Posts

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Sharing the future of digitisation

Hi all,

I support the work of the digitisation programme for the museum and Bristol Records Office. We have  1 stills officer and 1 moving images officer. I am thinking about what kit we need for digitising and digital storage for the next 5-10 years.

I thought i’d just ask that if anybody thinks that partnering up to share practices, resources (scanners, moving image equipment etc) and maybe LARGE data storage then please get in touch.

Questions I have been asking myself:

  • Can we share costs for expensive items like scanners?
  • The cost of data storage is massive, even using cloud hosting, I wonder of several similar services could share to be efficient?
  • How we can best use volunteers and students to help us?
  • There is some revenue in licensing BUT how can we react to the speed that production companies require?
  • Is there a better way to get the job done through shared work and collaboration?
  • Less resource every year… how can we be proactive in responding when less is NOT more it is less
  • What innovative uses of collections are people rolling out for public free or revenue use?
  • Why can I never pronounce ‘digitisation’ in public!

Thanks

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Swindon Heritage Strategy

Swindon Borough Council have unveiled their first ever Heritage strategy. The 18 page PDF makes note of the vision, aims and key objectives. The document has clearly been designed and written for print use.  It would be great if they had the headlines on a webpage instead of just a pdf.

Below are my key highlights from the document.

Read Swindon Heritage Strategy (pdf).

Objectives
a. Develop a plan for a united museums offer across the borough.
b. Develop the town’s reputation as a hub for heritage expertise with
bodies such as English Heritage and the National Trust.
c. Develop partnerships between voluntary, public and business sectors
to develop the action plan.
d. Promote Swindon as a heritage destination.
e. Increase understanding and awareness of Swindon’s heritage for
residents and visitors.
f. Encourage the engagement of young people with Swindon’s heritage
through activities and partnerships with schools and youth orga
nisations.
g. Promote Swindon’s heritage in development and regeneration.
h. Create a deeper understanding of Swindon’s heritage assets,
their importance, issues and ways to respond.

p18 Requirement to find a new home for the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery Collections.

The ongoing financial challenge to reduce the cost of delivering services through innovation and income generation

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Week 24

Although the end of the calendar year is nearly upon us I have been looking at the financial year as my ‘North star’ so no mad rushing over here to complete projects before Christmas.

  • Me and the team spent about half a day looking at the high level (50,000 ft in David Allen GTD speak) activity for 2014. Much of our thinking is looking at where we want to position ourselves for 2015-2018 which is the duration of the next Arts Council funding stream
  • I took yet another stab at online shops. Running an online shop is the easy part. Trying to resolve payments and syncing to our finance system is soul-destroying. The Council just isn’t able to be responsive so I’m looking at how we can go around this rock-block
  • I met with aardman  to see if we can collaborate on a research and development project in 2014 so watch this space
  • Played good cop, bad cop for an introduction to social media session
  • Chopped it up with Martin P about how our service could engage with wikimedians. The only issue is that of the creative commons licensing which needs to allow commercial use. I hope that the trend of others embracing the ‘share-alike’ mindset will win over our service
  • Budget forecasting – monthly reminder of how much time can be wasted with a poor user interface
  • Agreed in principle to run some digital training for the service and to extend to other South West teams and services
  • Agreed what our digitisation focus will be for 2014. We’ll be concentrating on transferring magnetic tapes and moving a large collection from a legacy system
  • Had a planning session with the learning team about their website requirements
  • Discussed Enterprise
  • Finished up the week seeing the first working prototype of Team Eclair’s student project. They are using a world map and timeline approach to displaying our collection and i’m now very excited about where this may lead us
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Week 23

The theme of this week collaboration and thinking more seriously about the first stages of a website redesign. I locked out  a large portion of my week to consider different directions for the website and also submitted the initial business case.

  • Met Nikesh Shukla who runs the web side of visit Bristol to see how we can help each other
  • Spent an afternoon with the conservation department to better understand their area of the service. Luckily for me they are also full of ideas for activities on a new website. Blogging is popular with them.
  • Had a fruitful introduction with Nomensa to hear about how they approach User experience. Making sense of the Cross-channel user experience is a concept I have long been trying to articulate into a single phrase . They also have a beer fridge!
  • Met with the Bristol Old Vic to see about collaboration and I really enjoyed hearing about their prototyping of sets and plays
  • Got the wheels moving on some digital signage (read TVs) with GB
  • Aardman left a message…

 

 

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Where in your organisation does social media responsibility reside?

Where in your organisation does social media responsibility reside?
And do you have other hubs for social media other than the core team?
(And what are the strategies behind?

Hello,

Social media lives within the content strategy, and is the equal responsibility of all staff and volunteers at Bristol Museum Service. My role, along with 1 marketing officer is to support (highlight the opportunities, training, guidelines etc) any individual and/or team.

Anybody can contribute to the official social media channels and are encouraged to think about why, how and when to use social media to support a project or theme of activity.

Our evaluation officer then evaluates our effort and we can then use the Build, Measure, Learn loop to improve.

We then have around 5 staff spread across the service who act as ‘champions’ helping their areas and feeding back to the folks interested in digital.

The content strategy is to whisper, shout, inform, engagement, promote, listen, experiment and interact in accordance with our mission.

In 2014 I hope to have social media / digital engagement specifically highlighted in all new job descriptions.

 

From: Museums Computer Group [MCG@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] on behalf of Kajsa Hartig
Sent: 05 December 2013 17:33

Subject: [MCG] Where does social media reside in your organisation?

 

 

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Week 22

This week was super packed and organised around several major events. I have my head in our web strategy so here are the highlights.

  • Planned and delivered a communicating on the web mini 90min workshop which essentially said that Google is our homepage and content strategy is key.
  • Met a critical friend from the Arts Council and waxed lyrical about innovation and digital engagement
  • Discussed in more detail the digital requirements for next years Moved by Conflict exhibition
  • Progressed with 1 of our student project teams
  •  Attended the private view for the launch of the refurbished galleries five and six
  • Learned about budget forecasting
  • Attended the private view for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year which included our experiment with motion tracking and ghost slugs which I urge you to see for yourself and THANK YOU to Stef Goodchild
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How to fix HTC Desire 500 auto correct

If you have a new HTC Desire 500, or similar mobile using Android, and find that your auto correct isn’t working, e.g it says all standard English words are incorrect, then read on.

When you first use the phone the auto correct isn’t working and says pretty much every English word is new and needs to be added to the dictionary. The problem is that for some strange reason multiple languages are switched on by default and the keyboard cannot understand English words. To fix is quick and simple:

  1. Go to Settings (the graphic is a cog)
  2. Scroll down to the ‘phone’ section and choose ‘Language and keyboard’
  3. Under ‘keyboard and input methods’ choose ‘HTC Sense Input’
  4. Choose ‘Keyboard selection’
  5. Then under ‘Select keyboards for text input’ un-tick all non-english languages EXCEPT English.

Problem resolved!

Language Screen

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Week 21

If I had to use one word to describe this week it would be Choices. I have choices, you have choices and 2014 is ready for us to start making choices. This was how I kicked off my team meeting on Monday. We have much to accomplish next year and at the moment the calendar is pretty empty. Yes we could just copy out the 2013 calendar and get back to work, doing all the things we did this year but I don’t think that 2014 should be the same. Yes there is plenty of work that will be similar – temporary exhibitions to build and destroy (i mean take down but that hip hop reference stays!), repairing computers, shooting objects, digitising moving image collections, reacting and a gang of other expected tasks. But we also need to evolve our team, our Team Digital. Our team not only needs to cope with the expectations from 2013 but also to grow with our audiences, funders and peer demands for the next 5 years or so. This means making dozens of tiny changes to how we work and importantly what we work on. Change is largely incremental and we can work to that tune or pretend things are the same until they are not and drown at the shock. What this really means for me and the team is that we may have to say no to current activities in order to find time for new fledgling activity such as Bring Your Own Device, sensors, user experience design, revenue generation, refreshing setup and working more closely with other organisations. To that end, I sent a request to all managers asking them to submit their requests for Team Digital and some have started to roll in. Once we have these requests we can make those choices we always put off.

  • The City Council Budget review was made public for consultation
  • Advised on several databases that are pretty fundamental to teams that need more than a few plasters
  • Introduced Stefan Goodchild to the audio visual team. Stef has kindly offered to produce a demo at the private view for Wildlife Photographer of the year. The interactive will use an xbox kinnect to motion track people as they walk pass it and draw a trail on the wall using a projector. My hope is that this will demo the usefulness of the technology to various teams and can be used next year.
  • Began to write our web strategy for 2014
  • Took a tour of the University interaction and graphics lab with Peter Bennet. It was like being a kid in sweet shop and I really hope we can work together on the future of interaction design in a museum space.
  • Talked to the Records Office about their storify project for The Dreadnought journal and hopes for wikipedia.

 

 

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Bootstrap your service and make money

I regularly read this piece of advice by Jason Fried of 37 signals on practicing to make money. With the public sector knuckling down to boost revenue and “act more business-like” I think there is much to learn from internet and digital-focused businesses. As a new team, i REALLY think it pays to act like a business unit within the organisation as we have yet to prove our worth in some folks eyes. I’m betting making money will help change that.

Read How to Get Good at Making Money from the creator of basecamp, which many of use.

Understand the buyer

…I made the discovery that people’s reasons for buying things often don’t match up with the company’s reason for selling them.

Understanding what people really want to know—and how that differs from what you want to tell them—is a fundamental tenet of sales. And you can’t get good at making money unless you get good at selling.

People are happy to pay for things that work well.

I can’t say enough about bootstrapping. Whether you’re starting your first business or your next one, my advice is to bootstrap it.

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What Screens Want by Frank Chimero

Lace up your boots and dive right into this article What Screens Want which will be doing the rounds at conferences and talks for months to come and rightly so:

One of the reasons that I’m so fascinated by screens is because their story is our story. First there was darkness, and then there was light. And then we figured out how to make that light dance. Both stories are about transformations, about change. Screens have flux, and so do we.

So the pep talk is that things are starting to suck, but there’s a capacity for change in what we’ve made, who we are, and what we believe. Everything was made, and if we want, we can remake it how we see fit. We only need to want it.

And then we have to build it.