library of primitive art

Museum object-based reference tool

Above: An example of a rollover for a single object in an installation photograph. Read below to see what I mean.

Not that anyone would suspect it, but the prolonged silence at this space hasn't been for lack of something to say. Okay, maybe a lack of something to say, but not a lack of activity. Much of my activity has been concentrated on local project planning -- offsite storage, WiFi, and a few stray efforts at improving reference tools.

One of the latter projects was an idea I came up with to use flickr! to assist in object-based reference questions. One of the most frequent questions asked at MPOW is: "Can you help me to find out more about an object in your galleries?" There are nearly 1,200 objects on display in our galleries. Keeping track of them in your head is impossible. In the best of all worlds our patrons would arrive with most of the information we needed to identify the object. Sadly and predictably, this is seldom the case. Absent that there has never been a practical way for us to match these often vague object references (“It’s in the case on the right as you come in, about halfway down, on a stand”) with the specific citation in the library's reference resources. Right now our only recourse is to send them back down to the galleries to copy down the pertinent information – an option I’ve never particularly liked: I worry that they’ll simply never come back again.

What if we had a way to share installation photos with our patrons to identify object they want to know about? And what if the photo had rudimentary information about the objects in the photo, enough to launch a fuller research effort?

While walking through the galleries one afternoon it struck me that I could tailor some of the existing features of flickr! to suit my needs. By using the ‘Add Note’ feature over an installation photo, I could create rollovers for each element in an installation photo, and presto!

I proposed a pilot project to the head of my department, who suggested that I start with objects I knew cropped up often with our walk-in patrons. She also informed me that our department’s segment of the museum-wide collection management database (TMS) already includes many installation shots, stored on the department’s shared drive, that are associated with specific objects.

For my initial effort I picked a wall of Benin brass plaques. I located the relevant installation photo in TMS, downloaded it to my PC and uploaded it to flickr! I created four sample rollover notes with only each object’s unique accession number and the object title. I created a mock flickr! set for it and future photos from the specific gallery in which it resides.

I tagged the photo with some boilerplate terms common to all the objects in the installation photo. I have my colleague Dan to thank for suggesting that I could tag the accession numbers as well as put them in the notes. As I subsequently discovered, tagging in flickr! is an imprecise art. Unlike our collection management system, there's no truncation, for one thing, making a search across accession numbers impossible.

I intend to use the 'Comments' section as a feedback mechanism to solicit suggestions and answer questions from the (for now) closed community with access to the project in vitro.

As is so often the case with projects employing museum photography, I’m waiting for the powers that be to determine if this use of the images complies with museum policies. I don’t know which of several real or imagined aspects of their use that might be giving our administration pause. Fortunately flickr!’s image options allow us to limit access as narrowly as library staff only if called upon. Naturally I’d prefer the resource was available to a much larger audience.

The project is still in development at this writing, pending approval from the administration and a lot more tinkering with the specific features of the tool. I had considered keeping this quick-and-easy DIY application of flickr! to myself until I could showcase a more finished project. But I'd rather put this out there now and see if it might have an application with other museum collections.

Keeping busy for fun and non-profit

FOR THOSE FEW BUT DEDICATED READERS: My apologies for not posting here sooner. Though I've had little to show for it in this space, I haven't been idle.

Props to Garrett Hungerford of Library Zen for introducing me to Google Co-Op, one of those many Google spin-offs (or outright purchase? Dunno, my back was turned), now with Create Your Own Search Engine. (Sounds like laundry product ads from my childhood.) Garrett's adaptation to compile a search engine for LIS bogs, LISZEN, is a masterful case of killer app -- the very sort of thing that at its best sets one to thinking.

One of my less whiz-bang responsibilities at work (until now) has been selecting titles for the library. We have few vendors who can match our narrow and specialized scope and broad spectrum of publishing venues with their approval plans. That puts a premium on finding titles on your own in order to guarantee the fullest coverage. Over time I have compiled a monster bookmark with the url's of all the publishers, trade and academic, putting out titles in our subject areas. A great start, but a pretty dull to plow through. Each publisher insists on designing its web site differently, providing for different search strategies (if any), arrangement and groupings of products, file formats (including the ever frustrating pdf), and page displays. (I feel that by now I could give an excellent presentation on how not to design a publisher's web site.)

Along comes Google Co-Op, and 'twas then the penny dropped. If I gathered all the root url's from the publishers' web sites, I could search across all their pages for keywords as I would any Google search. It's no substitute for hunting down the new titles one by one, but it could certainly cover most of the pages I'd need on a regular basis.

The mechanics of working in GC-O were surprisingly easy (with a few blunders along the way). I was even able to strip out the annoying advertising by attesting to being a 501(c)(3) institution. A few more deft taps and I could drop my test search engine into this blog. (That's it under SEARCH ENGINES at the bottom of the left column.) For now I've only managed an engine for the academic presses; I may still do one for trade publishers (if I sense a need for different keyword strategies) or fold it into the existing one.

It is worth pointing out that GC-O defaults to root url's (i.e., www.site.com). Web sites with subsites (subsite.site.com) need to be individually specified. At this early stage I haven't yet taken advantage of Google Marker, a handy way to gather url's to populate your search engines.

This particular application will probably spend most of its time behind the scenes. What's cool is that this also comes at the very moment that we are dismantling our Intranet pages and fashioning wiki pages for the same information. My colleague is working to transfer a key reference page featuring the web addresses for art and ethnography museums worldwide. The logical next step is a publicly-available search engine crossing all these museum web sites. That should find its way into the Goldwater Blog -- stay tuned.

Lest you think I spent all my time with my nose to the grindstone, I also took time out for Hallowe'en (left) and to visit a cemetery, but that's the stuff of another post on another blog.