Papers: The Inside Out Web Museum

Fig 1: 24 Hour Museum content always features at, or near the top of, Google searches

The Inside Out Web Museum

Part 1: Something Is Stirring Out There

Imagine this: you're looking for a picture by an artist — you can't remember his name. It's a painting of a yellow flower. The same guy did a painting of himself with a bandage round his ear. The painter might be from the Netherlands. The work is old, maybe 100 years old.

How can you find out who the artist was, right now? Where would you look? Would Google help you find it? Perhaps, if you knew a little more about the query than you can remember, or if you know a bit about art and where to find it on-line. But what if you don't? What if you're ten years old, and you just got a school project to do?

You were asked to find out more about the artist, and write a small story about what his world was like, from his point of view. Your teacher has asked that you make sure all your facts are correct, that you go to official Web sources, and warns you not to go astray on-line.

Fig 2: The 24 Hour Museum homepage

At the 24 Hour Museum (http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk), Britain's National Virtual Museum, and our kids site Show Me (http://www.show.me.uk), we'd like to help this kid get his info, safely, quickly and from all the best museums and galleries, many of whom we partner with on-line.

Imagine it was possible our student could type questions into Google, and get a page full of search results, all from accredited sources, real museums, knowledgeable curators. Nothing off-beam, nothing adhoc, every result close to his query. He typed in hazy keywords, but the Web did the work for him, making semantic connections he's not aware of. It's a cluster of results, all closely following his search, but from places all over the world.

He knows to look for the quality icon that shows the search result is safe, official and copyright free. It'd be good if some collection records show in his search too, digitized images of key works by our artist hero. Our young searcher can sort the results by location, like in eBay, and find an art museum near his home, where he can go and soak up the tragedy of the artist's life, by seeing the brushstrokes for real.

Some might say you can do this now, and you can, in a way. You'll get lots of pages of results, lots of unrelated stuff, and need to do advanced searching. You may know right away it's Van Gogh we're talking about, and might know the right art museum in Amsterdam or Paris to check on-line.

But we envision a more active, educative Web, which people of all abilities can get satisfaction from. At 24 Hour Museum we'd like to build on our expertise in RSS publishing by taking our content, and especially the content of our museum and gallery partners, out to meet digital audiences, instead of waiting for them to come to us.

This 'active' Web gives us the chance to publish even the smallest-sized digital items from our collections; just particles or atoms of cultural content into the search engine world, where the emerging semantic power of today's Web 2.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0) can present our virtual museum content in related, meaningfully linked clusters. It's a new kind of Web museum — one without walls, with no sense of place, without any analogy to the three-dimensional institutional world of culture.

It's A Tall Order — Where Do We Start?

First, let's look at the state we're in as an audience on-line. We're really getting into search these days and it means museums publishing on-line urgently need strategies to get out to meet these new audiences.

Recent OECD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD) figures show the rise in Web audiences in developed economies has slowed right down, but that many, many more people are using search. Unlike in the early days of HTML, when you pretty much always went to your favourites, there wasn't much else to discover. But there's now a stellar amount of material, everywhere. It's hard to imagine a Web world without search engines, but some of us lived through it. What on earth were Google thinking of when it all began? Find out here: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Even young Web users now often go straight to grown-up Google to browse or search, whether for pleasure or for school projects. You might say that's possibly a risky place to be for younger learners — I think you're right. We need to tackle this.

If this sounds like a personal opinion, it's not. Although I identified this trend in my paper about our RSS newsfeed (http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/pratty/pratty.html) presented at Museums and the Web in 2005, others more eminent and qualified than myself corroborate my observation. Recent reports by the Oxford Internet Institute (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/oxis/oxis2005_report.pdf) as well as earlier work by the Common Information Environment (http://talk.talis.com/archives/CIE_CC_Final_Report.pdf) and Digicult (http://www.digicult.info/downloads/thematic_issue_3_low.pdf) show dominant routes between audiences and content now begin at search engines.

NielsenNetRatings (on this page: http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp) just concluded the same point in a report published January 18, 2006. It's a pretty amazing set of stats: apparently lots of users even type URLs into the Google search bar instead of the browser address bar. It's become a digital default, an habitual click.

There are two types of online searchers who type a Web site url into a search window rather than into the browser bar (said Ken Cassar, chief analyst of Nielsen NetRatings). Those inexperienced enough not to know the difference between the two, and those that are so experienced they have become habituated to using the search engine as their portal to the internet. Whether this experience is driven by ignorance or savvy, the end result is the same: the search engine is the focal point of the online experience for internet users across the spectrum.

Why do users prefer Google to destination sites? Could it be that today's sites are too technologically challenging, or inaccessible, or linguistically obscure? Could it be that Web audiences are impatient? Have their expectations been raised too far by the seamless, flashy and fast thrills offered by other computer-generated experiences, such as the Playstation and the Nintendo? Fascinating recent research by the HOT Lab at Carleton University, Ottawa, uncovered the possibility that Web users judge the attractiveness and interest of Web pages in fractions of a second, not ten or twenty seconds as expected by Web architects and designers. (More here: http://www.carleton.ca/hotlab/news_Articles/AestheticAppealStudiesofW.html and: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4616700.stm)

Of course, one big reason for this change in habits must be the steady worldwide increase in 'always on' broadband connections. Look here, at The Times, in London: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9076-1791519,00.html and see more on the OECD Web site: http://www.oecd.org/document/16/0,2340,en_2825_495656_35526608_1_1_1_1,00.html. 'Always on' brings a change in the way people see the cost of using the Web, and this in turn allows a more playful, educative and instinctive use of the Internet in the home. I guess it may also mean a rather lazy and profligate attitude to information seeking: if there's no phone bill ticking over, why shouldn't I fiddle around in Google for recipes?

To me, a Web search is the most effective way to use the power of the Web. Cleverer people than I put on-line material they've taken a long time to research and write. I tap into it on-line, maybe at Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com). Without search engines, I cannot ever possibly know who all these people are, but more importantly, I cannot ever know what they've written, and how it relates to my own interests. I don't know what I don't know, but the active, semantic Web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web) can help me find stuff I didn't know was there. I need a Web that 'works for me.'

Consider, for a moment, the speed at which the Web is growing and evolving. The rise of broadband is making waves all over the world. This isn't yet another North/South technological divide issue — in less developed places, it's now realised that it's cheaper to put in place wireless broadband or satellite-based digi-access than it is to wire in old-fashioned copper wire telecoms infrastructure.

If broadband is driving change in the way people use the net, then this behavioural change isn't going to slow for awhile. Net access is changing from dial up and modem access to ADSL, Cable modems and other means, digital TV with converged Web media players, free wi-fi in public places and 3G phones, Blackberries and so on.

RSS Drives Change In On-Line Habits Too

I've noticed some other changes in my Web enquiry patterns too: I've almost lost the habit of visiting one or two favourite sites. It's quicker to look at a major aggregator like http://www.newsnow.co.uk or an RSS feed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29) or compendium of feeds. If I'm going to one place for my info, I want all the world there. I've got my feed reader (Feedreader from http://www.Sourceforge.com and Klipfolio from http://serence.com) for RSS alerts set up on my desktop so if something major happens in the world of heritage, the news comes to me, rather than waiting for me to find the news.

RSS seems to have been the catalytic protocol that is driving a lot of the 'active' Web. Don't take my word for it though. Find out more from an influential voice, that of Tim O'Reilly, one of those who coined the phrase 'Web 2.0':

One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html.) RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the Web since early hackers realized that CGI could be used to create database-backed Web sites. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Rich Skrenta calls this “the incremental Web.” Others call it the “live Web”. (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-Web-20.html)

This is a one-way ticket to an ever more connected world. It's what Simon Waldman (Digital Director of The Guardian newspaper Web site) called 'the distributed internet,' in the Editors Weblog: (http://www.editorsWeblog.org/2005/02/the_guardian_te.php)

It's worth looking outside the museum and gallery Web world to see how committed mass-market publishers are to the distributed Internet. Their readers (and especially their advertisers) now split their time between Web and print. It's possibly a chilling thought to some — but an insider at The Guardian recently said to me that the new Berliner format (smaller than broadsheet, bigger than tabloid) printing presses they've invested heavily in 'may well be the last printing presses we buy.'

Part 2: Page By Page — Everything Needs To Change

With our impatient new Google audience in mind, we may in the future be specifying much simpler, faster loading pages which grab readers from the moment they see the .gifs and text filling the screen. We could need much more immediate content titles, more descriptive headers and lots of pictures to get the attention of this picky, critical audience, as well as the algorythms of Google. Is the future Web going to be more like cable TV?

Looking at 24 Hour Museum Webstats (http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/etc/formuseums/TXT25733_gfx_en.html), we see lots of site users coming from search engines — usually 60 to 70% of visits. That's great, but we're also seeing a drop in page views. It seems likely that more unique visitors are coming in, but once they've glanced at the page the search engine has dumped them on at our site, they're clicking away quite quickly. At 24 Hour Museum we are trying to deal with this new reality by treating each page as a home page.

So visitors see plenty of other content on the site, they get the message of the site quickly, and they crucially see lots of other content on the subject they searched for. We're now re-arranging our content into themed areas, to accommodate the search patterns of our Google viewers.

Structured Search — Better Searching, But Your Architecture Needs To Change Too

Let's look at some ways other publishers have considered improving the efficiency of searching the Web. Here's an excellent vision from the UK's Institution of Electrical Engineers (http://www.iee.org/OnComms/Circuit/benefits/Editorials/Features/search_engines.cfm) where author John Schneiter explains specialized search facilities that are able uncover more of the dark Web, normally unreached by our friends at Google: just what we need to get through to some of our less accessible on-line museum collections. Looksmart.com has invested recently in what they call 'vertical search.' It's all about better quality results, from carefully sorted sources, using intelligent queries. Read about it here, (http://www.Weboptimiser.com/search_engine_marketing_news/13022198.html), then have a look at Looksmart (http://search.looksmart.com/). Annoyingly, Looksmart have chosen some vertical themes to search on our behalf, and as you might have guessed, art, history or museums are not there to explore.

Extrapolating this theme further, it's possible to automate and sort searching technology so it starts to associate ideas, names, concepts in the way we want — semantically. Here's an interesting piece by Bill Burnham in his perceptive blog about technology and investing. It's called 'A Unified Theory of Search, Social Networking, Structured blogging, RSS and the Active Web.' (http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2006/01/a_unified_theor.html).

Burnham says:

With RSS, you can now “listen” to the Web and automatically receive updates without having to go looking for them. But RSS is primarily a demand-side innovation. It benefits consumers of information/services but not suppliers. The real innovations yet to emerge are coming on the supply side of Web. And they are coming into being primarily as a result of the confluence of three important trends: social networking, search, structured blogging.

Putting aside Bill's interest in social networking for a moment, Structured blogging (http://structuredblogging.org/index.php) is a fairly recent movement promoting standardized XML-based tags in blog posts so search engines can recognize the type of blog post and elements within it.

So, if a blogger writes an exhibition review, the structured blogging tags enable an appropriate search engine to identify that content as a review and even to twin it with the artist concerned. Structured blogging could allow search engines to take the guesswork out of Looksmart's vertical search.

But hold on for a moment. If you and your museum want to take part in structural blogging, you need to be structuring your content to match the likely themes of public interest. You could try to label everything in your collection with multiple semantic metatags. But then if you allow vertical searching and structured blogging to its utmost degree, every single object in your collection would become a theme of its own — logical, but practically unreadable, and un-navigable. It'd be like eBay (http://www.ebay.com/) with absolutely no sections or classifications at all - just a teeming mass of unsorted objects.

To succeed, clever, themed, vertical searching needs matching themed Web sites in manageable chunks. That's why staff at eBay sort its car section into manufacturer sections, not by colour or just by the number of wheels.

Bill Burnham is electrified by the possiblities though:

It is only a matter of time before structured blogging (or some variant of it) is embraced by not just every blogging platform, but by every social networking site. What this will result in is a huge amount of index-ready supply side information. This is where search comes in. Using 'spiders' the search engines will now index and assimilate into their newly minted databases, all of this structured content. The results will then be available to the entire world within hours.” (http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2006/01/a_unified_theor.html#more)

Fine stuff — so let's import into the rest of the Web the structured search, trackbacks, RSS swapping, tagging and so on, that makes blogware so connected and ready for the next wave of the Web. Simon Waldman, Digital Director of The Guardian in the UK, reported on this trend in his speech to the World Editors' Forum in Seoul in 2005. In an RSS publishing environment,

“The core of what you produce on-line ... has to be able to stand up in this sort of aggregated environment. In other words it has to be distinctive — it has to be able to stand out on a global news stand… ” This is a crucial statement. With RSS output becoming ubiquitous, we need to publish outwards into the digital continuum objects that can sink or swim on their own.

The Internet Of Things — Now We Can Really Track Collections

Waldman has identified a key quality all digital objects need now to be active in the future Web. A fascinating November 2005 report (http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/internetofthings/index.html) by the International Telecommunications Union reported the possibility that we are right now on the threshold of inanimate objects, robots and databases dominating the Internet: there might soon be more 'bots than humans on-line. According to the ITU report, as life and the objects around all of us get connected by devices like RFID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID) tags and sensors, they will extend the communication and monitoring potential of the network of networks; as will the introduction of computing power in everyday items such as razors, shoes and packaging. You can't take this down too far — the report even proposes that nano-scale objects could have meaningful digital meta-values. Truly a life in a grain of sand.

With this possible environment in mind, everything digital we make should have universally readable metadata built in. You never know where it will end up, or who will be reading it, on what platform. You don't know what readers or platforms understand about the object, so you need to write a description that gives your object some agreed meaning, in the wider scheme of things. These agreed schema about meanings are called ontologies. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology) Clay Shirky writes some good sense about the practicalities of building ontologies in a general publishing context: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

In our museum world, the smallest relic in a collection can have a description in the traditional one or two-dimensional formal way, using the familiar Dublin Core attributes, but by adding an RFID tag, it can be traceable, updateable, auditable, Google-able and even be its own Web page, living on-line as well as in a glass case.

Very interesting, but what will the gains of semantically-literate digitized collections be? If we can search nationally for certain objects, would our funders then be able to 'rationalize' the duplicated collection items? It could be like the way national supermarket chains use EPOS (electronic point of sale) technology to track inventories and control stock levels on a hourly basis: good from one point of view - keeping tabs on collection items would be easy, but bad in that it could diminish local, regional or personal responsibility for curation and collection policy.

Fig 3: Flickr are exploring ways to make clusters of content — here's one about museums! (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/museum/clusters/ - for current content)

More On Web 2.0 And Museums

Here's more detail about Web 2.0 from Tim O'Reilly, one of the originators of the phrase: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-Web-20.html and here's something UK-centric by Mike Ellis http://www.electronicmuseum.org.uk/em/blog/index.asp? displaymode=homepage&blogname=post.xml from his excellent Electronic Museum Web site (http://www.electronicmuseum.org.uk).

In fact, many digital commentators argue about whether there is such a thing as a 'Web 2.0.' In the UK, tech writer Jack Schofield argued against the term's having any meaning in a piece in The Guardian Web site in September 2005 (sorry, you need to register to view this: http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,1644552,00.html) only to be contradicted by his colleague Bobbie Johnson in a story the following month.

Schofield's story references a key Web 2.0 presentation by Andy Budd at deconstruct 2005 (http://www.clearleft.com/dconstruct05/) in Brighton, and Tim O'Reilly's work. These pieces are a useful summary of what this new wave is about, in simple terms for non-techies to absorb.

Paul Miller, formerly Director of the Common Information Environment in the UK, adds this thought, via a post on the UK Museums Computer Group newslist, where a lively discussion about Web 2.0 and museums took place in February 2006.

One of the most powerful capabilities we get from 'everything-Web' 2.0, is an ability to finally unlock the wealth of content we all continue to insist upon stuffing into proprietary silos. Many of the technologies behind Web 2.0 actually *are* pretty mature and stable. It's the ways in which they're being brought together that are new and compelling. (posted Wed, 1 Feb 2006; http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0602&L=MCG&P=R312&D=0&I=-3&T=0)

Paul now works for library information systems company Talis, and more of his thoughts about the new Web can be found in a comprehensive article in Ariadne: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue45/miller/.

There's now see a bigger set of connections and opportunities, moving readers away from searching for items on-line towards a better, more functional, more efficient Web — what some call the Semantic Web (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/). This was a term Tim Berners-Lee coined when he set out his original semantic vision back in 1992. Here's a subsequent rough page from Tim showing some thinking (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html) and a TBL interview from MIT's Technology Review with background to the idea (http://www.technologyreview.com/ InfoTech/wtr_13784,258,p1.html).

There are others (like, from the Natural History Museum, Mike Lowndes: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/abstracts/prg_300000730.html) presenting papers to Museums and the Web in 2006 who are more qualified than I on the subject, so I don't propose to go too far into the semantic Web. My interest in the semantic Web stems from my devotion to RSS technology, and how it has opened up channels of communication and associated opportunities for connecting meaning and associations between published on-line content.

Researchers from other professions and different strands of publishing are taking concrete steps with joining up their worlds semantically — we should keep tabs on this work, and see how it could inform what we in the museum sector do; for instance, the European Information Society Technology research initiative funded the OntoGrid Project (http://www.ontogrid.net/ontogrid/home.jsp). The project has developed Semantic-OGSA, a reference architecture that represents an evolution of the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and defines a mechanism for the explicit use of semantics in components and applications.

SIMAC (http://www.semanticaudio.com/) is a new audio-based semantic music information retrieval system. Currently under development, it is a major leap forward in the application of semantics to audio content, allowing songs to be described not just by artist, title and genre, but also by their actual musical properties such as rhythm, timbre, harmony, structure and instrumentation.

Perhaps more in our territory, the SATINE initiative (http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/Webpage/projects/satine/) seeks to employ semantic strategies to make sense of the global hubbub that surrounds the tourism sector.

Fig. 4: Tagcloud analysis of keywords in 24 HM RSS output. (http://tagcloud.com)

Part 3: Can Museums Interact With This New Opportunity?

In the UK, we've got ten years or so of on-line collections in various forms, plenty of museum and gallery Web sites, many not well exposed to search, some database sites like Cornucopia (http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/), some RSS output, but not a lot. The museum and gallery community in the UK have not yet embraced blogging particularly extensively. We do have, however, thanks to recent lottery-funded investment, a reasonably well-structured, theoretically interoperable museum Web sector with consistent standards, good accessibility and a commitment to free use by the public.

However, the way museum and gallery Web is funded in the UK needs to change utterly to keep pace with the way the Web is developing and the way audience habits are changing. Commercial sector publishers and mass media outlets continually refine and develop. UK museum sites built in the last five years with one-off project lottery funding will surely sink into the old, dark, passive Web. Only sustainably-funded museum sites that develop as quickly as the Web changes will thrive.

Museum agencies in the UK like the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council or MLA (http://www.mla.gov.uk) are positively seeking to develop a multi-sectoral, multi-layered Knowledge Web (http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets//I/iik_kw_pdf_5038.pdf). To succeed, these plans need to recognise currently non-existent Web 2.0 standards — culturally-aware ontologies, hybrid, practical folksonomies, and searchable digitally-robust objects — as building blocks in publicly-accessible collections, inspiring editorial layers, and using creative commons licensing. Of course, it all needs to be completely free for end users. Nick Poole, the Director of the UK MDA (Museum Documentation Association) in Cambridge (http://www.mda.org.uk) sounds a note of warning about the future on the Museums Computer Group newslist, but does it in positive terms:

While I am all for Web 2.0, mashing up, syndicating, podcasting and flashmobbing, I still want to see a sector in which stable, well-designed websites offer simple user-focused interactivity and services, and to be honest, I think this is what the majority of users want too.

The danger of the cutting-edge is that it appeals to funders (pilots of PDA or mobile-platform services are much sexier than paying for hosting and domain registration for a museum site) but is not necessarily addressing the real need. I will always enjoy new media and emergent technologies, and MDA is closely involved in Web 2.0-related developments such as the Semantic Web and folksonomy, but I believe we have to select the most proportionate technology for our needs, and this often won't be the cool stuff.

MLA have been promoting The Knowledge Web for a few years. How does this fit into Web 2.0? David Dawson, who is head of digital futures at MLA, asserts that sites like Cornucopia are already part of the new 2.0 era, and have been for a few years. They're keen to offer Cornucopia as a Web service for others to use, though there aren't any agreed standards for Web services use in the museum sector just yet.

From my point of view as a journalist and editor, I don't see a very well developed degree of search engine transparency or accessibility when searching for UK museums on-line. There's little knowledge within the community about search engine optimisation (SEO) and many museums are run by volunteers, with Web sites that remain static from one year to the next. This ecology has not changed in recent years. While National museums in London and the big cities are able to develop new ideas, the rest of the museum community has not benefitted from funds to develop Web infrastructure in the regions.

MLA's Knowledge Web will remain just a plan if there is no investment in a sustainable museum Web infrastructure. There are, however, plenty of museum and cultural sector people in the UK keen to respond positively to the challenge.

Curators of Meaning?

The 24 Hour Museum's last five years have been concerned with deploying a mix of traditional journalistic and editorial skills, coupled with a keen sense of what's coming up next technologically. We've developed good digital publishing practice, sound marketing skills, educational outreach schemes to get student writers involved, and lots more. In other media sectors these things are taken for granted, but the museum world is still in the Victorian era when it comes to modern Web publishing, marketing and communications. To embrace new opportunities like an Internet of Objects, the museum world needs to adopt new ways of working digitally. We could soon see 'curators of meaning' who seamlessly use tagging and folksonomies to animate and explore the multilayered meanings of pictures or collection objects. Merely scanning artefacts and classifying by Dublin Core and then tucking the relic away in a repository would be a desertion of duty in the Web 2.0 world.

Projects such as steve (http://www.steve.museum/), the Art Museum Community Cataloguing Project, point the way to some interesting new curatorial activities. We can hook up to new communities of users if we are willing to subvert the old hierarchical models of curator, collector, consumer. Asking people what words they'd really like to use to describe contemporary art could be fun! (I can suggest a few, but we can't reproduce them here!)

On the UK Museums Computer Group Web forum, Tehmina Goskar expressed her delight in the steve approach:

I am impressed at the Art Museum Cataloguing Project as it shows how such initiatives can embrace users and 'sister' organizations too — an opportunity to work together. And before anyone flings up their hands in horror, I am not advocating that folksonomies replace the more rigid and standardized documentation standards that we use for managing our collections, only that social tagging can be immensely useful in increasing real-time interaction with collections — and it's a lot of fun. (Posted Fri, 3 Feb 2006; http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0602&L=MCG&T=0&I=-3&P=2405)

Things are moving fast, and it's quite possible the cultural establishment will get left behind. The rate of growth in the blogging world is staggering. Current Nielsen figures show that the number of blog sites doubles every five months. There are, as of January 2006, 27 million blog sites, most of them joined together by RSS links, trackbacks and all sorts of tagging systems.

Sites like the wonderful Flikr (http://www.flickr.com/) are forging ahead of the traditional arts and cultural establishment by giving communities of users the tools to share photos, grouping them in curious ways using tagging systems. Now Flickr is exploring the 'meaning' of what's been loaded up onto the site — they've come up with something extraordinary to cluster pics together. It's called 'interestingness!' (http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/)

The Inside Out Web Museum

After reading earlier in the paper about new audience patterns, the trust the public put into museums as sources of information and new ideas of sorting and tagging objects for their meaning, I hope it is becoming clear that the building blocks of a new kind of virtual museum are almost in place. Let's look forward to an on-line museum that authors content, sorts it into themes and promotes semantic links between sets of subject-related on-line resources, publishing in multiple ways to search environments. This new museum doesn't just promote its own content, but also, in the spirit of public service broadcasting, promotes the content of its partners too. This virtual museum of the future may even be more of an idea, or practice, than a single Web identity.

Naturally, if content is taken out of published context, the marketing and brand experts in authoring institutions would want to promote the image, values and identity of the originating body. To accommodate this, branded 'favicons' or text descriptors to show in search results could accompany semantic tagging, ontological identifiers as well as a Creative Commons license, parcelled up with our on-line resources.

Conclusions

We should consider adapting present site designs to present Google-borne cultural Web users (who are using instinctive or casually-generated keywords) with plenty of content on their searched-for theme. This will maximise the quality and relevance of the 'enquiry pathway' users follow on our sites. To do this we must re-arrange our Web sites along modular, themed lines with CMS, database, navigation and page architecture informed by useable taxonomies, and standardized ontologies: make sure they conform to user and search engine expectations.

We must make sure all our content, right down to our smallest 'atoms' of digital content, 'explain everything about themselves' to readers both robot and human, when encountered out of original publishing context. So (as well as their content) they should have Creative Commons info, originating institution branding, a kitemark or logo denoting quality and safety, agreed semantic tagging values, and some navigation or contextual linking information to other material on the same subject, or to other items from the same original museum source (and, of course, Dublin Core values too).This is a big suggestion, impacting on the way we currently specify digitised collections.

We could propose partnerships with the search giants, aiming to convince them research into 'structured search' would be beneficial to all. Specialized cultural searching would just be another flavour of niche offering to Google, easy for them to sort, but it would win governmental brownie points in a much less controversial fashion than their current attempts to move into archiving.

We need to work with Web builders to converge the best of blog connectivity and immediacy with our traditional site architectures and CMS. We need to bridge the growing gap between emerging blog technology and the older, one-way Web.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jane Finnis, Director, 24 Hour Museum; Andrew Sawyer, Museum Consultant, mwr; Richard Moss, deputy editor, 24 Hour Museum.

References

Berners-Lee, Tim. The Semantic Web Roadmap. (1998) W3C. Pub. Sept 1998, last update Dec 1998, consulted January 16, 2006. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html

Brin, Page, authors. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Undated, Computer Sciences Department, Stanford University, Stanford, Ca. 94305.
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Burnham, B. A unified theory of search… weblog, Jan 18, 2006. Consulted Jan 20, 2006. http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2006/01/a_unified_theor.html

Cornucopia, consulted January 29, 2006. http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/

Dutton, Genarro, Hargrave, The Internet in Britain, The Oxford Internet Survey, 2005. Oxford University. http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/oxis/oxis2005_report.pdf

Editors Weblog. Article, The Guardian Tests The Distributed Internet. (2005) consulted Nov 15, 2005. http://www.editorsWeblog.org/2005/02/the_guardian_te.php

Ellis,M. The Second Coming. (2006) The Electronic Museum. Published January 29, 2006. Consulted January 30, 2006. http://www.electronicmuseum.org.uk/em/blog/
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First Impressions Count for the Web, BBC. Consulted January 16, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4616700.stm

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Google Suggest, beta version. Consulted Feb 06, 2006. http://www.google.com/Webhp?complete=1&hl=en

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Cite as:

Pratty J., The Inside Out Web Museum, in J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 1, 2006 at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/pratty/pratty.html

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published: March 27, 2006
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