Category: museums

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Paper: Where next for open cultural data in museums?

My latest article for Museum Identity magazine, Where next for open cultural data in museums?, is now live online and in the current print issue of Museum-iD 13.

Site abstract: "Museums have increasingly been joining the global movement for open data by opening up their databases, sharing their images and releasing their knowledge. Mia Ridge presents a brief history of open cultural data projects, explores some reasons why some data is relatively under-used and looks to the future of open cultural data".

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Keynote: 'The gift that gives twice: crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage'

I was invited to give a keynote at 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC' at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.  This was the first event for the AHRC-funded iSay: Visitor-Generated Content in Heritage Institutions project.

I wrote up my research for this lecture into an article for Curator Journal, From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing. If you have don't have access to the journal through your library, the pre-print is available from the Open University repository here.

My slides are below and I've blogged Notes from 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC'. I've also saved an archive of isayevent_tweets_2013_02_01 (CSV).

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

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Panel: ASPIRE Digital Roundtable: "Horizon Scanning: Living in the Digital World"

I was invited to be a panellist for Oxford ASPIRE's first knowledge sharing event on 13th November 2012, Living in the Digital World: Horizon Scanning for Museums (PDF).  Oxford ASPIRE is a consortium of Oxford University Museums (the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, History of Science, Natural History Museums) and the Oxfordshire County Museums Service.

As they say in their post, ASPIRE Digital Roundtable: "Horizon Scanning: Living in the Digital World", 'This roundtable event brought together a small number of museum professionals to discuss how museums could thrive in the increasingly digital landscape by exploring innovations, opportunities for collaboration and funding sources.

Our 16 delegates gathered at the Pitt Rivers Museum and questions and ideas began bubbling immediately over coffee.  The event officially began with thoughts and provocations from our four expert panelists who gave their over-view of the key digital issues facing museums. Delegates and panelists then entered into a lively and illuminating conversation.' They've linked to podcasts and transcripts of the introductions in their post.

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Guest post: Center for the Future of Museums blog

I co-wrote a post with Suse Cairns in reply to a post from Jasper Visser on Opportunities and Challenges with Reproductions for the American Alliance of Museums' blog.

As the introduction to A Reply to “On the Opportunities and Challenges of Reproductions” says, Jasper's post and our response came out of a conversation on twitter about the launch of the exhibition.  Many thanks to Elizabeth Merritt and the Center for the Future of Museums for hosting our discussion.

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Keynote: Global communities and open cultural data: movements towards linked open data in libraries, archives and museums

I was invited to Taipei, Taiwan for the 'eCulture & Open Cultural Data Forum' by TELDAP (Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Programs), MCN Taiwan and Culturemondo Asia Pacific.  Many thanks to my hosts and organisers for their hospitality, for the meetings they organised with various national museums and for the opportunity to discuss open cultural data with staff from Taiwanese museums, libraries and archives.

As well as my keynote on 'Global communities and open cultural data: movements towards linked open data in libraries, archives and museums', I lead a further day and a half of seminars with Shih-Chieh Ilya Li at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan on:

  • eCulture, Data Immersion & Open Cultural Data
  • Why Open Cultural Data?
  • What is Linked Open Data (LOD) ?
  • Strategy and Planning Open Cultural Data
  • Technologies, standards and licenses for Linked Open Data
  • How to open your cultural Data
  • Group exercise: planning LOD projects