Digital Heritage

A belated post on our last week’s workshop on web construction. I hope you’ve found Nvu easy to use. I have to say, it was impressive to see that your webpages that you built in 2 hours passed the accessibility test of the a W3C W3C validation

I am currently reading about visualisations of the Internet and the Web (for example, see this: Visions of the Mediascape RoundUp) and thinking about what a visual map of a ‘Museum Web’ would/could be…I’ll come back to that…Speaking of mapping, here is an interesting way to map connections between museum objects: Eternal Egypt

Anyway, below I’ve included some links about Nvu and web accessibility that you may find useful also for the website construction of your group projects. See you next week.

University’s guidelines on Nvu

Further support if you are using Nvu

University’s guidelines of how to set up your personal web pages

W3C Web Accessibility Iniatitive Guidelines

W3C Checklist

W3C HTML Validation

TechDis: JISC disability advisory service

Cognitive Impairment Simulation

Screen Reader Simulation

In the 1980s and 1990s, museum websites were referred to as virtual museums or hyper-museums. These terms were developed to distinguish between the real and the vitual, and the two were seen as very seperate entities. Today however, these websites are now referred to as the museum online, with museums using websites as an extension to their physical format, and as valuable online resources.

These online resources range from collection archives to school activities, from games to video documentaries. The Natural History Museum, for example, has a range of videos which tackle contemporary museum issues. These resources allow for museums to deal with their visitors in new ways, and the more entertaining these websites are, the longer people will interact with the content.

With this shift has come a major change in the role of media staff within the museum. No longer are Webmasters mere IT support workers; they now contribute to a vast array of museum activities. Dr Paul Marty, in his paper ‘The Changing Role of the Museum Webmaster: Past, Present and Future’ discusses this issue. Museums are now employing New Media Editors, Interactive Media Managers and Heads of Digital Resources to meet these demands. No longer are webmasters required to simply have good technical skills, but they are now integrated into the museum as a whole, being involved with project planning and information structuring. These individuals need to mediate between the museum and the public, and between management and the technology. As Marty states:

As the design of the museum web site becomes more complex and more interactive, museum Webmasters find themselves needing a broader spectrum of skills: not just technical skills, but analytical abilities to determine user needs as well.

So what does this all mean for museum staff structures in the future? Will the era of digitalisation require all museum professionals to work in both the physical museum and the online museum in order to reach the desired audiences? And what about small museums with a limited budget and staff base?

There is a fear that online museums are replacing the real- but is this justified? With museums striving to be user-centred, and with the posibilities online technologies offer, only time will tell.

Nik Honeysett has written in Musematic (a blog for your list of favorites!) an interesting post on the hype cycle of technology ‘a representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies’, developed by Gartner.

It reminded me (especially the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ stage) our discussions last semester on ‘technophobia – technomania’ and McLuhan’s Narcissus effect’: that we are often so fascinated by the new technological capabilities that we stand paralysed before them.

Nik makes a very interesting point: ‘Your number one problem is that your senior management are at the Peak and waiting for you to leap straight onto the Plateau of Productivity. Its a cliche, but managing the expectations of these people is priority one…’. This links well to the topic of our next session about the the role that new media play nowadays in the overall museum function and the involvement of new media professionals in the various aspects of the museum work.

The one thing that I am not very clear about in the above diagram is the stage of ‘technology trigger’: is it just the emergence of a new technology that triggers the interest and its selection? Surely, an informed understanding of its characteristics, a front end evaluation, as well as an examination of whether this technology helps me in what I am trying to achieve should be there in the process of making a decision what to buy. I suppose this would rationalise the expectations of the next stage.