Why isn’t my museum on Google Earth?

Adele Beeby from the East Midlands asked this question today (March 10, 2009) on the e-List of the Museums Computer Group:

“Hi everyone,  I’m hoping someone can advise me on an issue we’re experiencing with Google Earth.  I’ve been asked to check that our Museums (and Country Parks etc.) appear on Google Earth and noticed that,  for example, Bosworth Battlefield has about 8 different entries – only one of which is in the correct geographical place and only one of which has the correct name  “Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre and Country Park”.

I think the problem stems from the Google Earth entries being fed from various different websites, each using User Generated Content (UGC),  so perhaps mistakes are inevitable? Has anyone else noticed this problem and how have they dealt with it? Thanks in advance!”
Adele Beeby

What a fascinating and topical enquiry! Sadly there’s no immediate remedy, but it raises lots of questions about how we in the museum/culture sector best interact effectively with major information providers like Google. And it’s currently something MCG members have been posting about, in threads about the Digital Britain report, and also Dan Zambonini’s challenge to nominate functions and scope for museum API’s. Dan asked - “if you could have an API in your museum, what would it do, or be for?”

I see these strands as closely related. Google Maps, and more recently Google Earth, have not been using any sort of ‘official’ data source for museum, library, archive and gallery venue info and location data. Most people can see it would be good for Google to be able to deal with one trusted, checked source of info for these useful types of information. I typed ‘Malvern Museum’ into Google Earth and got five different answers about where my local museum is, all info from different sources. Plainly useless. Agreed, one or two ‘reviews’ popped up too, and they were useful in a sense, but the reports were old, uncheckable, and ephemeral in a publishing sense. At the moment, I don’t think web users find this sort of info in any way useable.

So wouldn’t it be great if the Digital Britain report began to sketch out ways that centralised knowledge management could be delegated to one or national museum body, so it could take responsibility for co-ordinating collection of basic data about museums – things like venue info and location. Then Google just talks to one agency and gets the data in one live channel. [Of course - we already have the possible technical means to do this in the form of Culture24 - and that's no accident, it's been something the team in Brighton have been keen on for a long, long time...]

Why is centralised knowledge management (in some form or another) important? Everything needs to be paid for, infrastructure needs putting in place and it needs to be comprehensive. The place where info ‘pivots’ is the place to gather it. There’s not a lot of point in the data being generated regionally, one area at a time; a big player like Google wants national coverage, straight away, and it needs to be up-to-date, live and covered by some sort of service level agreement.

I know we all are keen on museums being participative and socially responsive, but the Google Earth example clearly shows why, when factual, unshakeable, reliable location data and core venue info is concerned, a more systematic approach would work best. So I’d suggest the best placed core aggregators of culture venue data should be funders or govt agencies (or their partners like MLA or agencies like Collections Trust). How do we get people to play ball and use the system? I think it should be a rock solid funding requirement for projects and venues that payment only comes after core info is entered into the publicy availalble, free-for-use, uber-database.

A large culture agency that I have worked with in the past still has no central database of projects, or funded venues, or collection objects aquired; I think a Digital Britain strategy needs to get to grips with such information deficits urgently and make cultural data acquisition a strong organisational priority. Just imagine 25,000 journalists turning up in London in 2012 and there being no trustworthy info on hand about our culture and [sporting] heritage…

New museum web project Creative Spaces sparks debate among web experts

The Museums Computer Group, the major web expert group within the UK museum sector, recently saw a passionate and erudite exchange of emails all provoked by the unveiling of the new Creative Spaces web project. (That’s the Wallace Collection node of the project)

Writing as a committee member of the MCG, I think this has been one of the best ideas threads we’ve had for a long time. Yes, it’s been passionate, and that does indeed get people thinking, and firing up laptops in reply.

I think voices who advocated tact in the exchange (Nick Poole, myself via Twitter, and others) did so because we’re already engaged in working with museum people all over the regions, not always in the most glamorous places; we’re all working for peanuts, doing about ten million things at once, including managing that puzzling interface between museum directors and the onward march of digital technology…

To me, that’s one of the reasons there needs to be some tact in the way we review each other’s projects; if you’d been behind the scenes of projects like NMOLP you’ll have seen the sort of passion it arouses. I also saw people (like Terry and Carolyn, and the teams of writers like Rachel and Rowena L) working like absolute stink to get the project done, and ploughing through all sort of effluent to manage relationships across and through the project. Those who stuck the course deserve medals.

I think the emotionality was also caused by the big fees funding the project – big ticket jobs like this cause a certain amount of envy, and that too, leads to comment that doesn’t always please. One gets a picture sometimes of vast (National museum) battleships manoevring around a smallish patch of sea, each one guarding it’s own flanks, carefully manning the bulwarks, in case a stray shell cuts the rigging, or someone jumps ship.

Best things coming out of the Creative Spaces debate for me?

A) The emerging discussion about ‘the plumbing’ (nice metaphor from Paul Walk) being the first job to tackle when working on these complex cross collection projects. Yep. Of course the data scheme underneath is critical. The website (if there needs to be one!) should be sat on top of the database well down the line of projects like this. How you get the data, on what (copyright)terms it’s given, and how the data is related and relational is the first key task.

B) Another plus has been the thread (from Frankie, Mike E, Kate Fernie and others) about how social nets work in reality, and why you might want, or not want, to play for a while, culturally. This stuff needs to be explored more. Already one or two culture orgs have made abortive attempts at trying to get things going, and they mostly failed ’cause they didn’t spot that sites get massive visits when they get the bigger publishing picture about mass audiences, massive budgets and massive human resources and tech support. That insight mainly comes from expertise that’s mostly, at the moment, outside the museum sector.

C) We’re starting to get the idea too, that the cool culture venture we dream about here might not be a big project, but smaller-scale, evolutionary, more experimental, more informal. There aren’t any more big pots of money (like ISB)now for this kind of work. We’ve got to be coming up with sustainable and scaleable ideas, so some wisdom about the scope and depth of project concepts needs to be found when ideas are still at the back of an envelope stage.

My interests in this?

I’ve long evangelised (and written about, in 2005)’the inside out web museum.’ At my former workplace, my enthusiasm for a more’datacentric’ publishing offer drove quite a bit of our re-design thinking, though the final realisation of those ideas is still in the pipeline. But look outwards at recent tech trends and think about how near we are to some sort of breakthrough. We’re wrong to expect a ‘killer app,’ but continuous development and playful experimentation like the (Mike Ellis) Mashed Museum sessions at UKMW08 will get us nearer to some sort of nirvana.

Where to go now, post-Creative Spaces? We ALL need and deserve (as a sector, everywhere) access to data channels that come to us, and do the neccesary spidering and data mining to make the most of all the content we might choose to expose and share. And, importantly, let it be live data exchange, not a day old, or a week old, or some such OAI-harvested old hat. The next culture web must be live; after all we have come to expect that through our day to day fun with Twitter and FB.

To get live, we need APIs; they are, of course, the way forward as Richard Light, Mia and Mike all say. API’s need standards, and Collection Trust work with DACS and towards the new BSI data standards is excellent.

Sharing freely and offering culture content to others for their own use opens doors to commerce and business models, so some movement there gets us towards a more commercially-geared culture web.

And finally? The success of #hashtags on Twitter (check #fakeanimalfacts) proves people can come up with vocabs and impromptu syntax that bind humour, culture, conferences and news together using simple XML. My research interest now is to see how we can map some simple #-like tagging and vocab structures (and maybe the National Curriculum) so we can have cultural fun without needing to build big and expensive portalised web projects…

JP

Finding #Darwin – Where’s the Twitter Map?

Just a quick post this morning to follow on from yesterday’s #Darwin fun. While writing yesterday I was looking for the link to the lovely animated Google Earth 5 #uksnow tweet map, and only just found it again, so here it is: http://www.barnabu.co.uk/uksnow-twitter-animation-google-earth-5/

And if you tire of watching that vid of the animation, Barnabu has done a browser-borne version of it, minus the rather fetching music: http://www.barnabu.co.uk/visualizing-twitter-activity-inside-the-google-earth-plugin/#more-494

(Just for once, I haven’t hidden those links behind easy, short urls.)

This lovely socially-generated, but individually-curated work made me think about how people ’situate’ themselves in cultural terms. Is it important that #uksnow tags have geodata? Yes, because there was a collective or memetic agreement, an agreed context,  that taggers were buying into when they Tweeted using the # tag.

But take the situation across to the cultural space, the place where today #Darwin taggers may well slow Twitter down, and there’s less understanding of the informational context in which people are #Darwin tagging. I can see that it would be great to be able to see where in the world people are digitally remarking about the founder of evolutionary theory.

It’d be interesting to analyse the mix of political, religeous and cultural cues that result from a geographically placed map of #Darwin tweets. Where might it take the debate between creationists and evolutionists if we can visually show the geo-distribution of the protagonists?

Getting people in the arts to begin to think about place in digital terms sounds really geeky, but when you suggest thinking about Barnabu’s #uksnow map and, say, landscape painting, or poetry, people might begin to embrace some ideas around this. As I wrote yesterday, it’d possibly need some central co-ordination, inspiration or creativity to sketch out some agreed #tags for art/artist terms or vocabularies.

Maybe that’s a useful role for cultural authorities like the Arts Council; in the past, however, ACE have shown no interest in centralised informational policy.  There’s no time like the present though…

Charles Darwin gets web 2.0 and joins Twitter!

Charles Darwin goes on Twitter - is he more Web 2.0 than you?

Just when you think the world of information science and the web has gone to sleep, bored to tears with endless discussions about when the semantic web will pop up, along comes something fabulous.

Hard on the heels of last week’s fascinating #uksnow Twittering and the lovely animation of tweets across Britain as the snow rolled us over, this week we’re being over-run by Darwin200 tweets using a #darwin tag.

Naturally the great man himself is Tweeting from beyond the grave – if you’d like to follow him he’s @cdarwin, not surprisingly. I wonder if he’s got a netbook with dongle, an N96 or an iPhone? I don’t suppose there are many powersockets on The Beagle. Have a look at his homepage on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cdarwin

Please can someone now do a #darwin mashup map so we can find out where everything is? Over the next weeks and months a string of events are being held all over Britain.  Check out http://www.darwin200.org/ .  Disappointingly, while a few months ago there was a rudimentary RSS feed of D200 events, it doesn’t seem to be around any more. The D200 site seems really flat and web 1.0.

Thinking about Twitter tags, these user-tagged info clouds could be great low-tech, high-flexibility models for socially-driven information creation. I think it’s fascinating that within just a few weeks, people are making up their own tag taxonomies, placing them in a networked environment, and letting nature take it’s course. Kind of like Darwin, really.

What’s next? A simple, standardised list of artist names, eras, types? It’s not that complex, because what seems to be happening is that users quickly twig which is the most powerful or sticky #tag to use and then the memetic effect that seems to energise Twitter takes over, and the #tag goes everywhere.

Meanwhile, check out the latest #darwin tweets in my RSS feed box up there on the right of the Machine Culture homepage.

JP/Feb 10

Twitter: @jon_pratty

Not getting together? Museums and Social Networking in the Midlands

On February 4th 2009, at The Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry,  I co-ordinated a Renaissance West Midlands event all about museums and social networking. Part of a wider research project, the successful day opened out some discussions about how museums take part in our socialised, digital society. Here is an introductory post about the project, to be followed by more posts about the event itself.

It’s quite unsettling how I assume the world spins the same way as me; and for a journalist and culture sector consultant, not actually that good either. I’d assumed that other people in museums and galleries also used Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. We all use eBay, Amazon and stuff like online banking don’t we? We all muck about with RSS feeds and know our way round Google maps and things that help extend our horizons.

Well, actually, no we don’t, of course. In a user-centric world (which means, in plain English, real life) there’s lots of people who don’t know about newsfeeds, web 3.0 and Creative Commons.  And in fact, if you go round the corner to your local (regional English) museum and ask them if they have an online collection that is commentable by members of the public they’d look at you like you’re an alien.

The reality is that in our local backyard, many museums are run by volunteers. The venues themselves are often only just joining the web revolution, with perhaps, at most, a simple brochure website and an email account that’s checked less frequently than it could be. And one pc in the corner of the room.

In spite of ten + years of lottery-funded largesse that has successfully grown IT for the library sector and built the People’s Network Discovery Service, there’s not been much digital development in small local museums. As the editor (until August 2008 ) of the 24 Hour Museum since 2001, I had lots of contact with some smashing people all over the uk doing a great job running tiny museums, telling us their stories about great discoveries, plucky tales of resourcefulness and occasionally, funding battles for survival.

Clearly – there were, and still are, some splendid tales to tell about UK history and heritage. And yet, there seems to be an increasing gap between those who have digital tools to tell their stories, and those who don’t. Ironically, while post-1997 Labour cultural policy has been all about meeting the needs of users and politically-inspired audience targets for cultural creators, a major group of disenfranchised and under-represented people has emerged.

This group is us – people who make the exhibitions, curate collections, accession the objects, paint the pictures, run the loan box schemes. Curriculum Online passed us by. Culture Online flew over our heads. Lottery money from nof-Digi did come our way to a certain degree. But by and large, right now, there’s an underclass of cultural workers in museums and galleries, libraries and archives, across the whole country, who don’t have access to the means to make online content about our own work, our collections, our lectures or our events.

The recent debacle of the Cultural Olympiad, which saw major promises being made on the behalf of the museum and gallery sector, with no funding stream whatever, only re-inforces this thesis.

While it might seem negative to make these points, I’m merely setting the scene. There are now many, many, well tried and simple means to get presence online. As 2008 closed WordPress, the most popular, free and simple blogging software out there, is gradually morphing from a calendar-based blog tool into a versatile and customisable platform for all sort of publishing tasks.

And, while some in museums find a website of any sort unattainable, others are using free and well connected social networking systems like Facebook, Flickr and MySpace. They are doing this because sites like these are free, vastly popular, and easy to maintain.

So are there lessons we can learn from culture sector users of digital platforms like Facebook and Flickr? Are they the answer to the current lack of infrastructure, support and mentoring, resources and know-how that we are confronted with? What challenges to our traditional ways of working and values do social networks bring?

To begin examining some of the issues at ground level, Renaissance West Midlands commissioned me to carry out a programme of research centred on an event pulling together people from museums in the Midlands.  The event, held at The Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry on February 4th, 2009,  explored some of the issues that we were aware of, and opened out some more that need further enquiry.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sketching in issues discovered, resources contributed by participants at the event, and new directions for further work. A set of pages, links and other resources will be put together on the Renaissance West Midlands website as a record of what come out in our work. In the meantime, I’ll be pulling it out and posting it up on this site to keep the pot boiling.

Further outputs are likely, and may include suggested templates for Facebook use, ideas for advocacy within your museum to help win over unbelievers, and a systematic approach to local government network difficulties.

Thanks to everyone who has participated so far – and welcome ot anyone who wants to join in and help! There’s a Google Group (museums_midlands_network) to house our conversations and ideas, but of course, feel free to comment right down there – below these words.

Next report – the event itself at The Herbert Art Gallery

Syndication, serendipity, spying? Custom Twitter Feeds

As part of a continuing research project that supports a workshop at MW2009, I’m looking into how people navigate online contexts, platforms and social spaces, and how content is syndicated to those places.

One place I want to explore is Twitter, a constantly changing, evolving and (perhaps, sometimes) contextually obscure platform. We mostly imagine that our tweets (Twitter messages) are between just us and our friends – but in fact they’re out there in the [data] cloud, and searchable by tag, keyword, phrase or whatever.

Yesterday, I looked at what people were saying about the UK government’s Digital Britain ideas, and I posted a feed that captures the buzz from Twitter about these new strategy directions. To do this, I simply did a Twitter search from the site homepage and then saved an RSS output of the search, pasting it into my WordPress RSS widget. If you want to try it, one moment of warning; you’ll find it really slows down your WordPress editing client.

Today, since it’s the end of the week, I’m posting a new feed to suit the mood: I’m looking at what people are saying about that familiar Friday feeling.

I’m not leaving any of these rather voyueristic syndications up for very long: I think there are very real concerns about copyright, publishing context, privacy and so on. In addition to that, if anyone objects to this exposure, I’ll take the respective feed down immediately.

Please email me if that is the case: jonnypratty(at)gmail.com

JP

Journalism, law and misidentification: McNabbed?

From Look to the Stars, a German charity sector website - the real Andy McNab?

Picture the scene: it’s monday morning, the coffee is cooling, I’m blankly trolling around in a free-associating Google image search. For some reason a glimpsed headline suggests the name Andy McNab to me and I end up looking at a screenful of pixellated thumbnails of the celebrated SAS survivor.

In one corner I notice an undisguised head and shoulders shot – a bit of a shock as, famously, McNab guards his identity carefully: he’d won the Military Medal for service in Northern Ireland and later trained anti-Cartel forces in Colombia; so he’s got all sorts of understandable reasons to keep his head down.

Here was an odd-looking face – head shaved, strong neckline, glancing slightly ostentatiously at the camera, in what seemed to be a PR faceshot. A quick look at one of McNab’s books in WH Smiths showed that the neckline, chin and cheekbones on the web pic looked quite close to the only other undisguised pic of Andy, taken in 1977 in South Armagh.

Could this be the first undisguised pic of the famous Mr McNab? (Link checked on January 27, 2009, still there). It’s on a German-based PR flummery site that seems to be soliciting money for charity contacts. Why was the pic there? Was it just an innocent mistake by an inept webmaster? After all, in newsrooms all over Britain there are photos of the man himself before the pixels are layered over, and in edit suites there must be hours of video of him without his digital disguise in place. Must be easy for someone to pop the wrong pic in the queue to FTP to the webserver, I wondered.

Wanting to find out more, I popped off an email to McNab’s publisher, Bantam (an imprint of Random House). I asked if they knew about the site. I guess I also had bought into the mystique of McNab – if he really wants to keep Sinn Fein/IRA and the Cali Cartel off his tail he’d want to know about this, I thought.

A press assistant at Bantam gets back to me: “It is always good to know that people will comment when they see something that is not right. Fortunately in this case the gentleman pictured is not Andy McNab, nor does he look anything like him – so a potentially disastrous situation is actually quite amusing.”

Ok then, so it’s not McNab. In a way I’m relieved not to be mixed up in outing McNab: if I had, he’d possibly turn up on my doorstep with some of his former friends from Hereford to remonstrate… A contact in the intelligence community tells me that McNab’s real ID is well known ‘in the trade’ and his wishes to keep his head down are merely a great way to build his brand as an author. So there we’ll leave the real McNab.

But if it’s not him, then who is it? While our friendly Bantam press assistant might find it ‘quite amusing’, if McNab’s really got mobile units of trackers on his tail then surely the person misidentified in the picture is going to be pretty cheesed off to be woken one day looking up the barrel of a nine millimetre pistol.

Now, publishing law is one of first (and most worrying) bits of professional practice you learn about when doing your NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) course. Misidentification by hacks can cause all sorts of distress and has resulted in some biggish payouts to unfortunate innocents.

Robert Rigby, as seen on Random House's own website

Some days later, things move on. I find the not-McNab pic again, in another Google Image search. This time it’s got the name Robert Rigby underneath it. Rigby turns out to be the co-writer who pounds the keyboard while McNab yarns away about the years of gunsmoke and car chases.

OK – stand down the lawyers and bodyguards – this seems to me to be quite benign, with one big proviso: if I were Robert Rigby, I’d get onto that German webmaster and get the pic of him taken off the site asap. We don’t know how long the pic’s been up, misidentifying him as McNab, but search engine servers and spiders have been indexing this pic for months and the error, if left, will linger for a long time.

In online journalism, early action to correct legal errors is absolutely vital because of the danger of  search engine caching of the legally unsound material.  Once it’s out there in Google Image land, it’s in the wild.

JP

Journalism: The Guardian revealed again

Just when you thought The Guardian would be restored to it’s pre-eminent correctness thanks to a wave of post-Obama enthusiasm, they go and spoil it with a daft ad campaign for their own content, complete with greengrocer grammar !

The screen shot above is from Monday morning’s web edition at 9.15.

There are those of us in the trade (me, sometimes, I suppose) who malign the dark forces (at the Scott Trust) that push the once great paper further into mediocrity will be Twittering all day.

JP

Jodi Awards 2008 – Full text of Kevin Carey’s keynote speech

Kevin Carey, Director of humanITy, Vice Chair of RNIB, delivers his keynote address at the Jodi Awards 2008. Copyright Culture24/Jodi Mattes Trust

Kevin Carey kindly gave his time on December 5 to deliver the keynote address at the Jodi Awards, held once again at the British Museum.  Kevin’s detailed and erudite address is worth reading in full; several guests who were present at the Awards have asked if they can access the full text of his speech.

The text will go up on the Jodi Award pages (www.jodiawards.org.uk) along with other resources from the night later this week; but here they are as a Word download for those who want to read them while the memory of the Awards evening is still fresh.

The text is copyright Kevin Carey

19-08-jodi-awards-2008-kevin-carey

2008 Jodi Awards report: Kevin Carey of RNIB calls for renewed effort to make UK digital culture accessible

Jodi Awards winners, guests and judges join Harry and Esther Mattes, and Jodi's sister Sara after the ceremony at the British Museum. Copyright Jon Pratty/Jodi Mattes Trust.

The British Museum in London is a really great place to hold the Jodi Awards and we (Jodi judges, presenters and committee) are always thrilled each time the lights go down and the presentations start. There’s a palpable sense of tension – not least for me this year as we had a few tech glitches before things kicked off!

Once things got going, guests, presenters and project staff involved with nominated sites all got into the swing of things. Kevin Carey, Vice Chair of the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), called for renewed effort to make UK digital culture accessible for all.

In a typically passionate speech Kevin outlined a new reality for culture creators, publishers and producers. He called for the setting up of a national Centre for Excellence for Accessible Media funded by the public, commercial and third sectors.

“If we go on training disadvantaged people, including those with impairments, in a fragmented accessibility and usability ecology, to acquire what are called ‘basic’ skills in accessing and processing information, we will doom them to be poor,” he said.

Andy Minnion, Director of the Rix Centre in London, opened our eyes with some recent creative work he’s been doing with learning disabled creators in museums. Some excellent and really witty stuff was seen: a visit to the Hadrian exhibition at the BM started some artists photographing themselves and then using Photoshop to re-appear as Roman characters. My favourites were the people who morphed their features onto Roman coins!

Then it was time to get on with the serious business of giving out the gongs. The Jodi Awards are for museums, galleries, libraries, archives and heritage venues that use digital technology to provide access to collections and learning for disabled people. This might mean building websites, interactives in galleries, audio guides, content for PDAs and virtual reality shows of various kinds.

Remembering the life and work (she was a member of the BM’s web team) of Jodi Mattes (1973 – 2001) is the core at the centre of the awards, and every year we welcome Harry and Esther Mattes at the BM. They arrived early with a big brown box containing the awards, all carefully wrapped up. The statuettes are handmade each year by an artist friend of the Mattes family.

It was great to meet Jodi’s sister, Sara, this year at the awards. We talked at length after the ceremony about new plans for the Jodi website, and also ideas for development.

Highlight of the evening for me is the chance to take a big picture of the winners, guests and Harry and Esther. There’s a friendly feeling to this evening, every year, and it always gives impetus for the next year’s work, putting things together for the next set of awards.

There was a brief comedy moment as the group picture was snapped. There was a sudden rush of BM security staff chasing down the stairs, where we were all arranged, to the basement where they’d heard a report of an intruder!

It was great to welcome Lord Low, Chair of RNIB, this year too; and there were lots of representatives from shortlisted museums and galleries. The awards, sponsored by RNIB and supported by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, were presented by Kevin Carey, assisted by the Jodi Awards chair of judges, Ross Parry.

Members of Outside In Pathways celebrate their Jodi Award onstage at the British Museum. Copyright Culture24/Jodi Mattes Trust

2008 Jodi Awards – the winners

Our first award was for excellence for people with a learning disability, in association with the Rix Centre, London. This is a new award, and it could be for success using any sort of technology. Winners were Outside In Pathways, for their project in which a group of people with learning disabilities made films using digital technology at the V&A museum, London.

We had a glimpse of the Outside In Pathways film made at the V&A and, again, like The Rix Centre work that Andy Minnion showed, there was humour at work!

Next up was the award for excellence in accessible digital media – basically in-gallery inter-actives, or multimedia, or a guided tour, or whatever. The National Trust won this, for their virtual tour pilot project. 12 virtual tours have been put together and four more are in production.

Judges were really impressed by the way this national organisation involved disabled people in making accessible media that could genuinely improve the experiences of disabled visitors. It’s now possible that the National Trust will take this pilot project and make it available nationally to many of its other sites.

Here’s a glimpse on the site of contractors Corvidae; http://corvidae.co.uk/panoramas/dunham/

Third award category was for website excellence on a low budget. In this category, the judges discussed at length entries from the National Year of Reading and the Thackray Museum in Leeds. A commendation was awarded to the Thackray Museum in Leeds, for their website redevelopment project. The museum consulted young visually impaired people from Henshaws College in York and incorporated a range of their recommendations into the design.

http://www.thackraymuseum.org

Why a commendation and not a full award? Though judges appreciated the Thackray Museum’s excellent work in general, and in particular in consulting user groups, there were some technical infringements of accessibility guidelines that remain important factors. It is advancing standards of technical compliance, as well as inspiring creative connections, that the Jodi Awards are about, after all.

Last – and not least. The award for excellence in web accessibility was awarded to the British Museum for its BSL Schools Web Project.

In this project young deaf people produced signed curriculum resources for young deaf people, working with Frank Barnes School and media company Remark.

This was an outstanding project; well thought out, carefully framed and cleanly presented, bringing together a creative and appropriate mix of users, artists and designers with expertise in the area of BSL.

The Jodi judges were so impressed with the way staff from Frank Barnes school worked with Carolyn Howitt and the team from the BM, that a Jodi statuette was also awarded to the school.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/learning/schools_and_teachers/school_projects/bsl_project.aspx

On a personal note, while judging this year’s Jodi Awards, it struck me how the same errors and technical infringements of WCAG and WAI guidelines keep on coming up, year on year.

While the sites that are nominated each year continue to be rich, surprising and creative cultural experiences, it is striking that occasionally, projects continue to be put before the public with core infringements of the basic rules: we’re still encountering missing ‘alt tags’, confusing pathways for screen reader users, contrast and colour issues, and most basic of all, confusing site architecture.

It is for this reason that we felt unable to make an award for web accessibility on a low budget. While each year Jodi judges call for creative approaches to be kept in mind, the core standards and qualities of the Awards are important to us – Helen Petrie and her team at the University of York carry out automated testing of nominated websites, and we carefully visit and user test non-web projects.

Are we seeing a pattern in the nominations submitted to the Jodi awards? Is it possible that the recent changes in our cultural world have meant that accessibility for all has slipped down the agenda for some?

2008 was, for many in the culture sector, a year of transition and re-alignment. MLA has been in a state of considerable organisational change, and policy areas such as digital futures are now being worked out in concert with external partners closely allied in aims – the Collections Trust and Culture24.

In closing the evening on Friday at the British Museum, I briefly made the point that in 2009, a key job for the Jodi Mattes Trust will be to enthuse and advocate about digital accessibility in concert with MLA, the Collections Trust, Culture24, UKOLN, Museums Computer Group and the Scottish and Welsh cultural bodies.

While it could be that accessibility has slipped down the agenda, in the current economic and organisational climate, the exciting growth of socially networked digital audiences and new tools that work across most digital platforms, means we need to advocate for access even more strongly – to keep all of us connected, and to welcome more of those currently excluded.

See more pictures from the evening on the Flickr site