The quote below, from Steve Jobs in 1997 stopped me in my tracks. I work on personal and collaborative projects that never see the light of day from time to time and maybe this sentence explains why:
Nothing is being held up that is any good
No boundaries conference day two
Luke Wright, Poet
Wednesday 26th February, Watershed
I attended day two of a packed house for the no boundaries conference #nb2014. I stumbled across some great folks and made a few loose notes. If you want the detail then check elsewhere as these are just random bits that interested me. Any errors about what was said is entirely my bad translation.
Simon Meller, Arts Council, spoke about the case for public investment:
- Need to improve engagement and inequality of access
- Lots of potential for partnerships with higher education – need to measure impact and support continuing and lifelong learning
- Show the links between arts, the creative industries and employment
- We need longitudinal study to show impact
- We can work globally by opening up our collections
- Four key themes are Culture (insights, citizens, identity), Education (Primary/secondary, continuing, higher education), Society (wellbeing, health, engagement), Economy (Creative industry, regeneration, tourism)
- Question from the audience making a plea for arts to focus on the “outside” where folks are e.g. Primark
Tom Morris, Bristol Old Vic said:
- spoke of the power of narrative
- Listening to the stories the public want to tell as its happening with or without u
- Trust our artists
George Ferguson, Bristol Mayor said:
- spoke about the arts being able to bring the City together and its our duty to give a sense of belonging
- Need to sell ourselves better to the public and the politicians
- When asked what kept him awake at 4am he said it was the need for us to “provide a catalyst
York Council boss said:
- we needed to foster the creative potential
- Internationalism and diversity go together
Week 34 at work
Walter Richard Sickert prints and drawings in need of digitising
This week was pretty busy:
- More Arts Council bid work…
- Skype chat about how we can use tablets to improve the visitor experience
- Discussion of how the new website can support the learning team
- How we can take online bookings – hoping we can use shopify for the heavy lifting
- A visit to M Shed to see how we can combine a tablet and flat screen to enable interaction with our ‘contributing wrap’
- Got permission to spend some external grant money to purchase a portable audio recording setup
- Visited the Office of National Statistics to give a talk on how we deal with intellectual property, make digital media, and make use of a digital asset management system (DAM)
- Hosted the monthly Social Media South West meetup and gave a talk with Claire Royall called “Reasonable doubt – how the museum us getting social”
- Helped Paul Sullivan get blogging over at www.pauldsullivan.com which let me see that wordpress has some poor accessibility quirks
- Briefly joined Trevor and David discuss digitisation requirements for 2014 which includes digitising a bunch of Walter Richsrd Sickert and Bristol Suspension Bridge prints and drawings (see above photo)
- Chopped it up with Adam about the progress of the new website navigation
- Rolled the dice on budget requirements for 2014-2015
Next week I really hope I can find somebody to help us take online payments…
Week 33 at work
This week was slightly less hardcore than the previous few weeks:
- Community support by taking on a student for his year 10 work experience for a week
- Moved from discovery to alpha phase for the website project
- Agreed how we’d do advanced ticketing for the next temporary exhibition online
- Got to grips with eventbrite
- Came up with way to start getting digital in the houses
- Met with Ian from aardman to discuss our full proposal for the Nesta Digital fund
- Reviewed another draft of our Arts Council bid
- Discussed how marketing and PR would help with the website project
- Confirmed my apprentice into the post – she has been a real asset
- One of our collaboration partner teams from the University of Bristol gave their beta demo of the volunteer database they have been making for us
- Started to get excited about our wikimedia proposal with the Bristol Record Office
- Swore that next year’s budget will be ruled with an iron fist ha!
Week 32 at work
This week was primarily focused on meeting internal teams to update them on the website project. I’ll have a student on work experience next week and dealing with the Arts Council bid so this week I tried to clear the decks.
- I met with members of the Natural Sciences team who are keen to build their team online activities. This won’t make phase 1 but anticipating future needs is vital. I’m assuming the BBC Nature History Unit will be a good baseline to start with
- The Public programme team’s needs are straightforward but the devil is in the detail. Their user needs will be met in the ‘plan your visit’ user journey. Also they need the website to deal with online ticketing.
- I met someone keen to volunteer for archives. We need hands at the pumps in that area so hopefully we can work together very soon
- The World cultures collections team are eager to blog for the new website. They were receptive to being user focused too
- The Development team are responsible for fundraising so we met to iron out possible user needs. We spent time reviewing other museum journeys and think we have a direction.
- I met 6 students from the University of the West of England (UWE) we photography students who will be snapping away between now and may. Although we have lots of marketing images I think there is lots of scope for ‘behind the scenes’ and documentary style photos. They help us do this and in return we act as a real client.
- We have started to see if a raspberry pi computer can replace some aging mac mini computers that are showing their age.
- We have a lot of kit in need of replacing so me and Zahid spent half a day preparing the list. This need to go to a panel to agree.
- Dan from fffunction wrote about his website research review for the website project
- In two weeks i’ll be talking with Claire Royall at Social Media South West so had to start on our talk
- Wrote a blog post about IT Services and my frustrations that will stay in the vault for now!
#ukgovcamp14 conference
Photo Credit David Pearson CC-BY-SA 2.0 license
Last Saturday I attended my first ukgovcamp conference in London. I went along with Jukesie, who wrote about his own experience of the day and Lauradee for a day of unconferencing. I was surprised by how few people had previously attended an unconference but this also made it enjoyable as then at least folk made it into sessions.
For me personally it was well worth the early start as there was a good bunch of people, many of whom i’ve stumbled across online. I haven’t paid much attention to local authority and central Government differences until this day. There seemed to be a much heavier group of central types which was a welcome eye-opener to their types of problem.
I think I was the only museum person which wasn’t really a shocker. For me, its important to widen my view of the entire public sector as there are many similarities even if the lingo is slightly different.
I picked a range of sessions to attend including the hardcore stats session which Jukesie was roped into. Stat IT nerds are a special bunch! I discovered a huge new field of using open data – though i wasn’t sure if this was for work purposes or just for tinkering in their spare time.
As always for me, its the meeting of new people that makes an event. For example I really enjoyed the session on creativity by Emma Allen who delivered a nice session that was closest to my line of work and thinking. A genius tip Emma suggested was to look at the Argos and Ikea catalogues, not just other archives as they of course are heavily dependent on getting them right for survival.
Another key takeaway was that regionally we could all make more effort to organise and run small evening or weekend events. Part of my 2015-2018 strategy at work mentions this type of activity so i’d better put my money where my gob is!
Thanks to all the organisers and my fellow attendees.
I make a cameo in the video below at the 0:40 sec mark
Week 31 at work
The next few weeks activity will be a similar pattern of Arts Council bid preparation, the website project AND squeezing in the rest of the day job.
- I wrote the first draft of possible plans for activity under the heading of ‘digital strategy’ which you can see on Google drive. This hasn’t been widely circulated but i’d love any feedback around clarity, style and vision. This will form part of the 2015-2018 Arts Council Bid for major funding. The headline is that digital should be a service.
- I had an introduction with Jess from the SS Great Britain about both of our digital work. Local collaboration will be key to our future survival.
- I did a tour of our IT/digital infrastructure for Redland High school for girls second year A-level students. They were mostly excited about visiting Nando’s afterward but hopefully they enjoyed it ha.
- Much of Wednesday was dedicated to working with Dan from fffunction interviewing staff about their interactions with the public. This is part of the discovery phase work for the new website.
- Submitted a business case for using external funding to purchase portable audio recording kit
- Agreed to trial eventbrite for our upcoming Private view ahead of the launch of the Jeremy Deller exhibition in April. In theory this should claw back at least two weeks worth of apprentice/volunteer time per event.
- Discussed using SquareSpace to run a small three year programme of work
- Had a great meeting with Patrica Santos from University of the West of England about using research to better understand using mobile technology in and around the museum sites.
- One of our student projects did an impressive functionality/alpha demonstrate of their tool for displaying our online collection over a Google map with filtering.
- Spent an evening hosted by the Pervasive Media studio hearing three great talks about open data projects. Thanks Tom!
- Ran a short session with Bristol Record Office on the benefits of using social media for their service.
Week 30 at work
This week marks the start of two major projects that will run until late March (and forced me to cancel my trip to New Zealand – sorry bro!).
- Both of our two major websites are failing to deliver results for either our business or customer needs. We finally got the nod to begin addressing the problems and this week we started the project with a kick-off workshop day. Myself, four colleagues and the external agency fffunction spent the day finding out the scope of the problems and the opportunities. We are employing the GDS project phases of discovery, aplha, beta to live. January and early February will be “Find out what your users need, what to measure and what your constraints are“. For much of the remainder of the week I met with staff from across the service to hear what their needs were and to hear how we could best find out how we could meet real users/customers. The list of ideas are captured in a public trello board. I need to fire up our labs blog in the coming weeks to write about the project in the open.
- I met with our marketing officer to discuss plans for 2014
- I had a productive Skype call with a researcher at UWE and hope that we can collaborate on researching the use of kiosks at our M Shed museum.
- I contributed to a City wide planning meeting about an HLF digital project. I co-wrote the HLF digital guidance so it was slightly strange to hear folks quoting words I’d written a few years ago.
- A potential volunteer got in touch to offer his web skills for February. I’m hoping he can experiment with RFID and Raspberry Pi as I just haven’t found the time.
- The most important strand of work until Mid march is our Arts Council bid for 2015-2018. I had 3 minutes to pitch my thoughts on our digital activity road map.
- I managed to attend the always enlightening Social Media South West #SoMeSW event
- Finally I had a really nice chat with the curator responsible for Nature Sciences about possible digital activity
- A bonus work day was attending the fantastic govukcamp 2014 on Saturday in London which i’ll blog about soon.
Choosing the right ebook file formats
There are many types of paper and paper-size to choose from when printing a paper book. The same myriad of choices applies to digital books except instead of texture and paper-weight, we’re concerned with what device and software the reader may choose to read your book.
If I had all the time in the world and I was producing a fairly simple digital book which didn’t require format specific features I suggest ensuring my digital book was produced in all of these formats:
- epub – an open format which means it will hopefully be around for years to come. An epub file will open in many ebook reader software and hardware such as an iPad or Android device. You can choose epub 2 or epub 3 depending on your target audience – stick with epub 2 for the widest support.
- Amazon kindle format (mobi and kf8) – because amazon rules the market it makes sense to ensure it works on both the kindle software and the kindle device
- Adobe PDF – Almost every device on the planet will open a PDF file so its a safe bet and is also open (see point 1). Further-more PDF is built to handle print, which could be a useful feature for some readers
- Apple ibook (IBA) – if I wanted to sell via the apple marketplace then i’d want to use their format.
Tip: if I was to distribute any of my own books I’d plump for giving ALL of the above to the reader in one bundle. This way they get the choice of their preferred format. I guess an issue for a small number of readers is they’ll receive a zipped bundle and have no clue what to do next. I didn’t say it was fool-proof.
Why is there more than one format I hear you cry? The market for selling ebooks is fierce and each major provider wants you to lock-in to their ecosystem, hence a fragmented market and a high number of file formats.
The key to producing our book fairly painlessly for each format is to plan early and use a workflow that doesn’t rely on any one particular format. The nerds of this world call this being ‘device agnostic’. Essentially write the book using whatever your preferred writing tool is and then have a workflow that makes it straight forward to produce for the context and constraints you have.
If I wanted to sell my digital book and I happened to know that all my potential customers used Amazon then I would likely produce this format first. If I wanted the book to open in say five years time I’d go for epub and PDF.
A final word on file format features
At the time of writing in early 2014, the format with the most advanced features that are implemented by a reading device is the apple ibooks format. It has some pretty impressive features for adding interactivity that may be essential for the success of our book. In which case your workflow for ibooks will split off and tackle those issues. Just be careful that you don’t go so far down that road that you can’t make a good experience for the other hobbled formats. By this i mean that readers and/or software for displaying epub, kindle and PDF don’t yet support any of the advanced feature support you’d like. Things change with each new reader software release though so the future could brighten up any day. If you need to use a feature e.g. video support, check if its supported in your primary testing kit.
Week 29 at work
This week focused on the here and now with the green light on the website project and then also trying to think strategically out to 2020. Although 2020 seems far away, in reality this immediate website project will be the foundation for work that will happen in 2020!
- All the procurement reading (70 odd pages) and hoop jumping has finally resulted in the green light to build the first phase of a new website for the service. We begin on Monday 20th January with the first wave of work called project ‘discovery’. Our champion striker in Government digital, GDS, describes the discovery phase as “Find out what your users need, what to measure and what your constraints are” Both us and the chosen agency, fffunction, will be talking about the project regularly so stayed tuned.
- Monthly budget forecasting which is the motorcycle equivalent of riding behind a truck in the rain
- Had an introduction with a new curator who will be joining us for a few months. Its fun times like these where I really enjoy preaching about the emerging digital curator roles I imagine the sector needs from now for the future.
- Demonstrated why it’s essential to listen carefully to an archivist about file naming conventions if you want to find the source material in 100 years. Talking of 100 years, I and the Records Office met with a central IT project manager about how our modern records might survive for the next 100 years. I really don’t think even Microsoft will be able to open a 2010 edition word file in 2114!
- Discussed my ideas for 2014 to 2020 with my boss. We looked at infrastructure, revenue, digitisation, skills needed, constraints and the chaotic beast that is the world of digital and IT. I drafted a trello board with these activities if your curious called the BMGA roadmap.
- I reviewed the user interface progress on a student project around volunteering
- Took a valuable trip to Exeter to visit Rick Lawrence at the RAMM. After a tour of their setup we talked about opportunities to work together in the near future. In order to do the best possible work many of us all need to work together which is also principle number 6 of our digital principles.
- Finished reading Content Strategy for the Web which will be an invaluable reference from here on out
- I took a leaf out of Tim Lloyd’s blog post and gave my personal copy of ‘Organisations don’t tweet people do’ to my boss who is already half way through. Out of my own pocket I
- Finally, I agreed to speak at the Office of National Statistics in February about digital media IPR and hopefully a little about digital books. Again, I think there is lots that can be shared across Government digital services.