Xhosa translations of our website. Also, your Estonian and Xhosa speakers may be less likely to use Windows, and therefore IE. I did mean this as a question of priorities (and a wish to do more on our own websites and a wonderment that big-budget US museum websites seem to ignore non-English speakers) but, as you raise the point, http://www.eisa.ee/stats.php, with a preponderance of visitors from Estonian domains, shows IE usage at 87%. Xhosa I picked because there was a project to translate Mozilla and other Open Source programs into this and other South African languages but I haven't seen any study on what difference this has made, if any. The papers I have seen in e.g. the Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, do show that the conceptual background to web use is quite different to that in the north. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.512 / Virus Database: 309 - Release Date: 19/08/03 --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: Web standards and museum sites
At 13:29 08/01/04 -0500, Sean Redmond wrote: One thing people can do is to stop using Internet Explorer exclusively. Look at your site with Opera, Mozilla, or Lynx. The dominance of IE and Microsoft monoculture tends to distort how (X)HTML has been designed to work in many different media. When you start to appreciate the multiplicity of contexts in which your web pages might be viewed, it's easier to rethink how your pages are built and your site structured. There are some good reasons for using XHTML and many even better ones for using CSS but 'multiplicity of contexts' is a red herring. Whether we like it or not, IE is dominant. Looking at the web stats for theClearances over the last period, we had 660254 accesses by IE browsers against 2955 by Opera and 5756 by Mozilla. In fact., we had more accesses by one particular Web Spider than all the 'minority' browsers combined. Improving accessibility is great; reaching more people with your museum website and its cultural message is even better but, if that is the aim, providing an Estonian or Xhosa language version of the content is likely to be more relevant than recoding in XHTML. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org which, yes, does use CSS ! --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.512 / Virus Database: 309 - Release Date: 19/08/03 --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: ARTstor: The Web Site
At 16:37 05/02/03 -0500, David Green wrote: materials will only be made available for use by not-for-profit educational institutions, It is perhaps invidious to carp about any initiative which seeks to offer wider access to images but mention of not-for-profit educational institutions raises a wry smile on this side of the Atlantic when some North American 'not-for-profits' have budgets equivalent to the GDPs of some developing countries. Are universities really the best guardians of intellectual property? If we want to expand our audience as museums do we hand the control of access to cultural elites? What is ARTstor's fear in making images, of a defined low-resolution, available to anyone who can get Net access? Surely the question is not one of access but of re-use. The model of the Soviet film train bringing movies to distant villages appeals with cells of museum workers ready to destroy the presses of anyone pinching an image for a calendar. Ah well, back to the barricades Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: redesigning a museum website search engine
At 12:42 01/10/02 -0700, you wrote: Has anyone redesigned the search engine on their institutional website and conducted formal usability studies of the results? Well, sort of. On theclearances.org site we log the parameters and terms used in the various search tools on the site and analysis of these (though not the full usability gamut) illustrated a lot of weaknesses in the search tools: free text search, even for a narrowly defined (by the site content) domain produced off-the-wall search requests for other time periods and geographical areas; free text search on locations showed lots of spelling variations and predicated either heavy background matching algorithms or less freedom of choice in the seach and so on. What it highlights most is what we know already, search engines, in the conventional Google-like sense, are not necessarily the best, and certainly not the only, interface required to a museum site. Given that most non-curatorial visitors to museums couldn't care less about your collection management system that is hardly surprising. The trick is to provide tools which allow visitors to ask the type of questions they want and to recognise there are many different 'audiences', sometimes an audience of one. That leads to the question of the value of usability studies. From what people were saying at the MCN conference I got the impression that museums were doing usability studies because they felt they had to measure something and there is plenty of literature out there on usability. It also ties in with Jakob Nielsen as the one-size fits all design guru. Usability studies, and the user-centred design, is all about task analysis, user memory maps, system metaphors for clearly defined groups. Once the group becomes diffuse it becomes harder to generalise about what sort of memory maps users are making (if any). Similarly all Nielsen's Web stuff comes from his 1980s work on hypertext where he talks about mapping working best for small information spaces. A website to sell soap powder is a small information space: an online museum presence should not be. Of course, that leaves the question of if not usability studies, what. CHIN have been talking about their stickiness quotient (or similar, I forget), time spent by user x number of return visits which has some obvious problems but is a step in the right direction. The measure of success is going to depend on your job spec and your museum's mission statement. It may be the objective of the website is to decrease 'phone calls to the information desk - easily measured; it may be to increase visitors to the physical space - put some discount coupon on the site for people to bring with them - again easily measured. There may be more subtle social objectives, increasing community awareness for example, which are harder to measure. Just because they are harder doesn't mean they are impossible. When training outcomes of CBT programs were hard to measure we used to ask users how much better they were at their jobs after the training and work from this. I am trying to put a paper together on non-usability evaluation methods for museums (quite far down the 'to do' list) so would be interested in other people's experiences. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: Online Catalogue Planning: Web Component
At 09:48 16/05/02 -0400, you wrote: Julie Beamer wrote: I'm sure it depends on the museum, but we get a lot of calls from non-curators about our photograph collection, portraits, and even some artifacts. We are planning to make our database available to the public (hopefully some time next year) and it will be available through the web. Yes, but is a collections management tool, albeit web-based, the best way to make it available to the general public? The number of catalogue enquiries will depend on the museum but I'd wager the number of enquiries forms a much smaller proportion than those visitors enquiring about catalogue entries in, say, a retail bookstore. I choose this as an example because two of the largest UK bookstore chains abandoned attempts to put their catalogues on the web. If you want catalogue info about book availability you now ask the info desk. We're fortunate that our database system (Cuadra Associates) includes a web interface in their museum system package. Just because there is *a* web interface doesn't mean it's the right one to do the job of presenting your collection to the public. This is not a judgement on any particular package just an observation that it is easy enough to knock together a website which interrogates an SQL-compliant database - it doesn't necessarily serve users' needs particularly well. But even with that, I don't think it matters that 70% of your potential users are other curators. They are still members of your "public". Online publically accessable catalogs are a valuable tool for the museum world. I don't disgaree about the importance of curators ! My point was that serving their needs is a different project altogether and is where the XML aspects, for data sharing, mentioned by Guenter Waibel are particularly important. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: Online Catalogue Planning: Web Component
Several people have written about making museum catalogues available via the Web. It's not terribly difficult to do this but the important question is why anyone would want to? How many folk come into your physical museum and ask if they can do, or someone can do for them, a search of the catalogue? The real trick is to build your web component in such a way that it answers the questions museum visitors pose, not what curators ask other curators (which is a whole other project) There are some published studies on this (Catechism at NMS; Jane Sledge's paper at MW a few years ago) but you will get as much information from asking those curators who have contact with the public. My generalisation would be that museum professionals focus on objects, visitors on people (yes, even in an art museum) and any web component needs to reflect this. We gather statistics on our TAMH project (www.tamh.org) and the Highland Clearances (www.theclearances.org). In the first instance the "research" interest is on trade patterns, in the second an attempt to do some statistical analysis of emigration/immigration networks. The logs tell us what the visitors from cyberspace want is information on possible ancestors. The interface, therefore, reflects this with powerful "people searches" but with an attempt to interest visitors in other aspects as part of our educative brief. Web logs, recorded queries and emailed user queries and comments will soon tell you what people want from your catalogue (and it's almost certainly not a catalogue they want). To be able to change requires a flexible component structure. We developed WebDev http://www.dmcsoft.com/webdev/ and MusDev http://www.dmcsoft.com/dmc/musdev.php3 largely to do this for our own projects. I'm not punting them here as a product, rather the thinking which led to them (described at http://www.tamh.org/tamh/papers/mw98.php3 ) might be of use to others looking at scripting solutions. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: bi-lingual web sites
Hi Christina We've done a bunch of these (from bilingual to five languages - pentalingual?) over the last few years (not all museum sites) and have tried all the methods mentioned so far. The separate tree for each language, suggested by Susan Hazan is by far the most cumbersome to maintain but is probably the only way to go if you have, as she did, languages which require different coding representations. XML (as Bert Degenhart) suggests is really good if you need to present the same information in lots of different ways (in addition to different languages) but can be quite a hassle to set up initially. We've done this with, among others, hotel and leisure bookings and historical ship data with the view that it is a good interchange format between different systems but there is quite an overhead in getting the right schema (or DTD in the old days) set up in the first place. There is also the hassle of the actions of different browsers. The most effective method we have used is a database-backed website with every page generated by scripting. You don't embed text in pictures and keep all text in differentlanguage tables. Almost all our sites are db-driven and we use our own tools WebDev and MusDev (http://www.dmcsoft.com/dmc/musdev.php3) for generating these. The principle is the same, though, however you create the site, with a local database, maintained with local utilities, exported to a web db for displaying the website. Our usual format is Access locally with either Access forms or a VB app to populate and edit the database and to edit the linkbase, PHP scripting and a MySql db remotely for the website (because it's free !). The advantage of this is that you can use the db to generate other material also (catalogues, CDs, in-house exhibition displays) and it may well be a database which already, at least partly, exists with your accession data. (We have a paper on this repurposing stuff at http://www.tamh.org/tamh/papers/mw98.php3 English-Spanish is generally quite well-behaved as the amount of space taken up by text in the two languages is roughly the same (German, for instance, with 33% more text, on average, and long compound nouns can sometimes cause aesthetic display problems.) Best Wishes Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
Re: Generic database software other than MS Access
Hi David We've used a range of dbs - Access, MySQL, Oracle and Paradox but I'm not sure you're asking the right question. No generic database has ready-made tools which make it ideal for collections management but, then, it's just a database - it's the query tools which matter. We built our own tool MusDev http://www.dmcsoft.com/dmc/musdev.php3 which sits on top of any ODBC compliant database (though for our own purposes we generally use Access). Furthermore, we use that same collections management database to drive the publicly accessible website giving a completely different view on the data. I'm not trying to sell you that as a product, just the idea behind it which is forget where the data resides and develop tools yourself for what you want to do with that data. Thes could be anything from some editable SQL queries to a full product like MusDev or an intermediate option such as a little VB app. I don't buy the indexed field stuff as a problem either. I can't see what benefit there is in db design terms of having an indexed field longer than 255 characters. Either you should look at splitting the data with an indexable part (for fast searching) pointing to the heavy text data or forget about indexing. Just because a field is not indexed does not mean it can't be searched. I agree that a free text field search in Access for 100,000 records plus is woefully slow but it's not rocket science to write a routine to do this quickly in C++ or even VB. Best Wishes Douglas TAMH: Tayside - A Maritime History http://www.tamh.org At 03:12 PM 11/13/00 -0500, you wrote: > and I would like to know what the >options with generic database software are other than MS Access. The >principal problem with Access in our case is that one of the collections >(Archives) is described using fields in which a great deal of text can be >entered. Staff would need to search in this field but Access has a limit to >the size of indexed fields. > >Are there other heritage institutions using a collections database using >generic software which either does not have this problem or has a greater >limit to indexed fields? I have built or re-designed museum collection >databases using Access and I appreciate the flexibility this do-it-yourself >option affords. >Thanks, > >David Farrell, Collections Assistant
Re: teaching and technology
At 04:04 PM 4/26/00 -0500, you wrote: >Do institutions with resources available online offer professors/teachers >instruction on how to use the tools to best advantage? > We have certainly offered advice and suggestions when asked and I've had plenty to say at conferences but, in general, we wouldn't presume to be prescriptive in the use of the resources we provide in the TAMH project http://www.dmcsoft.com/tamh Indeed, part of the philosophy behind the project was the idea that one resource could meet the needs of very different educational (and non-educational groups) by providing different windows on the data and different query mechanisms. Rather than produce study guides and lesson plans (which educational managers rather than teachers have asked us for) we have worked on developing annotation tools for group use by teachers and individual use by students so that users may repurpose the data in ways they see fit. The plus side of this, from my point of view, is that we have had primary (elementary) school children in Aberdeenshire doing a class project on fisher dress and history undergraduates at university level doing specific research on Mediterranean trade from the same set of resources. What is unfortunate is that, more often than not, we hear about these projects by accident. The annotation tool does create database entries we can look at to see what people are doing but we don't really like to snoop :) It would be nice to think that MCN could be a forum for user experiences rather than just content provider experiences. Douglas TAMH - Tayside: A Maritime History
