Several people have written about making museum catalogues available via
the Web. It's not terribly difficult to do this but the important question
is why anyone would want to? How many folk come into your physical museum
and ask if they can do, or someone can do for them, a search of the
catalogue? The real trick is to build your web component in such a way
that it answers the questions museum visitors pose, not what curators ask
other curators (which is a whole other project)
There are some published studies on this (Catechism at NMS; Jane Sledge's
paper at MW a few years ago) but you will get as much information from
asking those curators who have contact with the public. My generalisation
would be that museum professionals focus on objects, visitors on people
(yes, even in an art museum) and any web component needs to reflect this.
We gather statistics on our TAMH project (www.tamh.org) and the Highland
Clearances (www.theclearances.org). In the first instance the "research"
interest is on trade patterns, in the second an attempt to do some
statistical analysis of emigration/immigration networks. The logs tell us
what the visitors from cyberspace want is information on possible
ancestors. The interface, therefore, reflects this with powerful "people
searches" but with an attempt to interest visitors in other aspects as part
of our educative brief.
Web logs, recorded queries and emailed user queries and comments will soon
tell you what people want from your catalogue (and it's almost certainly
not a catalogue they want). To be able to change requires a flexible
component structure. We developed WebDev http://www.dmcsoft.com/webdev/
and MusDev http://www.dmcsoft.com/dmc/musdev.php3 largely to do this for
our own projects. I'm not punting them here as a product, rather the
thinking which led to them (described at
http://www.tamh.org/tamh/papers/mw98.php3 ) might be of use to others
looking at scripting solutions.
Douglas
The Highland Clearances
http://www.theclearances.org
---
You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected]
To unsubscribe send a blank email to
[email protected]
