museum journal

Shanghai Daily Science podcasts and the Shanghai Postal Museum

2008-08-12T01:01:00.006+10:00

Shanghai Daily newspaper has a range of podcasts that serve as English language audio guides to an eclectic collection of museums in Shanghai. These include the Shanghai Postal Museum, the Museum of Traditional Medicine, the Earthquake Museum and the Shanghai Eyeglasses Museum. I tested one out at the Shanghai Postal Museum. After a short argument I lost control of the iphone and followed my 6 year old son around, being fed choice bits of information. It was quite a surreal experience, walking around an almost deserted museum listening to a pleasant male voice with a strong Scottish accent describe the exhibits!
Starting with bits of clay inscribed with messages for an emperor, we then passed through an interactive display of signal towers being lit on the great wall. There was a history of stamps, post boxes from around the world, posties as revolutionary fighters and unionists, and then the enormous expansion of the postal system to service Shanghai (and China's) huge population. It was really interesting.
The museum is housed in a beautiful 'eclectic style' building from the 1920s/30s, and there is a roof garden which was closed when we went. Many of the displays feature interactive elements to keep children button pushing, and there is a lot of old postal equipment on display. Definitely worth the (free) admission. The English translations are adequate but the podcast is a great bonus.

Shanghai Urban Planning Museum

2008-08-12T00:41:00.004+10:00

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre is at People's Square, Shanghai. Like many Shanghai museums it is pretty deserted on a weekday, so there was no problem wandering around and looking at the exhibits freely. The most publicized exhibit is of course the scale model of Shanghai, as planned for the year 2020. This takes up a whole floor, and is great on the detail. We found our very own apartment building!
It is a beautiful piece of work and shows what a fast pace of development Shanghai is undergoing, with a lot of the proposed buildings already built or currently under completion. Another floor holds a model of the Shanghai 2010 Expo site, which is also fascinating with some great building designs.

There are a few interactive exhibits to please the kids, one of which enables you to race a boat at high speed across the bay and under the proposed bridge linking Shanghai to the new deep water port facility, or alternatively to race along a road and through tunnels at breakneck speed.
Old Shanghai is documented with a display of large historical photographs and beautifully produced very large format colour books of the old Concession era architecture.
The website link to the English site version unfortunately doesn't work, so you have to just look at the pictures!

First post from Shanghai

2008-04-29T01:26:00.003+10:00

Well, I've been in Shanghai for 10 months, and firstly wikipedia comes online here for the first times since last July, and now I can finally access this blog!
So now I will be exploring the museums and galleries of Shanghai once again, and posting any interesting observations I have here.

definitions of web concepts

2007-06-26T11:48:00.000+10:00

Blog/Weblog: site that is an ongoing chronicle of information, frequently updated, personal website.
It features diary type commentary and links to articles or other websites.

Characteristics:
- main content area organized chronologically, often into categories.
- -archive if older articles
- Way for people to comment on content
- List of links to other sites (blogroll)
- One or more ‘feeds’ like RSS, Atom or RDF

Content:
Articles/posts/entries regularly updated. Can either write online or offline and upload later.

Comments:
Readers can interact by leaving comments
Pingbacks/trackbacks are when you inform bloggers whenever you cite an article from another site. (like a trail)

Blog or CMS?
Cms – content management system, blogger software is a type of content management system for bloggers, which manages the site whilst the blogger inputs the content.

Archives:
Backlist of articles often based on date, can be based on categories, or alphabetically

Feeds:
Automatically monitoring a site and posts updates when new content appears. Eg RSS Atom

Blogrolls:
List of links to websites, often in a sidebar eg Blogrolling or blo.gs or del.icio.us

Syndication:
A feed is a machine readable (usually xml) content publication updated regularly.
Reads the feeds RSS or atom, and provides you with new stuff. You feed the links to the RSS feeds you are interested in into the feedreader and it will inform you of new posts.

Trackbacks:
person A writes something on their blog. Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say and to be able to comment on her own blog. Person B vcomments on own blog and sends trackback to person A’s blog
Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post This comment contains a link to Person B’s post.(Can be faked)

Pingback:
Sound the same, but uses different technology (XML-RPC and HTTP POST. Harder to fake that trackback, both pingback and trackback aim to add some sort of verification to the comment process, as you can usually claim to be anyone at all.

Comment moderation:
Allows website author to monitor and control comments.

Comment Spam:
Useless comments/trackback/ping posted to a blog. Can contain links to other sites or domains. Can be managed.

Permalinks:
Permanent urls to your individual weblog posts, as well as catagories and other lists ofweblog postings. The url shouldn’t change as others may link to your individual postings.

Pretty permalinks:
Idea that the link should give some idea of what content is eg not /index.php?p=423 but /archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/ gives idea of date, subject, and gives user opportunity to hack into other articles by using /archives/2003/05/ for example.

Social Media:
Social media enable cultural participants to both explore images of themselves and
distribute those images across broad online social networks. Museums worldwide are
starting to use social media such as blogs, wikis and vlogs to engage online
participants with new interactive experiences.
From here

Winding up

2007-06-26T10:17:00.000+10:00

Last week of internship - a very full couple of months, with a lot of hands on experience. Blogging, wikis, storyboarding, dvd production, a very useful experience.
I have been immersed in a part of the online world that is expanding and experimenting with the new technologies and web 2.0 processes in a way that it is encouraging to see. The move into the online world for museums is a very active process.

visualisations of the web

2007-06-19T14:41:00.000+10:00

Another nice tool for visualising the activity of the web. This one creates colour coded diagrams based on the type of tags on sites or pages - images, divs,tables etc. It creates very attractive and varied visualisations, and is available on a blog here. ALong with processor it provides an ability to create simple graphics (not quite so simple with Processor)that are visualisations of the flow of type of information.
If there are more around, please let me know!

tips for blog extras

2007-06-18T14:20:00.000+10:00

A few 'how to' tips for blogger blogs.
Add ing an image to your header. Go to customise blog, then click edit for the header. In the popup window you can select to add a picture, either from you computer or the internet.
Adding a tag cloud. I used zoomclouds, where you just have to enter your rss feed source, which you can get by going to your blog feed, and then copying and posting the address from the browser. Once you have this and enter it into zoomcloud, it generates your javascript, which you then copy and paster back into a blogger widget (add html/javascript functionality in the customize design option of you blog). In zoomcoulds there are many editable layout and designs to choose from.
Adding images to your layout - again, go to customize layout, and choose the add picture option.

web tools

2007-06-12T11:28:00.000+10:00

Museums remixed blog mentions The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning having some web tools that enable users to reuse and remix openly avaialble web resources. Sounds like a good 2.0 resource.

Exploratorium Explainers

2007-06-05T12:11:00.000+10:00

Just had a look at a museum blog put together by the floor staff at the Exploratorium. A good example of blogging as a sort of inhouse journal/avenue to communicate. Great photos, interesting anecdotes - some personal, some more to do with museum experiences. I really enjoyed it!

digital stories

2007-06-04T10:09:00.000+10:00

More work on the digital stories for TAPIR and LSID. Scripting, workshopping ideas and then storyboarding. We are trialling using the TAPIR blog for comment and feedback.

discussing Hyperconnections

2007-05-28T11:46:00.000+10:00

Internal discussion forum here at the museum last week about the implications and issues raised by Hennes, dsicussed previously on this blog.
From the point of view of a newcomer/outsider, it was interesting to see how personally people at the museum related to the article, and how protective and passionate they felt about the issues raised.
It was a good starting point for the discussion, as it was presumably designed to be, with some of the dichotomies raised in the article heavily criticised. The article is discussed on the audience research wiki, and some of the comments made have already been posted there.

Archiving this blog site

2007-05-27T10:25:00.001+10:00

Have you thought of a way to archive this web site? It may be as simple as copying the entire content page into a Word document or similar. It would be nice for you to have a record if and when the site is no longer maintained. You have obviously put considerable work into your entries and the broad range of coverage.

web steering committee

2007-05-21T16:25:00.000+10:00

Attended a meeting of the web steering committee, to discuss implementation of the new museum website. A web restructure is a great opportunity to consider the incorporation of all the issues we have been looking at here - web 2.0, audiences both virtual and physical, interactivity, and the development of an underlying technical structure that is flexible, adaptable and easily updatable. Content managment systems for places such as museums need to have specific and unique characteristics, and to be tailor made to suit all the facets of the website. It will be an interesting process to see how this particular website is transformed.

LSIDs

2007-05-21T14:38:00.000+10:00

This is a summary and explanation of LSIDs, by TDWG that explains some more about their meaning, purpose and implementation.
Summed up under 3 headings:
1. Think global, then everything's local
2. Have calling card, will travel
3. Carry meaning, not just data

LSIDs and their implementation will add to the concept of the semantic web, where the connections and interconnections of knowledge start to be searchable, and compileable. The basis of this process is the making of online data machine readable, so that software can be taught to seek out and compile knowledge from all sorts of digital objects (see the machine is us/ing us). A specific example in relation to LSIDs from the Kevin Thiele's summary is that of the image of a funnel web spider. Currently Google images searches for images on the web, and searches the surrounding html text for some inferred meaning or label - sometimes it is right, sometimes it is wrong. If the image was tagged with an LSID, it becomes possible to go directly to the metadata, via a query, which will return tagged, machine readable information, for example 'this image is of an organism', and 'the name of the organism is Atrax robustus'. If the species name changes, a tag could point the query towards the originating LSID, and so always be able to seek out the correct name. In this case, LSIDs are pointing to LSIDs, adding to the power and functionality of the system.
The parts of the LSID include the unique specimen identifier, and the issuing authority, which when combined make it globally unique. Even when combined with other data from other databases, the LSID makes the particular digital object always tracable back to its source.
The challenge now is to explain this in an interesting relevant format suitable for a short video piece.

Podcasting as a communication tool?

2007-05-19T20:46:00.000+10:00

At the MA Conference went to this useful session about podcasting - seems acheivable and I'm wondering if using sound files that answer audience research questions might be another form of giving information via a q&a? In response to your query about how audience research is used in a museum it could be interesting to interview people about their use of research or projects they've worked on and then post this as an easy way to capture and distribute information rather than having to write it out? Might be a useful student resource - once I get the right equipment you and I could give it a go?

Anyway, the museum detective website has useful tips on podcasting and many links. Joanna Cobley spoke about this and I have blogged about it at my conference notes. Worth checking out.

Conference blog experiment

2007-05-18T21:43:00.000+10:00

Hi Mel, been at the Museums Australia conference and tried to blog it - with mixed results. My posts about the conference and my thoughts on the process of blogging it are here.

Sorry to have neglected you this week - see you next week and I'll try and give the wiki a go...

more on TAPIR, LSID and Digital Stories

2007-05-15T15:12:00.000+10:00

Discussion is continuing on the TDWG blog in order to develop a digital story format for explaining the TAPIR and LSID concepts. Lynda, Paul and I also had a bit of a dicussion about blogs, blog formats, and how confusing their structure can be. Although a web 2.0 concept, Paul pointed out how linear they still are. We need to do more research into how to structure a blog - has anyone any overall suggestions or specific suggestions? Being new to the process, it is hard to work out what are the limitations of the particular blogging platform and what are my own limitations from lack of experience and knowledge. I am struggling at the moment with customizing feeds - comment feeds or post feeds, individual post feeds, what to link to, how to structure an ongoing dialogue so that one can easily follow a particular theme...any suggestions?

semantic web

2007-05-14T11:25:00.000+10:00

Whilst checking out the TDWG blog, came across a reference to the 'semantic web', and a link to the w3c specifications. Again, a concept that fits into the web 2.0, DOI, GUIDs discussions.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

The reference was in a good explanation of LSIDs etc, called A Case for LSIDs and RDF in Biodiversity Informatics

more on digital object identifiers

2007-05-14T10:10:00.000+10:00

Interview with Tony Hammond about Digital Object identifiers is available as a podcast here, on Jon Udell's blog. Tony Hammond is a publisher of scientific journals including Nature. May be interesting in regards to conceptualising LSIDs, waffles a bit though.
Also, Lynda pointed me towards the Encyclopaedia of Life site, a project that aims to create a web page for every species.

Tapir, LSIDs and TDWG and what it all means...

2007-05-08T14:29:00.000+10:00

More on the categorising of flora and fauna. Following on from my post of 1st May, here, a discussion with Paul and Lynda has clarified a bit more about what all the acronyms mean and what the plans for the future are.

LSIDs are a categorising system that sets out to bring digital collections management in biodiversity up to a web 2.0 standard. Ideally it replaces and encompasses the two previous standards for flora and fauna, makes the data accessible and searchable, and allows much greater aggregation of data.
In a practical sense, what this means is that you can search for and find an object (which can be an actual specimen, but not only a specimen!), and then, using its LSID, locate other objects related to it by location, by species, by characteristics, by institution, or by any information that is conveyed by the LSID.

To borrow from the LSID website:

Every LSID consists of up to five parts: the Network Identifier (NID); the root DNS name of the issuing authority; the namespace chosen by the issuing authority; the object id unique in that namespace; and finally an optional revision id for storing versioning information. Each part is separated by a colon to make LSIDs easy to parse.

So what does this do for the biodiversity community? Well, if museums et al take up the system, it means that all this data is available online: for research purposes, for species monitoring, for mapping and locating endangered and rare species, and so enabling a greater and more immediate response to management and planning for the future. Again, the Hennes article comes to mind, with its discussion about the future possibilities for museums and their collections.

How is it implemented?
Unlike other online cataloguing systems, this would be applied at the level of the institution. If the institution already has a DOI system in place, it may need tweaking to comply with LSID standards. The internal museum system would not have to be changed, however, as the LSID is divided into component parts (described above).
It is overseen by TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval)
As the website says:

TAPIR combines and extends features of the BioCASe and DiGIR protocols to create a new and more generic means of communication between client applications and data providers using the Internet.

So, TAPIR oversees the implementation of the protocol. If you feel brave enough to tackle a sea of acronyms you can check out the TAPIR wiki.

Please let me know if any of this is inaccurate, i have done my best to put it in layperson terms. Conceptually it sounds like a great idea to me. We also discussed The machine is eating us, as an example of a great way to convey what are conceptually complicated ideas in a simple, effective, interesting format. Are there other, successful ways to deal with these issues in a very short timeframe? that is the upcoming challenge.

online tools

2007-05-08T11:23:00.000+10:00

Just used online photo editing programme snipshot to resize this image of a robot band from Chengdu Museum, China. Really simple to use for basic photo manipulation - resizing etc. Will add more links to online tools as i find them.

audience research wiki

2007-05-08T10:47:00.000+10:00

We have set up another web 2.0 tool - a wiki to explore in particular audience research and museum websites. Please have a look and at to our discussion pages. We are interested in what particular forum (wiki, email, blog) might suit particular types of discussions or exchanges. Other wikis we have looked at include New York Hall of Science education section's wiki, and Museum Wiki.

web statistics

2007-05-07T10:28:00.000+10:00

An article in the Australian Financial Review today talks about the unreliability of web statistics and analysis in terms of advertising revenue. An interesting comment was that the amount of data available led to superfluous or meaningless data being used to attract advertisers, and the need for a recognised system of audience evaluation and statistic analysis. In terms of audience research for museums, the same issues are relevant, even though there is not the same financial incentive. There will be more about this on the trial audience research wiki Lynda and i will be setting up shortly.

blogs, wikis, journals....

2007-05-06T22:53:00.000+10:00

Hi all
thanks for such quick comments, all of which have interesting/useful info.

Angelina it sound like we are doing very similar work here - i would like to see your course blog and follow its development. I will also have another look at Museum 2.0.

Renae i have also been thinking about sustainability in the blog context - i guess it depends upon the duration of the project concerned, and then whether there is enough momentum generated to keep the blog going. The other issue is also important - what is appropriate content for an online journal is not necessarily the same as a private journal. I am interested in seeing what you considered appropriate content, and will have a look at your blog.

Regarding blogging and ease of use, i think it is an advantage to have some knowledge of html, though judging by the number of blogs in existence, it is not a big problem!
I have come across a Blogging for dummies site which has already been useful to me in image uploading.
I also had a look at your wiki Chris and found it very interesting, especially after setting up one myself as an experiment. It does seem a very useful tool for education, and i like the openness of authorship it offers.
I am really impressed with the whole process - the immediate nature of the exchange of ideas is great.

Blogging as a tool for museum professional networking

2007-05-03T17:45:00.000+10:00

Hi, just wanted to get down my ideas about what Mel and I are doing in this internship. At the moment we’re doing blog experimentation looking at issues like:
* What does it take to establish and maintain a blog?
* Who are the current and potential audiences for a “professional”/specialist topic blog?
* What are the benefits and issues around blogging (e.g. moderating, publishing, posting links, etc)?
* What might a blog be used for that email can’t?
* Can you do a literature review through a blog?
* And other stuff...

'Hyperconnection' and Tom Hennes

2007-05-01T10:00:00.000+10:00

Interesting article about the future of natural history museums, and their necessary evolution from position of detached documentation of the world around them, to a position of engagement and interconnection.
Hennes talks about the need for museums to find a niche for themselves within their community, and to engage with the urgent issues of the 21st century - the changes in the world's ecosystems and the corresponding effect on biodiversity. He sees natural history museums as being ideally placed, with their bodies of knowledge about their collections, to take an active role in current research:

Science has awakened to the storehouse of biodiversity maintained in the millions of specimens stored in natural history museums, and is using this wealth of data to track long term change and support surveys of endangered areas.

An example is the development by Naturalis (the Dutch National Museum of Natural History)of joint programmes with environmental organisations. They have established a Dutch biodiversity register, and a student educational website.

The Australian Museum has established a joint project with Rio Tinto called Biomaps, a project to produce an interactive web based mapping system to show where biodiversity data is held in Australia and overseas.

There is also a move to create a digital object labelling system called LSID (Life Science Identifiers, a version of GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers) which provide a unique identification system. Here is a link for more info on this, and info on other types of digital object identification systems can be found here.

There has been a lot of discussion on this issue of digital identification. As Wikipedia describes it:

A DOI can apply to any form of intellectual property expressed in any digital environment. Intellectual property includes both physical and digital manifestations, performances and abstract works: DOIs can be used to identify e-texts, images, audio or video items, software, etc. An entity can be identified at any arbitrary level of granularity. This means that, for instance, DOIs can identify a journal, an individual issue of a journal, an individual article in the journal, or a single table in that article.

This really is getting to the nitty gritty detail of the digital world - and I thought the internet was an unruly swirling mass of digital data!

museum people

2007-05-01T09:42:00.000+10:00

After meeting some people at the museum yesterday, today i have perused museum people, a site by and about all sorts of museum types, and full of interesting exchanges on all the details of life for museum workers.
The exchange about the differences between blogs and wikis yesterday has clarified for me the different merits and purposes of each. Kirsty's final comment

Also a wiki page is intended to be a single page/screen collectively updated, edited, improved. A blog is a sequential conversation with track-bacl options, visibly retaining the trail of evolution and dialogue. A wiki is like the current state of a document, presented as a document. A blog is like a history of contributions that must be trawled through for information.

was a good summary.

wikis and blogs

2007-04-30T14:32:00.000+10:00

What do you think about the comparative merits of wikis and blogs? The wiki is essentially something like a multi-author fluid knowledge-base or electronic encyclopaedia to which any responsible person can contribute and augment a pool of knowledge. A blog is inherently single-author or selective authorship, ostensibly by the owning few who also mediate feedback posted on the site. I could see wikis having a usefulness for education and young audiences if its accuracy is sieved. If the agenda is to build audiences and participation, a context enticing shared authorship and communal engagement may encourage that.

libraries grasp web 2.0

2007-04-24T13:51:00.000+10:00

Interesting post relating libraries and web 2.0 from Wired. Helen Blowers has devised a programme for bringing librarians up to speed with all the web 2.0 terminologies and software - Flickr, YouTube, wikis, blogs etc etc. The first other library to participate was an Australian library, Yarra Plenty.

2007-04-24T13:23:00.000+10:00

More on the museum web audience breakdown...

I would expect that in comparison to larger corporate social sites, museums are most likely to have their major audiences less likely to be creators and that we should be encouraging a growth in critics - who most likely align with our existing strategies and long-time organisational strengths in encouraging and managing academic criticism.

From Seb Chan at fresh and new.

the intricacies of blogging

2007-04-24T11:33:00.000+10:00

This blog serves multiple purposes for me: as an experiment in an online logbook for my internship; as a way to learn the nuts and bolts of blogging, in order to assist with the audience research blogs; and as a way to gather together disparate areas of knowledge about the use of the web and interactivity in the museum context.
So now it is on to the nuts and bolts: tagging, linking, comments, etc etc....all to be revealed next blog!

more web 2.0 concepts

2007-04-24T11:16:00.000+10:00

Museums are looking at establishing connections with the online community networks such as Flickr, an online photo sharing community, and del.ici.ous an online social networking site. This is an interesting phenomenon, given the very small percentage of visitors who actively contribute to the web. Seb Chan discusses this in his posting from Museums and the Web 2007 here. Something like a 0.16 percent of users of YouTube are uploaders, and 2 tenths of 1 percent to Flickr. The vast majority of site users are still viewers rather than participants.
So, how much time and energy should museums - or anyone else - devote to seducing these tiny numbers of active participants, as opposed to catering for the needs of the vast majority of happy perusers who do not want to do more than look?

Museum and the Web 2007

2007-04-24T11:13:00.000+10:00

Check out the day by day postings on the Museums and the Web 2007 conference on fresh and new. A great rundown on all the ideas and concepts being explored in the online museum world.

museum blogs

2007-04-24T10:39:00.000+10:00

How and why do museums use blogs? Over the past few years the use of blogs by museums has increased exponentially.
A survey in 2006 looks at some museum blogs that were up and running in early 2006.
Museums are exploring blogs as a way to communicate with their audiences online. Like any large institution a museum has to work out the protocol for blogs, often opting for purely personal forums rather than sanctioned ones. Check out the Powerhouse Museum's official policy for blogging.
Often the blog runs out of steam, when the workload becomes too much, like any blog.
See the blog called museum 2.0 for a more detailed account of web 2.o and museums.

essential concepts

2007-04-24T10:25:00.000+10:00

Web 2.0 - what is it? All the museum sites and articles talk about it. I found a great summary by O'Rielly. Basically it is about user services rather than the hardware; the platform rather than the software. Data is important, adding value to information.
The user becomes a co-developer, and a resource.
Such things as blogs, wikis, interactivity, are ways users can participate in the online world. Software that develops the more it is used, continual improvement rather than scheduled releases.

first days

2007-04-24T10:21:00.000+10:00

after a couple more meetings to discuss options, we get under way. Initially I am researching a couple of areas - museum blogs, audience research through the web, how to get feedback for a museum site.
This leads me backwards - I find I need to define a few terms before I can really get going.

preliminary discussions

2007-03-19T21:47:00.000+11:00

Met with Lynda today to talk about what the internship will involve. Some exciting projects and ideas came up. Looking forward to starting.