NZMuseumsOne Year Live

A recap of the first year for NZMuseums.co.nz and a look at future plans

Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems

National Digital Forum ConferenceWellington, Nov 23rd 2009

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdegenhardt/3434961931/

A website for all New Zealand Museums

From the small...

...to the large

• Launched Sep 2008• Represents 400 museums• Collection records and images from 60

museums (many volunteer run)

Website administered by:National Services Te Paerangi,

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

The team on the Our Space map at Te Papa

www.nationalservices.tepapa.govt.nz

How they help

He Rauemi Resource Guides

0508 freephone helpline

NZMuseums allows you to find our treasures

To talk about them

...and help others find them

Built on top of the eHive collections management system

Within eHive, each contributor has their own login to create and edit content and upload images

www.ehive.com

NZMuseums – One Year Live

New contributors every month

Continuous new collection items

• National cultural events website• Data shared with NZMuseums through RSS

feeds for each museum

Search for NZLive event information from NZMuseums

NZMuseums widget

Example of NZMuseums widget on the Te Papa website

NZMuseums on Twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/nzmuseums

Twitter is a place where you can follow things you’re interested in

Contribute to discussions

Comment on things, share links, publish notices

http://www.twitter.com/ehive

Enhancements in eHive

• Summary reports for National Services on NZMuseums contributors

• Approval process for new NZMuseums contributors

• Options to download your content in several formats, including an Excel spreadsheet

• Search friendly (human readable) webpage addresses

Acquisitions tracking almost ready for release

Why be on NZMuseums?

• Reduces barriers to achieving a web presence

• Show it to the world! (1,000 views of Nelson Provincial Museum’s 50 records)

• Minimal funds and expertise required

• The information can automatically flow onto other projects with the planned DigitalNZ integration

Nelson Provincial Museum

“Using the NZMuseums website as motivation, we narrowed our selection down to 100 artefacts, took the digital photographs, and researched what we could in the time available.”

“We have found the NZMuseums web site to be very useful, and a great way to display our collections to a much wider audience. Local people have shown more interest since having seen their museum on the Internet, and tourists are able to access it ahead of their stay.“

Roslyn Miles, Administrator, Raglan Museum, wrote about her experience with the project:

Raglan Museum’s profile page on NZMuseums

Case Study: Raglan Museum

Plans for NZMuseums for 2010• Better blogging integration through Wordpress

• Integration with DigitalNZ

• Mark rights for records and images

• Programming interfaces (API) for 3rd party developers

• User created galleries

What’s an API and what’s it doing to my museum data?

• Application Programmable Interface• The way two websites or applications talk to each other using

an agreed set of questions and response formats• Data created in one place can be repurposed• Share your stories

Website 1

Collection Records

. . . . .

Website 2

Collection Records Redisplayed with different presentation

. . . . .

API – “the telephone line”

DigitalNZ helping with bottlenecks

• Online guides through Make It Digital• Helpdesk for all aspects of digital lifecycle• Aggregated data for whole cultural sector• Forum to propose & vote for digital projects

DigitalNZ: the digital life cycle

NZMuseums integration with DigitalNZ

• Harvesting is the process of copying core information between multiple website & applications

• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Harvesting Metadata – OAI-PHM

• Create filters of information• DigitalNZ’s preferred method is OAI-PHM

Data Harvesting

Sharing data

• Copyright issues• Less control of where your data ends up• eHive - 3rd party search “opt-out” option • Creative Commons licences

– Copyright holders only

• Other categories– No rights reserved, custom rights statements, all rights reserved

Summary

• Infrastructure to get data in is complete• Extending the functions for contributors to edit

and manage the content• Working on new ways to share the data with

other websites• Programming interfaces will allow new ways to

view the data

Contact InfoPaul RoweJoint CEOVernon Systems

paul@vernonsystems.comTwitter:www.twitter.com/armchair_caver

Lucie PatersonCommunications OfficerNational Services Te Paerangi

natserv@tepapa.govt.nz 

Twitter:www.twitter.com/nzmuseums