The Curator’s Egg

OK, so we didn’t win. But to be beaten in a category called ‘Innovation and IT in service delivery’ by something that is not by any stretch of the imagination innovative in an IT sense is a bit rich (and I’m sure the other genuinely innovative projects felt the same). And perhaps the site shouldn’t carry the Bobby AAA Approved logo when it doesn’t meet the AAA standard, and in any case has many other accessibility errors; use the Valid HTML logo when it fails validation; or use a design that breaks when the text size is increased (and the default used is very small) - and is badly broken on some pages in anything but IE even without that. Still, maybe it was because the hosts had entered every category and otherwise wouldn’t win anything…

However, that’s not the point here. What puzzles me more about the Association for Public Service Excellence awards is how they can possibly assess the winners in most of the categories which give awards to the Internal Service Team of the Year in a host of areas, such as Waste Management, Refuse & Street Cleaning, Roads/Highways Maintenance and Management or Building Cleaning. It can only be on the basis of their applications, since there is no way, for example, that they are going to send teams out to assess the state of the roads in Cornwall, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Northumbeland, Kensington & Chelsea, Torfaen and West Lothian (and they are just the ones on the short list). Our projects (and indeed most, if not all, of the IT projects) could be accessed and assessed online. As for the others it seems to me that it’s more about being able to talk a good game, since actual performance can’t in practice be measured.

The APSE web site, by the way, deserves an award itself for some of the most clueless web design I’ve seen a long career of sneering at how badly-constructed most public-sector websites are. I mean, for goodness sake, a center-aligned <div> containing a layout table consisting of two cells each containing an <iframe>. This really is bad design at its very poorest, combining all the worst aspects of frames, javascript and inaccessible design. And yes, they do commit all the classic accessible-design no-nos: text sized in pixels so IE users with poor eyesight (or very high resolution screens) can’t resize it; links that are’t links just to trigger a javascript-driven menu system (yes, you can’t navigate the site without javascript); and of course the concomitant links that are links, but don’t look like links; 220-odd lines of javascript included in the document, within cargo-culting HTML comments (nested 60 levels deep! - here’s a hint guys - that hasn’t been necessary since about 1997, if indeed it ever really was); I can report that Spacer Gif is alive and indeed thriving, and that browsers will display a nasty mix if HTML3.2 and 4.01 code, even if they have to guess what the authors meant; a ‘bookmark this site’ that only works in IE (and wonderfully the very idea of which assumes that visitors don’t know how their own browser works <sigh>); incorrectly-nested headings (ie they’ve been used to size text, not for their structural meaning); links opening in unannounced new windows; and you’ve got to love the idea of <p class=”normal”>. Not exactly leading the way in excellence methinks.

Interesting article in the latest MJ on singles events in museums and art galleries. Not sure how that would work out at our museums, which mostly aren’t that big (and aren’t art galleries). Still, our industrial museum might be a suitable venue on a summer evening in June or July - a big open air site with lots of grass and trees, outdoors in the late evening sunshine amongst the relics of our industrial past.

It did make me wonder though whether the events were organised in the interests of audience development and visitor numbers - or whether it was merely as a convenient cover for lonely curators hoping to score :). Particularly with the following quote highlighted:

“Museums and galleries have always been places to go on the pull - events such as singles nights just formalise it.”

To which I can only say “You wish!”.

There seems to be something of a concerted campaign on denigration underway at the moment directed at Creative Commons in, amongst others, the Register and elsewhere. The attacks seem to be based on a combination of misinformation and a misapprehension of copyright law (one writer in particular being ignorant of the copyright law of the US even while using it as the basis of his argument). Look at this example from the Register:

“A Linux advocacy group emails me to ask permission for a reprint of an article, and I’m delighted to grant it. The Daily Express asks for permission, and I tell them where to shove it. Now that’s a freedom I don’t have by adding an unnecessary license to my work.

Now let’s say the Linux advocacy group has been taken over by people I don’t like. It asks for another reprint. I can change my mind, of course, but that’s because I haven’t signed over my rights under an irrevocable license. (And very few people tagging their work with Creative Commons licenses seem to realize that they’re irrevocable).”

Actually under copyright law having given that blanket permission to the Linux group he would not be able to revoke the permission unless the right of revocation was explicitly included in ther original permission - they don’t need to ask for further permission unless the original permission was explicitly restricted (note: I am not a lawyer, but this is the advice I have been given).

Anyway, the point of this is that I have been at a conference today reviewing a report (commissioned by CIE) about the potential of Creative Commons for public sector bodies making their material available for public use and repurposing.

It seems to me that this could be a fruitful way forward. We already know that teachers, for example, are concerned that resources they want to use should be cleared for educational use without having to contact each content provider directly, and the same issue applies to libraries and museums (and their visitors), as well as the FHE sector. To be able to make that permission explicit in a simple and understandable fashion seems to me to be particularly advantageous for the sorts of material that the museums service want to distribute: education packs, online exhibitions and activities, information about collections.

Of course there are some potential pitfalls too, in particular the issues of pre-existing terms and conditions applying to material; the sometimes uncertain nature of the ownership of collections (such as documentation that consists of letters from the Town Clerk saying “Thank you for your kind donation, it will make a valuable addition to the museum” but neglecting to say what the donation actually was); the problems of aggregating material released under different licences; and the sometimes conflicting requirements of the FoI and the DPA. Still I’m feeling quite enthused at the moment, so I’d better send out some emails before the weekend arrives and my keenness gradually dissipates.

One potential issue not covered by the existing England and Wales licence is the question of endorsement, or rather the possibility of seeming endorsement given by material from a trusted source such as a museum appearing in a context that the originating institution (or its managing body) might not approve. I think this is not likely to be a huge issue though, and it seems that a disclaimer in addition to the CC licence would be OK, as long as it does not conflict with the terms of the CC licence. So now to crack on and set up the working party.

Two further thoughts: a) despite working in a local authority for more than ten years, it is still a source of perpetual amazement to me how long it takes to get anything done once you move beyond the confines of a single small service (this is common to all large organisations, I believe); and b) I really liked the ‘Creative Commies‘ image and must steal borrow it if I end up doing a presentation on this subject.

As the quantity of material that is available to be used/re-used/re-purposed continues to grow at a huge rate, Creative Commons opens up a way for content providers, and particularly those in the public sector, to explicitly make material available for their target customers in a straightforward, simple and easy to understand way. As for the rest of the monkeys, they can just keep on typing.

Note. I started writing this on the train in Waverley Station. The train was subject to ‘severe delays’ because ‘a vehicle collided with a bridge in the Abbeyhill area’. It made me wonder how First ScotRail categorises delays, or whether there was some sort of national standard for train operating companies. Perhaps like this:

1. Delay
2. Severe delay
3. Exceptional delay
4. Leaves on the line
5. Wrong sort of snow
6. Etc…

The train was eventually cancelled. I must say though that unlike in the good old days, they were very good about keeping pasengers informed.

*With apologies to Andy Toone from whom I stole the title then adapted it.

I wrote these a while ago, but I think they really belong here. After reading a report on how museum pay, particularly that of curators, has been falling begind that of comparable sectors, I was inspired to begin a parody of ‘Maria’ from the Sound of Music (suitably re-titled ‘Career’):

Career

[The scene: a department of Museum Studies. Several students discuss their prospects with a tutor. For unknown reasons they are all dressed as nuns.]

Berthe: Unlock the door into the store, the floor has got a leak
Sophia: I’m feeling so frustrated that it’s very hard to speak
Berthe: To fix a simple window, it will take at least a week
Catherine: So is it any wonder that I’m crabby?
Agatha: To get a start you work for free
Sophia: Oh, come on now, get real!
Berthe: You’ve fallen far behind your friends
Catherine: And that you can’t conceal
Berthe: I hate to have to say it, but I very firmly feel
All four: Curating’s not an asset to your CV

Margaretta: I’d like to say a word in its behalf
R. Mother: Then say it Sister Margaretta
Margaretta: The salary makes me laugh!

How do you get to have a good career?
How do you get a job with lots of pay?
What I desire, I’d like to make it clear,
Is oodles of money, enormously long holidays.

Many’s the path I’ve tried and then abandoned,
Many’s the time I’ve tried to find a rôle.
Accountancy won’t impress
And teaching’s too full of stress
And being a lawyer drives you up the pole

Oh, how do you get to have a good career
One where your worth’s reflected in your pay?

When I’m working I’m confused
Out of focus, unamused
And I never know exactly where I am.
Re-arranging the exhibits
Oh, it really is the limit
When you’re promised that tomorrow you’ll get jam.

Under-funded, under-staffed
Should I cry or should I laugh?
Should I try to fix the leak inside the store?
Then I feel my pulses quicken,
Run round like a headless chicken
As the time for budget cuts rolls round once more.

How do you get to have a good career?
How do you get a job with lots of pay?
What I desire, I’d like to make it clear,
Is oodles of money, enormously long holidays.

Many’s the path I’ve tried and then abandoned,
Many’s the time I’ve tried to find a rôle.
Accountancy won’t impress
And teaching’s too full of stress
And being a lawyer drives you up the pole

Oh, how do you get to have a good career
One where your worth’s reflected in your pay?

Of course, then I had to write some more, like this:

Do-re-mi

Let’s start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
Now in most jobs you start on a salary
In museums at first you work for free
Work for free?
The first three years are voluntary
Work for free?

(spoken) Let’s see if I can make it easy…

Dough, I fear, we lack my dears
Raids from elsewhere left us short
Meetings on more budget cuts
Far, far worse than I had thought
So forget what I have said
Laugh as if you didn’t know
Teetering right on the edge
And it all comes back to dough…

(spoken) Now, meetings and budgets and so on are only the tools we use to build a service. Once you have the notes in your heads, you can sing a million different tunes by mixing them up. Like this…

When you know the notes to sing
You can get project funding.

One of the problems about material published on the web, as with other stuff done on computers (letters, exhibitions, articles for example), is that the possibility exists to endlessly and almost effortlessly continue tinkering with settings, layout or exact phraseology in the pursuit of some (probably) imaginary perfection. So I’ve spent the last ten minutes adjusting the stylesheet to something that more matches my mood of the evening. No doubt within the week I’ll have got fed up with it and change it again.

In the past of course it took so long to produce any kind of draft that when it was good enough, it was done. Now because we can keep making changes with little effort, it becomes that much harder to just cry ‘stop!’ and decide something is actually completed.

Until of course a deadlines forces us to :).

Dylan was telling me the other day about online surveys that SMC had conducted, and it seemed to me that it had been comparatively expensive for them, involving as it did the use of an external contractor. I suspect that it’s actually the analysis of the surveys that’s the expensive bit though. Still, for anyone that would like to set up an online survey, is short of cash and is willing to do the analysis themselves, here’s a handy little tool: Clipboard.

You can create the survey forms through a simple web interface, and the results are collected in a text file emailed to you. Just import it into your favorite spreadsheet (for example Excel). No need to know HTML or PHP or anything like that, and a really simple set up too.

For a simple example knocked up in a couple of minutes see My Big New Super Survey. Enjoy!

Almost, but not quite, just back from Electric Connections 2005 in Perth (I’ve had my dinner first), so some thoughts on the day.

My talk ‘Display it again, Sam’ went down quite well, which was a relief. Quite a lot of applause at the end, though whether that was because it was a good presentation or relief that I had finished, I couldn’t say. At least I only got laughs where they were intended :).

Plenty of other good stuff, and some useful contacts. I’m particularly interested in picking up on the Scottish-law version of the Creative Commons licence which should be launched soon. This could be a way of allowing creative public use of and contributions to our online museum resources. Interesting to find out about the BM thesaurus. There was some disappointment in the auditorium at the failure of the National Burns Collection (somehow sounds sort of medical, that) to produce an image of the great man’s ‘marriage equipment’ - and explain why it is categorised under ‘religion’. As a side note, I’m not sure I’d have a logo on my site boasting about ‘Level A compliance’ with the WAI WCAG (that’s the Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for those not au fait with such things). I was also confirmed in the belief that librarians are definitely obsessed with metadata ;).

I was further reminded that we really need to formalise a digital preservation strategy. Perhaps we should get together with the records manager, and also look what other parts of the council are doing. Hmmm.

The DPC, by the way, is a membership organisation. It costs £10,000 per year to join. I’m thinking of starting up a similar scheme for Curator’s Egg. Send me £10k and I’ll let you join in.

What, no takers?

No, not that psuedo-scientific anti-evolution nonsense. I want to talk about design, and more specifically about graphic designers.

Why is it that graphic designers, whether they are working on exhibition panels, a booklet or other publication, or your new leaflet, or even (heaven forbid) a web site, just luurrvvv teeny, tiny text? I guess that they must all have perfect eyesight. Either that or they can’t actually read - why else would they treat text as if it were just another decorative element in the overall design?

I’ve been fighting an unending battle with designers over the last ten years trying to force them to make the text legible. While I have had some success with the designers I’ve worked with - they can see the point once it’s been explained (well, explained repeatedly over a course of months or years) - as far as I can tell the vast majority of them are as clue-challenged as ever. Which is a pity as there is some great visual design being done, but all too often it seems obsessed with itself as art to the extent that the design, the look and feel of the layout becomes more important than the actual content. At times it seems as if things are being done purely to impress other designers. The Wow! factor is all very well, but if all it generates in the audience is the ‘WTF?’ factor it rather defeats the object. They seem to forget that in the end the packaging is only there to facilitate access to the information.

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I’m not sure why I started this blog, other than to try out WordPress (which is really good, and really simple to set up). There is I suppose a bit of a risk in putting out a blog so closely related to my day job - well actually not so much close as joined at the hip :-), and certainly there are examples of people taking it too far and getting into trouble. Then of course there are the work blogs that turn into nothing more than PR puffery.

I do think it’s a useful way of getting my own thoughts into some sort of shape - the process of writing forces that - and trying to express myself coherently (which is always a challenge, as any who know me will testify).

So what comes next? Not shocking revelations from behind the scenes at the museum. For a start we don’t have any shocking revelations. In fact there’s not even any really dull revelations. Plus I’ve been on leave for several weeks, so I’m a bit out of touch. And I still have to write my talk for Electric Connections in Perth on Monday. Aaaaagh!

I’ve been thinking for a long while about ways in which I could be using technology to enhance access to museum collections and especially to open up possibilities for users / visitors / interested parties to use our material to create their own exhibitions / resources, with their own interpretive text. Some of these ideas became part of my ‘Distributed Museum’ concept; others I hope to put into practice with schools later this year.

1. Podcasting audio tours
2. Self-selected museum guidebook, with your text, or ours, or both - burned to CD/DVD or stored on our web space for others to view
3. The museum-wiki
4. Instant postcards - our stuff, your choice, your message
5. User-created multi-lingual interpretation
6. Interactive visitor book
7. Multi-venue education events and activities
8. Intercontinental interactives
9. Handheld / smartphone tours (Bluetooth or wireless hotspot?)
10. What’s in store - opening up the reserve collection

More to come…