Picture this.

http://images.swinburne.edu.au/handle/1111.1/1982

This is one of the 1.5 MILLION images on Picture Australia.( Click the link for a better view) It depicts Mrs Swinburne, in garden party regalia, hostess of a garden party at Shenton, the Swinburne family home in Hawthorn, 1945. The garden party for staff was an annual event.. The faded photo is in an album of photographs donated to Swinburne by one of the family. Like most photographs this, and the others in the album, offer viewers a wealth of information – fashion, hospitality, Swinburne family commitment to staff, formality and manners,language, collection habits…

These pictures would never have been seen again, but now can be through Picture Australia.

Web 2.0 is changing, no, has changed, the stately world of library and museum collections

I went to Canberra early this week and attended a meeting of participants in Picture Australia: http://www.pictureaustralia.org/

I just cannot work out whether I am enthralled by anything to do with giving the public a chance to look at wonderful things or I am enthralled that this is done so brilliantly, eloquently and idiosyncratically through the internet and Picture Australia.

I listened to presentations from new participants to P A, developers of new search engines talking in technical language I do not really understand but know what they are talking about and talks by eminent scholars in the field of communication between communities and the use of web 2.0 technology that is revolutionising this.

When I think about the swirling items of information I gleaned in that one day in Canberra, I find that I am definitely shouting hurrah to the people in museums and libraries who are working with the web 2.0 phenomena to make their collections available to searchers, even flickr and google searchers. There is now a new world out there where even the littlest (regional) library, when a participant in Picture Australia, is getting “web hits” from anywhere and everywhere because its staff have:
*gone to the public to suggest that their stories and photographs are important and had the public respond in droves with marvellous and perfectly valid material;
*added terms to their cataloguing of items, formerly languishing in archives, and in transferring their data to Picture Australia, brought a new admiring audience – the general public and researchers;
*been able to get grants from their own management, regional government and other such bodies to further enhance the accessibility of their collections because they are getting such rich feedback from their own and external communities (and the Councillors like their photographs on line, on flickr, on the www).

Research in earnest is now taking place within the institutions and in the academic world about connecting or being connected to popular sites like flickr to beef up the numbers of visits to their sites. Serious (re)searchers can always find most of what they want, whether they use popular sites or esoteric and little known search engines. But the public at large favour ease and easy, so they use google, wikipedia, flickr and others as well as a specific library or museum catalogue on line if they know the item is most probably in that institution.

I am quite amused by my own views post 23 things, my presumption of what a conference such as Picture Australia would have said even a short time ago, say 3-4 years, about all this acceptance of new audiences via the popular. I even sensed a small amount of reluctance to “give in” and a wish to remain pure.

One of the most interesting issues I have pondered on since my day in Australia’s capital is that Delta Goodrem’s dress is a very popular site for the Powerhouse Museum* and so is the Tyrrell collection**


Extract

“The Delta Goodrem dress was collected by the Museum as an example of contemporary fashion and in particular the influence of 'celebrity' on style, and thus it is entirely appropriate that this object be discovered by users searching in Google or linked from Goodrem fan sites. It also has a relatively complete object record with three available zoomable images (including one of Delta Goodrem wearing the dress), a full statement of significance, object description, production notes and history notes (totalling 865 words) written by curator Glynis Jones. The object has never been on public display. However, this is not the whole story.” Read more*

Extract
“Powerhouse Museum joins the Commons on Flickr - the what, why and how
What Flickr offers the Powerhouse is an immediate large and broader audience for this content. And with this exposure we hope that we will have a strong driver to increase the cataloguing and digitisation of the remaining Tyrrell glass plate negatives as well as many more the previously hidden photographic collections of the Powerhouse. **
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


All is well with our world when a pop star’s dress and the Tyrrell collection are written about in learned articles about collecting, accessing, search engines, museums and the public view of them, as well as discussed at meetings of librarians and museum curators.



*Chan, S., Tagging and Searching – Serendipity and museum collection databases. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 31, 2007 at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/chan/chan.html

**About this entry: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/04/08/powerhouse-museum-joins-the-commons-on-flickr-the-what-why-and-how/Author:
Seb Chan
Published:
08.04.08 / 6am

Kartoo: That was a bit scary

I thought I would give kartoo a bit of a challenge. I wondered if a photo on my flickr account of two sheep dogs in Dunkeld Victoria would be picked up. I put in Slim and Dusty + sheepdogs + flickr + Victoria and got waaay more than I bargained for. Parents should beware if their children find this search engine.

Here are some of the sites that came up:

• G'day,to all Country Music singers and songwriters. I have two programs that go to air at EMFM 104.7 the only local Community Radio in Echuca

• Nanotechnology world

• safari-magazine.ru

• A blog with many items including this :Writers, though - we’ve got the weekend song tomorrow with the latest volley in the fusilade of tunes I routinely fire off to scare of the crows, and I’ll close with Mark Twain, who called music: “that magician of magicians; who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.”

• And this – one of my favourites - Rodrigo Y Gabriela on YouTube

• A Greek site about something Greek with a You Tube entry for several men speaking Greek

• The Crusade of Varna

But I also was given a site which was for **** for **** for ****absolutely unmentionable/printable words. Oh dear me.

How could Kartoo have brought this up for Slim and Dusty and sheep dogs and Victoria and Flickr? I dared not look at the site. And why throw up the others? I can see the point of the Country & W site but - nanotechnology? A Spanish guitar duo? The crusade of Varna?*


I tried again with Sara Jervis + Slim etc and voila – up it came.

But that was scary and I became afraid to open sites as they may be obscene or tracked by the CIA.

I think I shall stick with google


*The Crusade of Varna was a string of events in 1443–44 between the Kingdom of Hungary, the Serbian Despotate, and the Ottoman Empire. It culminated in a devastating Hungarian loss at the Battle of Varna on November 10, 1444.
Wikipedia

Triple test on catalogue: VuFind and the others

National Library of Australia
I looked up George Swinburne and came upon several items that are very interesting for an insight into George Swinburne’s opinions outside of the Technical College:
• The League of Nations - the hope of the world – address delivered in Adelaide, South Australia, on April 27th, 1926
• Time limit v. monetary compensation – speech September 7, 1905;
• Small arms factory, Lithgow : report [to the Minister of Defence] / by Mr. G. Swinburne Inter-state Commissioner : re-dispute between the management and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, 1914;
• Murray River Waters and Mallee Frontage Setlement (sic): parliamentary trip of inspection by steam boat from Echuca to Mildura and the Darling Junction, October 17th to 22nd, 1907; trip authorized by Thomas Bent, Premier of Victoria and carried out by George Swinburne


Buzziwig / by Mrs. George Swinburne also came up. It is a children’s book published in 1931 as part of RNB children's literature series

State Library of Victoria
I looked up the State Library of Victoria catalogue and found some entries but the few papers in the collection were listed in the separate manuscripts catalogue. (2 searches)

Swinburne University of Technology
I looked up Swinburne’s catalogue and found the main entries – the Sugden biography, artwork – reference to the G S bust in the Image Bank and a paper, The Boy : His Relation to Industry, a pamphlet written by G S in about 1927. I also found loads of books with Swinburne College of Technology/Institute of Technology as publisher, but nothing to do with George.
Three different types of entries – book; artwork; archival document; one search. Tick

My opinion - VuFind is excellent

Would I have found the same items in the one search in the National Library of Australia catalogue pre VuFind?

I am elated: new knowledge – Semantic web; mentor – Tom; helper – Dragan

Human thinks and works collaboratively and uses technology: concept for Semantic web

I listened to Tom then paused to search the example about the Seoul Olympics and the weather in Melbourne on the opening day.

I entered into Google - Seoul + Olympics + weather + Melbourne

I found out that the Seoul Olympics were in September 1988, opening day 17 September 1988. As the table of Olympics gave only dates, I guessed 1988. So the first reference was only to the Olympics, and I am glad for a future trivia night I know the year of the Seoul Olympics and the opening date.

I then entered weather + Melbourne + 17 September 1988 and found no useful reference.

Then I thought I would go to the newspaper records in the Library and hunt up the Age for 17 September 1988 and look at the weather report.

Dragan helped me load the “Age” newspaper tape in the old technology into the new technology reader and I printed the weather page from the PC. *

As I did this, I thought how familiar Semantic Web seems in relation to what I know about Artificial Intelligence. This is more than what I gleaned from the movie A I. Our previous Vice-Chancellor was a brilliant researcher in this field and as I worked in chancellery I got to know some of the research he was working on.

I note in the Andrew Walmsley, reference , he mentions Artificial Intelligence.

I never, ever say that anything to do with the developments envisaged for the new web world is futuristic gobble. Not any more.

But I see the issues with Semantic web are to do with humans anticipating how to write data to connect. One day there will be a website devoted to the weather in the world at the time of the Olympics. There will be a website about writers who write in the spring and who focus only on children’s books. Every time a brilliant internet site is created, it will have taken a brilliant person to work out how to create connections – weather and Olympics, children’s authors and spring. The creators of these websites will know to make sure that the weather in USSR is divided up in the different states - Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc. as the person looking up the weather in Kazakhstan pre perestroika may not look up USSR and there may be no records for the season Enid Blyton wrote “The Magic Faraway Tree.


* It was Cloudy with showers developing during the day. Wind tending cooler southerly and freshening. Max:16

To be in there and because I am essentially curious, I entered Linkedin.

As usual it was very simple. The tricky part is to remember your password. From experience I now print out the register details and write the password on the sheet. Trickier still is where to put the details, but I am a librarian.

The first of the new 5 is irrelevant to me. I do not want a job, consultancy, to meet people, to talk about myself, to describe my job. For others this may be just the link they have been waiting for.

My experience with the first 23 things has taught me to go into these projects to see what is there. I have and I am glad I am still curious. That knowledge is the key.

I can do it.

I did it

I do not need it

I exercised new-found expertise/confidence with the internet world

I may or may not brag to my family and friends by dropping a reference to Linkedin when people talk about networking

To quote Henry Jenkins*, guru from MIT on digital technology:

“…the design philosophy underpinning games in education was less about serious games than serious gaming: the content was less important than the way programs allowed students to explore and experiment.” **(my emphasis)

*Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities and co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies program

**From an article in the Australian Higher Ed section 2 July 2008