Recently I’ve been thinking of more and more ways that museums and libraries can expose their collections via other methods besides typing a search term into a search box - yawn…

Like most Australians I’ve been playing around with the street view data Google have added in for Australia cities and it got me thinking, how could this be used by museums and libraries.  An obvious candidate is photographs as many photographs are of street views. Earlier this year the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney joined the Flickr Commons with their Tyrrell collection.  In a report on their first 3 months at Flickr, Seb Chan noted that over 50% of the photos were geocoded.  This provided the perfect scenario for an experiment as every Flickr account has a geoRSS feed.  Could this RSS feed be incorporated with a Google maps street view to provide historical photos and contemporary street images side by side?

After about 30 minutes of coding I had a nice proof of concept demonstration page happening.  The interface is a little clunky, but it works.  This could be improved by using the Flickr API rather than the RSS feed to generate the images. There are some issues which you can’t resolve, like the rotation of the street view compared to the photo, but this isn’t really a show stopper.

I would love to know your thoughts?  Am I on to something here?

With the recent introduction (for many countries) of Apple’s iPhone, many museums and galleries have been looking at ways they can use the web browser and multimedia player capabilities of the device to enhance the content they deliver.

The Tate Liverpool have made a podcast of their Gustav Klimt exhibition available.  It can be watched from anywhere, but is designed to play on an iPhone or iPod touch at the exhibition. The podcast weighs in at nearly 200Mb so they provide a wi-fi network at the gallery where a user can download it once they arrive or a user can hire an iPod touch.  Given that they have tailored the podcast for these devices and they have a wi-fi network in place, I wonder why they chose to present the content to mimick a traditional audio tour where you walk up to an object and press the corresponding number on the device - rather than as a web based tour that could use a totally different interface to interact with the artwork? 
 

However, the podcast itself has been done very well. It begins with a short introduction, showing a user how to use the device.  For each item, a brief image appears and then the screen goes blank while the narration occurs to allow the visitor to focus on the actual work of art, rather than the video screen.  Towards the end of each items file, videos, stills or interviews are presented as secondary content to enhance what the user has already learnt.

The tour appears to be working for the gallery. Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media, stated that the average visit time increased from 45 minutes to 3 hours since the tour was introduced.

Being in Australia, it’s a bit hard for me to visit the exhibition and experience it fully.  Although the tour appears to be working for the gallery, it still feels as though there is a bit of a missed opportunity in that it hasn’t exploited the unique interface of the device in the ways it is capable of being used.

The Australian Council for the Arts have just released their annual Books Alive list of 50 books you can’t put down. Books Alive is an initiative to encourage people to read. On their website they have a list of where you can purchase the books, but they haven’t included a list of which libraries stock the books. If you are trying to encourage people to read then there should be no barriers for anyone - especially financial barriers. So for all of those that wish to read, but don’t want to pay for the privilege, here is a list of all the libraries in Australia that have the 50 books you can’t put down.

• The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide
• Breath by Tim Winton
• People of the book by Geraldine Brooks
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner
• Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
• The Six Sacred Stones by Matthew Reilly
• Exit Music by Ian Rankin
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
• Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• God’s Callgirl by Carla van Raay
• Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Those Faraday Girls by Monica McInerney
• Skin and Bone by Kathryn Fox
• 7th Heaven by James Patterson with Maxine Paetro
• Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen with Luke Nguyen and Mark Jensen
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
• Somme Mud by E.P.F. Lynch
• Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham
• Les Norton and the Case of the Talking Pie Crust by Robert G. Barrett
• Turn Turn Turn . . . Please by Kerry O’Keeffe
• Over the Top with Jim by Hugh Lunn
• That’d Be Right by William McInnes
• The Day After Tomorrow by Allan Folsom
• Nothing to Lose by Lee Child
• The Memory Room by Christopher Koch
• Addition by Toni Jordan
• Voodoo Doll by Leah Giarratano
• The Rouseabout by Rachael Treasure
• Avoiding Mr Right by Anita Heiss
• This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
• Back from the Brink by Peter Andrews
• True Green by Kim McKay & Jenny Bonnin
• He’ll Be OK by Celia Lashlie
• Girl Stuff by Kaz Cooke
• Lucky for Me by Frank Robson
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
• Obernewtyn Book 1 in The Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody
• The Gift Book 1 in the Pellinor series by Alison Croggon
• Superior Saturday Book 6 in The Keys to the Kingdom series by Garth Nix
• Twilight: Special Edition by Stephenie Meyer
• George’s Secret Key to the Universe by Lucy & Stephen Hawking
• Treasure Fever! Book 1 in the Schooling Around series Andy Griffiths
• Water Witcher by Jan Ormerod
• The Waterhole by Graeme Base
• Parsley Rabbit’s Book about Books by Frances Watts & David Legge
• Quest for the Crown Book 1 in The Faraway Fairies series by Eleanor Coombe
• Go Girl! Angels: Anniversary Edition by Chrissie Perry & Meredith Badger
• Nim’s Island by Wendy Orr

Today we released an upgrade to Picture Australia. Most of the improvements were behind the scenes improvements involving building the framework for features that will be implemented in a few months.  One feature that was implemented was an “Add to del.icio.us” link.  

A “share this” link is nothing new for any news site, blog or current affairs site, in fact for these sites it’s nearly essential to get your content out there and distributed as quickly as possible.  So why is this feature virtually absent from the collection searches of most libraries and museums?  Isn’t it an ideal mechanism for promoting the core content from their collections and giving it the opportunity for further exposure, particularly given the difficulties many museums and libraries face getting their collections indexed by search engines?

Picture Australia currently provides what are essentially “pre-configured” searches on particular topics called trails.  These are designed to be easy and topical introductions into the collections.  With the addition of the “share this” link, now any user can create a group of related images, add their own descriptions, tag it however they like and promote it.  For example, a teacher may want to create a group of images for a class they are teaching, or a historical train society may wish to collate all the references to photographs of trains in their area. Through the use of the del.icio.us API, this user generated trail doesn’t even need to be promoted on del.icio.us, it can be incorporated into any site, displaying it in it’s own context.