museumsandtheweb.com - Interface

Interface content: it's not the size, but how you use it

athibodeau — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:18:08 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

content strategy

Keywords:

content

Keywords:

apps

Keywords:

mobile

Keywords:

Interface

Abstract:

Museums are increasingly looking for ways to connect to people on their own devices inside and outside of the museum space. Smartphones and tablets have helped drive the popular use of apps, traditional websites often don’t translate well to mobile devices, and increasingly, people are looking for a more immersive and creative online experience. Partly in response to this, in the past few years a new range of museum apps have cropped up.

This means that interface content should be more important to museums than ever. The problem? People often overlook it or don't know how to apply content strategy practices to constrained copy. This workshop will introduce techniques specifically aimed at addressing button text, links, labels, menus, interactive components and other pieces of interface content.

We’ll look at ways that people concerned with content can ensure that their interface copy is clear, user friendly, predictable and consistent with their organizational voice. Although this will be most applicable to those who are thinking about developing their own app, it will also be useful for anyone who is interested in improving the smaller, interface elements of their website.

Through practical examples and hands-on exercises, we’ll cover:

What is content strategy and how can it be applied to micro content
What to include in a micro-content style guide
How to audit and track interface content
Creating strong and clear calls to action on buttons and links

This workshop will be designed with the under resourced museum professional in mind. This means people who often act in multiple roles including wordsmith, educator, technical expert and possibly even user experience designer. No prior experience necessary. Bring your questions.

Type:

Mini-Workshop - teaches something or explores approaches

Site:

https://facebook.com/amy.thibodeau

Authors:

Amy Thibodeau

Art & Artists

jmkd — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:25:35 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Art & Artists

Keywords:

art

Keywords:

collection

Keywords:

database

Keywords:

Interface

Keywords:

research

Keywords:

collections online

Abstract:

This paper describes how multiple strands of exploratory thinking across a large organisation were brought together in the complete overhaul of Tate’s collection online.

Scholarly research, technical innovation, curatorial enquiry, educational strategy, enterprise analytics, user-centred design and crowd-sourcing were just some of the methods employed by numerous teams across Tate on various projects. Over the course of two years these sometimes unconnected activities were identified, shaped and successfully channelled into a unified online representation of art and artists.

The quirky trajectory of multiple projects will be charted as resources are diverted, goals mature and priorities change. As well as the most successful endeavours, we will encounter failed initiatives, inconsistent progress, abandoned contexts and reconfigured methodologies, all set against an increasingly pressurised budgetary landscape and an unpredictable change of government.

The finished site will act as a guide for these narratives, demonstrating the outcomes of completed efforts and acting as a live metric for the projects’ goals and priorities. Future components will be discussed in the relevant contexts, and longer term plans revealed.

Case studies to be referred to include:

ArtMap
Taxonomic structures
Online Scholarly Cataloguing Initiative
User commenting
Personal collections
Archive integration
Tate Channel
Article syndication
Displays information
Curatorial style guide
Image sizes
User testing
Audience research
Social media integration

Through discussion of these projects we will discover the scale and complexity of the finished product, the challenges of integrating many years worth of content created for other contexts, and the ongoing implications for a public institution that integrated digital workflows over a decade ago.

A open assessment will be given of the budgetary and personnel requirements, along with the institutional impact of Tate’s Online Strategy 2010-12.

The site will launch in February 2011.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Collections Online

Site:

http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/

Authors:

James Davis

John Stack

Automatic Metadata Enrichment and Linking for Event-driven Access to Distributed Collections

MvanErp — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 13:15:32 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Automatic Heritage Metadata Enrichment with Historic Events

Keywords:

collection access

Keywords:

linking

Keywords:

enrichment

Keywords:

Interface

Keywords:

thesauri

Keywords:

historical events

Abstract:

Most digitised and online available objects from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) can be browsed through a predefined set of formal metadata, such as its creator, year of creation, and type of material. Standards for metadata management and exchange have matured and are being adopted widely. They enable intra-collection search and exploration, and are also main drivers behind supporting domain and cross-boundary access to collections.

However, these formal metadata often do not give access to information pertaining to the content of the object, such as its topic, or what is depicted. This information is often given through textual descriptions which are mostly only accessible through keyword search. Keyword search is limited in the sense that it does not facilitate sorting, or retrieving objects whose descriptions contain terms that are synonymous to the search term.

This paper provides results of an interdisciplinary research project, Agora, that is taking collection access one step further by enabling users to search and browse museum collections through the content descriptions of objects in a structured way. The three-year Agora project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and brings together computer scientists, cultural heritage experts, and humanities researchers.

We present advances in collection access through automatic data enrichment and linking to thesauri and external resources using a combination of state of the art information extraction and semantic web technology. In this work, we show results on enrichment, linking and integration of two collections, namely those of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) and the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (RMA). Our first contribution to the state of the art in collection access enables users to browse and search descriptive metadata elements in a structured manner; our focus here is on automatically linking objects to historical events, thus providing users of the collection with objects in context. The figure shows a screenshot of an object from the NISV collection, along with its automatically enriched description field. The entities and events that are identified in the description field, are linked to instances in the event thesaurus. The instances in the event thesaurus are multifaceted objects that are modelled through an event model, providing the historical context to an object.

This new dimension that is added to the collection information has profound implications regarding visualisation; a list or facet view does not do justice to the richness events provide. Our second contribution is a presentation method of enriched collection objects through an interface that is based on the same event model that also underlies the event thesaurus. This interface explicitly shows the event links that connect collection objects and support user interactions that are subsequently used to enrich the knowledge of the collections.

The first evaluations of our approach indicate that event-driven collection access offers users a more meaningful and richer experience. As information extraction and semantic web technologies are advancing at a rapid pace, we foresee that event-driven access as proposed by Agora will be adopted widely in the cultural heritage domain in the near future.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Linked Data

Authors:

Marieke van Erp

Johan Oomen

Roxane Segers

chiel van den akker

Lora Aroyo

Geertje Jacobs

Susan Legêne

Lourens van der Meij

Jacco van Ossenbruggen

Guus Schreiber

Hiding our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability"

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:48 +0000

Solas, N. (2010). Hiding our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability". (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.