Seth; you might want to ask these questions in two other places as well. The Fluid project (www.fluidproject.org) is a multi-institutional, multinational collaboration to improve usability and the Web experience. Its primary focus is on open source projects, but its value extends beyond that, and the usability specialists and others in the community and on the listservs can probably drown you in responses to your first question.
The Bamboo project (no website yet) is a just-launched collaboration between the Universities of Chicago and Cal-Berkeley, along with many other institutional partners (including several museums), to explore the creation of a shared technology services platform for the support of research in the arts and humanities. They don't have answers yet, but over the next 18 months they're going to be asking questions much like your second question, at workshops in North America and Europe. It might be a good idea to connect up with that project and see what answers they uncover. Contact people are Chad Kainz at Chicago (cjkainz at Chicago edu) and David Greenbaum (dag at Berkeley edu). I hope this helps, --Chris -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of mcn-l-request at mcn.edu Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 1970 3:00 PM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: mcn-l Digest, Vol 30, Issue 5 Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:21:07 +0100 From: Seth van Hooland <svhoo...@ulb.ac.be> Subject: [MCN-L] user needs and APIs To: Museum Computer Network Listserv <mcn-l at mcn.edu> Message-ID: <84F044FF-E283-4906-9F28-D0851F9D89E7 at ulb.ac.be> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed; delsp=yes Dear all, One of the issues I'm exploring within my phd on digitized cultural heritage, is the difficulty within our application domain to define and "guess" the user needs regarding digitized heritage collections and the interfaces we build around them to provide access. It's relatively easy to find examples of projects that failed due to the lack of interest for user needs when developing a project, but I am specifically looking for cases where institutions really did their best to define their audience (and their needs), but where at the end they were still surprised by different types of users and uses that showed up in practice and that they didn't think about... Please drop me a line when you think of any interesting cases and people I might contact. A recent development within this discussion is to adopt and radicalize the idea that an institution can never predict user needs, and should therefore concentrate on offering data and metadata in "use-neutral" manner, in combination with an API so that external parties can develop services upon your data and users can "hack" your data and have a standard toolkit to their disposition to fulfill their specific needs. A simple but illustrative example is the widget that the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) has launched in 2005 (see http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/widget?lang=en) . Shortly after the launch of this widget, an ICT student hacked the non-public XML stream to offer an RSS feed (see http://breyten.livejournal.com/111482.html) that is now know as the "informal" museumfeed of the Rijksmuseum (thank you Saskia Scheltjens for pointing out this example!). I'm sure quite some people have an opinion on this issue, so please contact me with your remark and/or links to specific projects that I could use to illustrate theses issues within my research. Thank you! ULB - Facult? de philosophie et lettres Dpt SIC - fili?re STIC Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50 CP 123 1050 Bruxelles B?t. DC.11.203 +32 2 650 40 80 http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~svhoolan/ skype username: sethvanhooland
