What would Phar Lap do? AKA, what happens when Facebook and museum URIs meet a dead horse?

Phar Lap was a famous race horse.  After he died (in film-worthy suspicious circumstances), bits of Phar Lap ended up in three different museums - his skin is at Melbourne Museum, his skeleton is at Te Papa in Wellington, NZ, and his heart is in Canberra at the National Museum of Australia.

I've always been fascinated by the way the public respond to Phar Lap - when I worked at Museum Victoria, the outreach team would regularly get emails written to Phar Lap by people who had seen the film or somehow come across his story.  (I was also never quite sure why they thought emailing a dead horse would work).  So when I first heard that Phar Lap was on Facebook, I was curious to see which museum would have 'claimed' Phar Lap.  Does possession of the most charismatic object (the hide) make it easier for Melbourne Museum to step up as the presence of Phar Lap on social media, or were they just the first to be in that space?  The issues around 'ownership' and right to speak for an iconic object like Phar Lap make a brilliant case study for how museums represent their collections online.

And today, when I came across three posts (Responses to "Progress on Museum URIs", Progress on Museum URIs by @sebastianheath, Identifing Objects in Museum Collections by @ekansa) on movements towards stable museum URIs that problematised the "politics of naming and identifying cultural heritage" and the concept of the "exclusive right of museums to identify their objects", I thought of Phar Lap.  (Which is nice, cos 80 years and one day ago he won the Melbourne Cup).

Of the three museums that own bits of the dead horse, which gets to publish the canonical digital record about Phar Lap? I hope the question sounds silly enough to highlight the challenges and opportunities in translating physical models to the digital realm. Of course each museum can publish a record (specifically, mint a URI) about Phar Lap (and I hope they do) but none of the museums could prevent the others from publishing (and hopefully they wouldn't want to).

Or as the various blog posts said, "many agents can assert an identity for an object, with those identities together forming a distributed and diverse commentary on the human past", and museums need to play their part: "a common identifier promoted by and discoverable at the holding institution will ease the process of recognizing that two or more identifiers refer to the 'same thing'".

Of course it's not that simple, and if you're interested in the questions the museum sector (by which I hopefully don't only mean me) is grappling with, the museums and the machine-processable web page on Permanent IDs has links to discussions on the MCG list, and I've wrestled a bit with how URIs might look at the Science Museum/NMSI (and I need to go back and review the comments left by various generous people).  I'd love to know what other museums are planning, and what consumers of the data might need, so that we can come up with a robust common model for museum URIs.

And to reward you for getting this far, here is a picture of Phar Lap on Facebook as his skin and bones are about to be re-united:

UK Culture Grid wants to know what developers need - get in!

Neil Smith from Knowledge Integration dropped by the Museums and the machine-processable web wiki to ask what users (developers) need to get data in and out of the Culture Grid:

To support the ambitious targets for increasing the number of item records in Culture Grid, we thought know would be a good time to review the venerable old application profile we use for importing metadata into the Grid. I've added a discussion page reviewing options at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/w/page/Culture-Grid-Profile.

We really want the community to be involved in helping ensure that whatever profile (or profiles) we support will meet the needs of users - not only for getting things into the grid but also for getting things out in a format that is useful to them. Although the paper focusses mainly on XML representations of metadata, we're also interested in your views on whether non-XML representations (e.g RDF or JSON) need to be supported.

So whether you work in a museum or are an external developer who'd like to use museum data, I'd encourage you to think about the four options Neil outlines, and to comment, ask questions, share sample data, vote for your favourite option, whatever, on the Culture Grid Profile page.  One of the options is to develop a new model - definitely more time-consuming, but a great opportunity to make your needs known.

As an indication of the type of content that's available through the Culture Grid, I've copied this text from some of their about pages: "It contains over 1 million records from over 50 UK collections, covering a huge range of topics and periods.  Records mostly refer to images but also text, audio and video resources and are mostly about museum objects with library, archive and other kinds of collections also included."  So, that's:

• "information about items in collections (referencing the images, video, audio or other material you offer online about the things in your collections)
• information about collections as a whole (their scope, significance and access details)
• information about collecting organisations (contact and access details)"

There's a lot of cultural heritage and tech jargon involved on the Culture Grid Profile discussion page - don't hold back on asking for clarifications where needed.  I'm certainly not an expert on the various schemas and it's a very long time since I helped work out the Exploring 20th Century London extensions for the original PNDS, but I've given it a go.

If you've read this far, you might also be interested in the first ever Culture Grid Hack Day in Newcastle Upon Tyne on December 3, 2010.

Finding problems for QR tags to solve

QR tags (square or 2D barcodes that can hold up to 4,296 characters) are famously 'big in Japan'. Outside of Japan they've often seemed a solution in search of a problem, but we're getting closer to recognising the situations where they could be useful.

There's a great idea in this blog post, Video Print:

By placing something like a QR code in the margin text at the point you want the reader to watch the video, you can provide an easy way of grabbing the video URL, and let the reader use a device that's likely to be at hand to view the video with...

I would use this a lot myself - my laptop usually lives on my desk, but that's not where I tend to read print media, so in the past I've ripped URLs out of articles or taken a photo on my phone to remind myself to look at them later, but I never get around to it. But since I always have my phone with me I'd happily snap a QR code (the Nokia barcode software is usually hidden a few menus down, but it's worth digging out because it works incredibly well and makes a cool noise when it snaps onto a tag) and use the home wifi connection to view a video or an extended text online.

As a 'call to action' a QR tag may work better than a printed URL because it saves typing in a URL on a mobile keyboard.

QR tags would also work well as physical world hyperlinks, providing a visible sign that information about a particular location is available online or as a short piece of text encoded in the QR tag. They could work as well for a guerrilla campaign to make contested or forgotten histories visible again - stickers are easy to produce and can be replaced if they weather - as for official projects to take cultural heritage content outside the walls of the museum.

The Powerhouse Museum have also experimented with QR tags, creating special offer vouchers.

Here's the obligatory sample QR - if your phone has a barcode reader you should get the URL of this blog*:



* which is totally not optimised for mobile reading as the main pages tend to be quite long but it works ok over wifi broadband.

[Update - I just came across this post about Barcode wikipedia that suggests: "People would be able to access the info by entering/scanning the barcode number. The kind of information that would be stored against the product would be things like reviews, manufacturing conditions, news stories about the product/manufacturer, farm subsidies paid to the manufacturer etc." I'm a bit (ok, a lot) of a hippie and check product labels before I buy - I love this idea because it's like a version of the ethical shopping guide small enough to fit inside my wap phone.]

[Update 2 - more discussion of a 'what are QR codes good for' ilk over at http://blog.paulwalk.net/2008/10/24/quite-resourceful/]

I came across a mention of 'Digital Object Identifiers' in a paper on digital humanities, and discovered DOI.org:

A DOI name - a digital identifier for any object of intellectual property. A DOI name provides a means of persistently identifying a piece of intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with related current data in a structured extensible way.

A DOI name can apply to any form of intellectual property expressed in any digital environment. DOI names have been called "the bar code for intellectual property": like the physical bar code, they are enabling tools for use all through the supply chain to add value and save cost.

A DOI name differs from commonly used internet pointers to material such as the URL because it identifies an object as a first-class entity, not simply the place where the object is located. The DOI name identifies an entity directly, not some attribute of an object (an address is an attribute of a thing, whereas the thing itself is a first class object).

At some stage I have a big post to write about stable, permanent URIs for museum objects, and I'll be re-visiting this site when I start that.