Category: Museums

This week focused on the here and now with the green light on the website project and then also trying to think strategically out to 2020. Although 2020 seems far away, in reality this immediate website project will be the foundation for work that will happen in 2020!

• All the procurement reading (70 odd pages) and hoop jumping has finally resulted in the green light to build the first phase of a new website for the service. We begin on Monday 20th January with the first wave of work called project ‘discovery’. Our champion striker in Government digital, GDS, describes the discovery phase as “Find out what your users need, what to measure and what your constraints are”   Both us and the chosen agency, fffunction,  will be talking about the project regularly so stayed tuned.
• Monthly budget forecasting which is the motorcycle equivalent of riding behind a truck in the rain
• Had an introduction with a new curator who will be joining us for a few months. Its fun times like these where I really enjoy preaching about the emerging digital curator roles I imagine the sector needs from now for the future.
• Demonstrated why it’s essential to listen carefully to an archivist about file naming conventions if you want to find the source material in 100 years. Talking of 100 years, I and the Records Office met with a central IT project manager about how our modern records might survive for the next 100 years. I really don’t think even Microsoft will be able to open a 2010 edition word file in 2114!
• Discussed my ideas for 2014 to 2020 with my boss. We looked at infrastructure, revenue, digitisation, skills needed, constraints and the chaotic beast that is the world of digital and IT. I drafted a trello board with these activities if your curious called the BMGA roadmap.
• I reviewed the user interface progress on a student project around volunteering
• Took a valuable trip to Exeter to visit Rick Lawrence at the RAMM. After a tour of their setup we talked about opportunities to work together in the near future. In order to do the best possible work many of us all need to work together which is also principle number 6 of our digital principles.
• Finished reading Content Strategy for the Web which will be an invaluable reference from here on out
• I took a leaf out of Tim Lloyd’s blog post and gave my personal copy of ‘Organisations don’t tweet people do’ to my boss who is already half way through. Out of my own pocket I
• Finally, I agreed to speak at the Office of National Statistics in February about digital media IPR and hopefully a little about digital books. Again, I think there is lots that can be shared across Government digital services.

Everybody came flooding back this week and with them a tidal wave of email.

• Transferred BRERC to our own server to further reduce our third party annual hosting costs. By the end of all of these moves we’ll have saved several thousand pounds.
• The new interim Director started and I look forward to talking about my plans. IT services managed to drop the ball and I found myself saying “Welcome to the Council”
• Got a detailed tour of our City Lives exhibition from the curator Julia Carver which was brilliant and I wish everybody could have a curator in their pocket!
• Ironed out how we move a key collection back into the fold
• Put the wheels in motion for a web project with regional partners where I think we’ll give the website service squarespace a run through its paces
• Wrote about why online is still the real world
• Hit the brakes on a pending project due to begin next week
• Managed to squeeze in a lunch-time run (6km)
• Finished reading Organisations don’t tweet, people do during my breakfast reads

 

It seems that most of the Service takes the full two weeks off and so this week was still eerily quiet on the office front. As we reflect on the end of a year and hop to the next, I managed to focus on the website project.

•  Meet with a young student who will be joining us for a week in February for work experience.
• Completed the content audit for our two main websites (find all URLS, listed value to audience and business, note volume of web traffic  for Q1 and Q2 in 2013 and make notes for anything interesting)
• Met with potential web agencies to hear about their approach to helping us build a new website platform
• Was impressed by Tom who fixed hundreds of pounds worth of AV kit using 40p replacement transistors
• Learnt about current good practice for digitising film
• Started to read Organisations Don’t tweet, People do and make notes for folk in the service
• Reviewed a student project to replace our existing volunteer database
• Read our procurement guidance in painstaking detail
• Completed an IT request to ask for Google Chrome and need to write a business case to use Skype – yes you read that correctly, the average person has more useful tools in their pocket.

Today is Christmas eve 2013 and became my first experience working the floor of the Places Gallery at our M Shed museum.

For ninety minutes I was covering lunch breaks and had control of the radio in the gallery. Ever since I started back in July I have been trying to find out more about each of the locations and staff roles. This served as my introduction to one of the most important roles in the service, helping the public with enquires and keeping everything safe. In my role, if the wifi falls over or a computer fails, the museum continues to tick over. If there are not enough visitor assistants to safely manage the museum, we close. Digital technology roles are critical, but no single point of failure should close the doors (unless the doors fail!).

I took the time to explore the gallery in greater detail and being a biker, my favourite object is the Douglas Motorcycle  which I discovered was founded and made in Bristol. I was asked a few questions; How old is the giant floor map of Bristol and where is slug number 8 hiding (had to radio for the answer). During my patrols of the gallery I made sure to listen to the conversations by the public and watched them interact with the objects and most importantly for me, the technology.

From my observations it was clear to see that the computer kiosks are popular for short periods of time and that they are too high for very small children. Questions I then asked myself were: How can we make the kiosks work for even our smallest audiences? are they only used briefly as their task was complete or do they give up? Do we have analytics for every device to measure usage? What replacement process would we be considering for both hardware and software?

We have a mixture of screens that automatically play video on a loop, audio telephones, touch screens, and button triggered media. Those keyboards are already dated, not so much in function but the world has moved on and everybody tries to touch the screen instead of using the keyboard these days. I kept thinking about what I might change if I had the opportunity to refine and improve what we offer.

What became very obvious and clear during my stint was that the technology solutions we employ shouldn’t be considered in isolation. The public aren’t using these touch-points at home, on a bus or at work. They are sitting or standing in a large multifunction environment. When designing for gallery uses we should consider this context. Many of the public I saw were in small groups and small single person computers are not very helpful to this context. I can only guess that most gallery technology is an after-thought, rushed or makes assumptions that are never tested. I hope to change this for Bristol Museums. Our team has the remit, the will and a lot of the expertise in this area to design compelling public user experiences. If we team up with the visitor assistance staff , curators and the public we should hopefully raise the bar.

Now back to my office I go!

Most folks were wrapping up for the year this week and our director is off to Sunny Australia. The focus was ensuring I had agreements and sign-off from anybody who wouldn’t be around during the holidays.

• I spent a fair chunk of the week at the Bristol Records Office as two of the team are there and it is usual a good quiet place to do planning. The highlight here was exploring our building plans collection which we hope will form a great digital HLF proposal
• During the final management team meeting I think we came away with a consensus  about our direction of travel as a service
• I met the folks of Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC) and we had a chat about improving their website and general IT infrastructure requirements
• Moved the Commonwealthonline website back to our server as part of my retiring costly service agreements with third parties
• Mark P gave me a demo of his solution of using Dropbox to run daily updates to our Egypt gallery. One step closer to decommissioning that server, Hurrah.
• Continued to work on the Nesta bid with Aardman
• Spoke via the magic of Skype with a group of museum types about delivering training for the South West
• Got the green light to host two events in 2014 for local gov and museum digital types
• We finally got two TVs setup at our main site which we’ll be using for way finding and whats on type information for the public
• Got the green light to run the discovery and Alpha phases of our website improvement project – web design agencies can holla until 6th January
• prepared a service wide plan of attack for the digital strategy which now needs to go out to the teams for feedback and refinement