Collaborative Catalogs partner Jim Enote (of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center) presented a lecture on the project at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe this past March.

Listen to Jim’s lecture here.

Hi all, I was recently interviewed by Jussi Parikka (media archaeologist and digital theorist). We talked about the past, present and future of archives. Might be of interest. You can find the interview here.

This is a continuation of my sketchy notes from our mini-meeting at Zuni on November 30, 2010. We spent much of the afternoon in a discussion about sharing protocols and other details of the Zuni local system, and the protocols that will drive the links between the different local systems. Lastly, we had a discussion of the focus groups for evaluating the system.

We brainstormed about user profiles, and the kinds of information that might work to identify different users and drive the protocols of access. After coming up with a lengthy list, it seemed like a pretty invasive & complex amount of information to gather from users — might discourage people from signing up.

- Probably only 1-2% of objects need that level of careful restriction
– just mark it ‘unavailable without assistance’
— can only access it at AAMHC with help
– for right now, just set sensitive things aside

we can run a permission set out of FileMaker
another idea – restricting access to local IP addresses

- Robin also emphasized that we need a word that doesn’t subjugate the new stuff to the existing catalog
- we discussed different kinds of updates that might emerge, and whether we should distinguish between different updates.
Categories we brainstormed: (which could also emerge from the actual work)
- correctives / corrections
- events
- new / additional information
- research
- relations / genealogies
- disputes / discussions

- idea – part of the system evaluation could be from the self-ID of additions – does a pattern emerge?

- impact could be just access, or it could be making flexible systems, or user-generated content

- how do we roll out the system?
– events in the community
– getting adults on board
– permanent kiosks at IHS, etc

Photos / videos / audio – what if young people don’t know the protocols about taking photos or video?

Focus groups – guiding questions
themes of what we’re interested in
- experience of the system
- access to patrimony
- community dialogue

question ideas (for anonymous q’s in system)
How easy is this system to use? (answered on a scale of easy to hard)
Tell us about it…
How much do you feel you’ve learned from the system?

Hello everyone,

Without meaning to, I let two months go by without an update — my apologies. Especially since lots of good things have been going on!

Top on the list was a very successful mini-meeting that we had at the beginning of December. Robin came over from the UK to spend a week at AAMHC working with Curtis to get a system in place to begin sharing with people at Zuni. Ramesh and I came out for a little while to see how things were progressing, and we were joined by Daf Harries, who is going to be our hired consultant to develop the mechanism to transfer data between the museum systems. He will be using an open-source program called CouchDB to make it happen.

As I understand it, CouchDB will create a duplicate database of the Zuni objects in each museum’s collections, and since all of the partners will have their own local CouchDB databases, sharing information between them will be easy. Daf will develop individualized software to move data between each partner’s CMS (Argus for example) and that institution’s CouchDB system. And, each institution will be able to decide how they will handle updates coming in – whether they want to review them, have them automatically update their own catalogs, that kind of thing. As far as we can tell, this is the best solution to the interoperability problem that’s been one of our biggest challenges. Daf created a presentation that explains how this is going to work a little bit better, and I’ve attached it to this message. More on this to come as things progress…

I am putting together my notes from this meeting to post on the project blog, so you all are welcome to take a look once those are up.

In other news, we have been hearing very positive things regarding the NSF proposal that Ramesh submitted several months ago. This proposal would cover an expansion of our project to include additional communities of ‘experts’ who will be making contributions to the system — archaeologists and museum curators. Even better, this proposal would be able to fund more equipment like servers and computers at AAMHC. We haven’t gotten a 100% yes that we’re getting funded, but they have asked us for things like IRB certification, which indicates things are moving in that direction.

Something that came to my attention during the meeting was that Robin hasn’t received the digitized images from DMNS — Chip, I recall that those were either finished or nearly finished. Would you mind following up on that, and making sure that Robin receives those images, so he can get them into the system at Zuni? Thanks!

We also weren’t sure whether we are expecting object images from Museum of Northern Arizona — Robert, were we going to get images for the system from MNA? I can’t recall…

And one last thing – we need to submit letters to IMLS that certifies each partner’s contributions to the cost share. Our grant admin Tracy has been reaching out to the business reps at each of the museums, and she hasn’t received a reply. I’ll be sending out individual emails to each partner to facilitate this, so please look for that to come soon.

As always, please let me know if you have questions or concerns. Happy holidays to everyone!

Sincerely,
Katherine

I just came across this publication from WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) and thought that it highlights areas of museum resources that we have not exactly been ignoring, but have not really considered very much. These include the vast number of photos, archives and/or other documentation held by many museums. I recommend that everyone have a read of this. You can download the report here:

http://www.wipo.int/freepublications/en/archive.jsp?cat=&year=2010&title=intellectual+property+traditional+cultures

Robin

I came across some in-house papers that have never been published from when we were doing some very early work on the Web in the mid-1990s. I was fascinated by how much the ideas overlapped with what we are doing now, so I decided to publish them on my blog. Have a look if you are interested. Only the first is up so far, Toys For Boys, but I will be putting the others up too.

Best

We have made much progress on the four major goals we have had in this first 12 months of the project period, and we have accomplished much in the six months since our last performance report.

1. Planning, selection of collections, digitization (October ’09-August ’10)
During the last six months, we have accomplished much in the outstanding areas of collections digitization for our project. In the time since our last performance report, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has completed the imaging and digitization of 667 selected objects, including historic photos, that remained to be done, and these images will be populated into the Collaborative Catalog system very soon. The MAA is about 60% of the way through digitizing the historic archives from the 1920s excavations at Kechiba:wa which they expect to complete before the end of the year.

2. Collaborative Catalog design and build (November ’09 – October ’10)
Since our last report, we have made some progress in terms of the design and build of our collaborative catalog.

One bit of luck that we have had in terms of system development is that Questor Systems (the makers of the Argus catalog that several of our partner museums are using) has recently been purchased by SydneyPlus. This is a promising development for our project, since Questor had previously been unenthusiastic about supporting the interoperable data-handling that we were asking for, which made for a challenging time in developing the collaborative catalog. The new owners of the Argus system are still talking about making an add-on for the upcoming Argus that will allow for the data to be fed out via the ATOM protocol (which is a good thing for our project since this kind of feed is both easy to use and can be read by many local databases). ATOM feeds will also best accommodate our pubsubhubbub interfaces. We are in an ongoing conversation with SydneyPlus to see if they can prioritize this aspect of their system development, but for the moment it is a low priority for them.

However, with the appointment of our developers for linking systems (Dafydd Harries and Tony Garnock-Jones) we are moving forward with developing systems that will not rely only on ATOM feeds but on a separately managed dataset. This means that we will be able to share data regardless of the database systems used by the individual museums. This is necessary as now the DMNS and a peripheral partner, the Maxwell Museum, are abandoning ARGUS for other systems. The current goal is to develop a linking system that will allow linking to whatever database or CMS is at either end for maximum scalability.

3. Data transfer (partners to AAMHC) (March ’10 – June ’10)
We have achieved a significant milestone in terms of our data transfer goal. The preliminary data transfer has been completed. We are still waiting for all of the related images to all get populated in the database, but since this is linked to the almost-completed digitization goal discussed above, this step will get completed very soon. We have a rich repository of data, although some work remains to be done towards tying in the images with the data. Our goal is to include as many images as possible, since images are such an important indicator of the physical existence of objects. All our research so far into what users want in the collaborative catalog underscores the importance of images.

4. Catalog launch, use, and evaluation (Present – June ’12)
In the current version of the Collaborative Catalog, we are still working towards populating the database with every record. Instead, in the prototype of the catalog that is currently in use, the collection limited to a portion of the total collection (images and records related to the Zuni Day School), in order to test the interface and work through any problems. This sub-set of the collection also relates to an upcoming exhibition being launched at AAMHC.

According to our partners at AAMHC, the work that we have done so far on the Creating Collaborative Catalogs project has been very helpful for how the AAMHC has approached the Zuni Day School collection, both in terms of cataloging and in developing interpretive material. The process and attitude towards collections has shifted: each catalog record is viewed as a first step in the process, rather than the final voice about this image or drawing. Because we know that these records will be added to and expanded, the process of cataloging and preliminary data entry for minimally documented collections is fundamentally different. Our colleagues report that they are looking forward to what other people will add to these records.

Our partners at the AAMHC also report another important development which can be attributed to the work on the Creating Collaborative Catalogs project. They report that this project is changing the way they are working with outside experts, helping to reestablish a level of confidence and assurance in working with outsiders which has been eroded over time. Not only do they trust the people to appropriately handle the materials being entrusted to their care, they are assured that the system we develop will be created appropriately.

Something else that we have done is use this smaller subset of the collection to test a model for facilitating comments from community elders via the help of four community curators. These community curators have used the system to each select ten images, and along with the help of a questionnaire, each interview ten people, primarily older Zunis, to gather their responses about three images of their choice. Eventually, we want community members to comment directly into the system, but our experience here reminds us that facilitating comments from elders that have English as a second language is a big challenge, but nevertheless one that we can overcome.

Some questions that we asked:
“Of the ten images you see, pick three and describe what you see.”
“What did these pictures make you think about?”
“Has looking at these pictures make you think differently about your work or home life? If so, how?”
“Have the pictures made you think about how you talk with or work with your children?”
“Were you a student at the Zuni Day School? If yes, when? What did you like or not like about being a ZDS student?”
“Do you think the zuni day school pictures would be beneficial for students attending zuni schools?”

During the next phase of system development, we will be sharing the system with our Zuni cultural advisors, from whom we will be gathering feedback about the system interface and usability as well as system architecture and protocols of access. We expect to go through several iterations of design and gathering of feedback with our cultural advisors. Dr. Boast will be spending a week in Zuni this December to work with the Zuni cultural advisors to further refine and develop the prototype system.

In terms of the project evaluation aspect of our project, we are planning a partial team meeting to take place at the end of November, where we will hold the first of our focus groups about the Collaborative Catalog. We have developed a guide for conducting focus groups to assist our project team at Zuni in holding the focus groups, and the UCLA team will observe the first focus group to make sure the process goes smoothly. Our goal is to launch the catalog and have users interacting with it prior to the first of these focus groups, so we expect the catalog to go live very, very soon.

5. Other project milestones
Another project milestone worth noting is our gaining approval of our human subjects protocol from UCLA’s Institutional Review Board. Because we will be conducting focus groups, and because all of the research will be conducted by AAMHC staff at Zuni under the auspices of UCLA’s IRB (which presented several bureaucratic hurdles in itself), it took nearly seven months to obtain approval for our human subjects protocol. But now that we are approved to begin conducting focus groups with participants, and we have a clear date established for our first focus group sessions, we will begin the project evaluation phase at the end of November.

>Earlier this year, Ramesh gave a presentation at a conference at NYU where he discussed some of the bigger theoretical ideas behind our project.

Srinivasan from Robert Gregson on Vimeo.

He starts discussing the Zuni project around minute 14. Interesting stuff!