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Joanne S

Reprogramming The Museum | museumsandtheweb.com - 0 views

  • Powerhouse experie
  • her APIs
  • Flickr AP
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Thomson Reuters OpenCalais
  • OCLC's WorldCat
  • Before we began our work on the Commons on Flickr, some museum colleagues were concerned that engaging with the Flickr community would increase workloads greatly. While the monitoring of the site does take some work, the value gained via the users has far outweighed any extra effort. In some cases, users have dated images for us.
  • In subsequent use of the Flickr API, we appropriated tags users had added to our images, and now include them in our own collection database website (OPAC). We also retrieved geo-location data added to our images for use in third party apps like Sepiatown and Layar.
  • In our case the purpose of creating an API was to allow others to use our content.
  • So consider the questions above not in the context of should we or shouldn't we put our data online (via an API or otherwise) but rather in the context of managing expectations of the data's uptake.
  • Steps to an API
  • several important things which had to happen before we could provide a public web API. The first was the need to determine the licence status of our content.
  • The drive to open up the licensing of our content came when, on a tour we conducted of the Museum's collection storage facilities for some Wikipedian
  • This prompted Seb Chan to make the changes required to make our online collection documentation available under a mix of Creative Commons licences. (Chan, April 2009)
  • Opening up the licensing had another benefit: it meant that we had already cleared one hurdle in the path to creating an API.
  • The Government 2.0 Taskforce (http://gov2.net.au/about/) was the driver leading us to take the next step.
  • "increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information"
  • the first cultural institution in Australia to provided a bulk data dump of any sort.
  • The great thing about this use is that it exposes the Museum and its collection to the academic sector, enlightening them regarding potential career options in the cultural sector.
  • I will briefly mention some of the technical aspects of the API now for those interested. In line with industry best practice the Powerhouse Museum is moving more and more to open-source based hosting and so we chose a Linux platform for serving the API
  • Images are served from the cloud as we had already moved them there for our OPAC, to reduce outgoing bandwidth from the Museum's network.
  • Once we had the API up and running, we realised it would not be too much work to make a WordPress plug-in which allowed bloggers to add objects from our collection to their blogs or blog posts. Once built, this was tested internally on our own blogs. Then in early 2011 we added it to the WordPress plugin directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/powerhouse-museum-collection-image-grid/
  • One of the main advantages the API has over the data dump is the ability to track use.
  • It is also worth noting that since the API requests usually do not generate pages that are rendered in a browser it is not possible to embed Google Analytics tracking scripts in the API's output.
  • y requiring people to sign up using a valid email address before requesting an API key we are able to track API use back to individuals or organisations.
  • Concerns that people would use the API inappropriately were dealt with by adding a limit to the number of requests per hour each key can generate
  • An Application Programming Interface (API) is a particular set of rules and specifications that a software program can follow to access and make use of the services and resources provided by another particular software program
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    Dearnley, L. (2011). Repreogramming the museum. In Museums and the Web 2011 : Proceedings. Presented at the Museums and the Web 2011, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming_the_museum
Joanne S

Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2009: Paper: Gow, V. et al., Making ... - 0 views

  • New Zealand content difficult to discover, share and use
  • DigitalNZ is testing ways to create digital content, collect and share existing digital content, and build smart, freely available search and discovery tools.
  • Memory Maker blurs the line between consuming and producing content. What’s sometimes called ‘remix culture’ […]. Digital technologies have opened up new possibilities for young people to access and represent the stories of their culture by taking sound and images and recombining them to say something new, something relevant to them. (Sarah Jones, Lunch Box: Software & digital media for learning, November 2008) http://lunchbox.org.nz/2008/11/get-coming-home-on-your-schools-website-wiki-or-blog/)
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  • The Memory Maker provides a taste of what is possible when collecting institutions modernise their practices for keeping and managing copyright information, using Creative Commons licenses or ‘no known copyright’ statements.
  • Learning about ‘hyperlinks’ today, these young New Zealanders will be the developers and creators of tomorrow.
  • The full set of contributions is accessible through a Coming Home search tool, occasionally on a google-like hosted search page (Figure 5), but more often through a search widget embedded on many New Zealand Web sites (Figure 6).
  • Digital New Zealand is developing and testing solutions that showcase what’s possible when we really focus on improving access to and discovery of New Zealand content.
  • Technically, the Digital New Zealand system is in three parts: a backend, a metadata store, and a front end.
  • The coolest thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else
  • “an API is basically a way to give developers permission to hack into your database”.
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    Gow, V., Brown, L., Johnston, C., Neale, A., Paynter, G., & Rigby, F. (2009). Making New Zealand Content Easier to Find, Share and Use. In Museums and the Web 2009. Presented at the Museums and the Web 2009, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/gow/gow.html
Joanne S

Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums - 0 views

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    Smith-Yoshimura, K., & Shein, C. (2011). User contributions sought by LAMs. Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives and Museums Part 1: Site Reviews (pp. 13-36). Dublin  Ohio: OCLC. Retrieved from http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-02r.htm Skim-read this to ensure that you understand the definitions of the seven different ways that libraries, archives and museums are using social metadata. Read more of this report if you are interested:
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