Viking Ship Museum/ King Tut exhibit

December 27th, 2006 by daniel pett

I got this news via RSS this morning that the amazing Viking ships housed in the Viking Ship Museum are possibly on the move. This is obviously quite a task and is raising quite a few emotions:

“Even if I have to live till I am 100, I will go on fighting this move,” the former curator, Arne Emil Christensen, 70, said in an interview. “The best way to stop it is still through diplomacy, but, if necessary, I will be in front of the ships, chained to the floor.”

I wrote about these ships for my Masters dissertation (load of rubbish and should be consigned to the bin!) They are extremely important to our understanding of maritime history and have to be preserved, I should think the engineers can move them intact, but risks have to be considered. As the Oseberg vessel is extremely fragile due to early 20th Century conservation techniques, it could be quite a risk.
The other news story of cultural note over the weekend is the Sunday Times article about the proposed Tutankhamen exhibition at the ill fated Millennium Dome, which reports that:

“If there is a casino in the dome, I will not send the exhibits to London,” declared Zahi Hawass, the secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

“It’s insulting. These Egyptian artefacts have dignity and therefore we should keep this dignity. I will never — [even] if they give us a billion dollars — show an Egyptian exhibit next door to a casino.”

I wonder if the money offered will increase….. The exhibit is currently on tour in the states, minus the iconic death mask which is too delicate (and probably too important to Cairo Museum to lose for a long stretch of time!) to transport.The mask It’ll be a block buster exhibition if it does make it and may increase tourism to Egypt immensely. Economically, they surely must have made some money off this touring spectacle!

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2 BM web pages

December 21st, 2006 by daniel pett

Before we all go demob happy for Christmas, here’s two things that have come out of the BM over the last few months.

Egg Thief game This comes from Jo Sivell, who recently left the BM:

Here is the museum’s first viral game! Based on the Sparta challenge from the Ancient Greece website it is a special cut down version of the challenge consisting of just the ‘Egg Thief’ game which, I am sure you will find, is the most addictive bit. It is very easy to play but hard to master. It uses arrow keys and has sound effects if you have speakers. At the end we direct the user to find out more about Sparta or Ancient Greece in general, so directing traffic to the main site.

Do pass it on to as many people as you can (that’s how virals work) and encourage them to do the same.

http://www.ancient-greece.co.uk/eggthief/

And then from the Multimedia unit comes the Gazi Scroll online: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/bengal/gazi/gazi_scroll.html

The Gazi scroll is is one of the star objects in the current Myths of Bengal exhibition. It is 13m painted scroll which was used by itinerant storytellers in rural Bengal, as a visual aid to a spoken narration of the myths and exploits of the painted scenes.

The Educational Multimedia Unit (EMU) and the Department of Asia have just launched an interactive version of the Gazi Scroll on the Bengal Season Micro site. Following on from the success of the video scroll in the exhibition, this new web version has been created to allow users to watch the scroll unroll automatically, scene by scene, or to examine it at their own pace.

However the most innovative feature of this product is that for the first time we are actively eliciting comments from users and incorporating them back in to the webpage for other users to see. It should develop into a growing database of comments, anecdotes and stories surrounding the scroll. The Dept of Asia are particularly keen to hear form the Bengali community both in the UK and in South Asia, who it is hoped will be able to tell us a lot more about the narrative that the scroll holds and thereby contributing to our understanding of this fascinating object.

Individual scenes from the scroll are hosted on the photo sharing website Flickr which runs the comments feature. This will allow the museum to draw on the enormous user audience that use Flickr (which is now part of Yahoo) and feed it into the Bengal site.

Gazi ScrollIt’s their first delve into the world of web 2.0 and social applications, something we’ve been doing for a few years now. However, small steps on the path to greatness. I suppose the only main drawback is the availability of flickr and whether there is any need for maintenance if their URI format changes. Kudos chaps.

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Content commissioner – web team

December 20th, 2006 by daniel pett

We are currently recruiting for a number of positions within the newly developing web team. Responsible for building up the core content within the newly designed website, this team will support and encourage online visitors; enabling individuals throughout the world to access and engage with our extensive collection. Our website should be a place for learning; an arena for informed and interesting debate it should promote the expression and understanding of different cultural perspectives. Join us at this exciting time and become involved in the creative process.

Content Commissioner – Ref: 570
R3A – £24,457 pa

You will work with the senior content commissioners to develop high quality, accessible new content for our website, fulfilling the needs and requirements of all our online visitors and thus increasing visitor satisfaction. Working in partnership with other members of the web team, you will ensure all content is relevant and up to date as well as explore new content creation ideas – such as discussion, interactivity and social space. You will facilitate the Museum’s new devolved authorship model, supporting departments in the maintenance and development of their web pages.

Previously employed as a content creator or editorial/project manager within a web team, you will have proven experience working on content management systems. You will be fully web literate with excellent editorial and written skills. As an exceptional communicator, you will possess an ability to interact and build relationships with a wide range of individuals both internal and external to the Museum. The ability to organise and prioritise your workload whilst maintaining accuracy and attention to detail is also a highly essential skill.
Completed application and equal opportunities forms must be returned, no later than
12 noon on 8 January 2007.

http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/jobs/570W.doc

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Audience Manager – web team

December 20th, 2006 by daniel pett

You will act as an audience advocate, championing the voice of online visitors so as to ensure current and future web-based facilities fully meet the needs of a diverse visitor base. Working across the Museum you will build online audiences through tactical marketing campaigns, constant website evaluation and other subscription based initiatives. Through understanding and advising on the needs of key audiences, you will ensure our website is accessible to all and achieves a high level of user satisfaction.

You will have experience working for a complex organisation in an audience development or satisfaction based role – preferably within the Arts or Heritage sector. In these positions you will have managed projects confidently, prioritising work and making decisions as appropriate. You will need a good working knowledge of marketing techniques and a proven ability in web-site evaluation and database management. With responsibility for advising a range of Museum staff, you should possess excellent negotiating, influencing and persuasion skills as well as an ability to build relationships across teams both internal and external to the Museum. As a creative individual you will have excellent communication skills, both written and oral, and possess a good working knowledge of marketing and visitor research techniques.

http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/jobs/569W.doc

Completed application and equal opportunities forms must be returned, no later than 12 noon on 8 January 2007.

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Senior Developer – web team

December 20th, 2006 by daniel pett

We are currently recruiting for a number of positions within the newly developing web team. Responsible for building up the core content within the newly designed website, this team will support and encourage online visitors; enabling individuals throughout the world to access and engage with our extensive collection. Our website should be a place for learning; an arena for informed and interesting debate it should promote the expression and understanding of different cultural perspectives. Join us at this exciting time and become involved in the creative process.

Senior Developer – Ref: 568
R4B – £34,295 pa

Working with the content commissioning team, you will provide technical expertise and guidance, developing web design in a timely and cost effective manner so as to fully integrate the new content into the Museum’s agreed information architecture. You will ensure all graphics, images and other media are suitable for the website, working closely with internal colleagues to maintain a high level of technical accessibility.

Educated to degree standard you will ideally possess a design or development qualification. You will have experience working in an online design function preferably within the Museum or Gallery sector. Knowledge of web design, relevant design tools and coding language is essential along with a commitment to delivering an accessible and effective Museum website. You will have experience working to protocols with distributed responsibility along with an excellent knowledge of rich media technology. As a proven team player you will possess excellent communication and negotiation skills, able build relationships with a range of individuals both internal and external to the Museum.

http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/jobs/568W.doc

Completed application and equal opportunities forms must be returned, no later than

12 noon on 8 January 2007.

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PAS data on your website or your desktop

December 18th, 2006 by daniel pett

I’ve been working with RSS feeds for the last 2 years and I’ve realised how useful this data format can be for monitoring and surfing the web. What it can also be used for is getting our data or someone else’s data and leveraging it onto your site. As it is XML, you can pull out the elements that you need to parse the information onto your page. So you can select to display just the headline, or the headline and description. In the last few days, I’ve made more of our data available from the database and our news and vacancies sections through RSS 2.0 scripts running queries direct from the MySQL underlying database. To obtain a list of these feeds, head over to our RSS feed page and this details what data you can find via this method (several feeds are on auto discovery via the link rel method of our HTML source code, a feature available for use in IE7 and Firefox.)Simplepie

To get this data onto your site, there’s several methods you could use. If you use PHP as your scripting language, there are two useful scripts that you can use to parse RSS feeds and get them onto your site. These are:

    1. Magpie RSS
    2. Simplepie

      Out of the two, I prefer simplepie over Magpie as it is far easier to play with if you’re a novice and it also provides functionality for WordPress, Textpattern, Dokuwiki, several other PHP based software packages and your own site. If you don’t use PHP, you can also still use these feeds by making use of scripts on Dynamic Drive‘s website.

      Therefore, over on the new Community Archaeology Forum wiki from the CBA, you could take our datafeed and parse finds found in that county onto a page about archaeology for Kent; a local archaeology society could have a feed of finds from it’s catchment area; a planning department can be kept up to date on finds from Roman Hampshire and the list of possibilities goes on. Shortly, I’ll be getting the database configured so that it can output RSS feeds for coins by denomination/period/county and maybe even images. A geoRSS feed would also be fantastic…..RSS feeds in use

      Any other ideas that you have let me know.
      You don’t need to seek permission to use these feeds, but I would love to know if you do use them to enrich your website. I use the Simplepie method to display feeds from BAJR and Prospect’s vacancies section of the website, it’s an easy way to automatically keep content current. I’ve also found that using RSS to keep up to date about website changes is really useful. There’s lots of open source software available for getting the alerts, many people use bloglines but I use Feedreader and sage extension in firefox for my browsing. By syndicating our content, we can help others and also make our own website more visible to a wider audience. When I get round to it, I’ll be incorporating the news feed from the 24 Hour Museum on our news pages.

      Other than that, I’ve added a few more features to our database pages; this is meant to make better use of our database and open it up to a wider audience. I’ve incorporated a tag cloud of artefact object types (bit web 2.0) which gives you all finds in validation/publication queues and also tells you how many of these exist via the use of quantity weighted CSS. As I’m making use of the quick search function, it does throw up a few bugs in the searches and also it helps weed out some very odd identification terms from pre-finds adviser days. Some of these records will carry a health warning message. It has its uses, but I’ve got some other ideas as well. If you want to incorporate this sort of thing on your website have a look at this script from Jenny Ferenc. No point reinventing the wheel, so I used this as a pointer for what I wanted to do and rewrote it from scratch. And if you want to see more about where we’re going, I gave this presentation to the project board on the 5th December.

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      CBA community archaeology forum launched

      December 5th, 2006 by daniel pett

      The following is a press release from Dan Hull at the CBA:

      The Council for British Archaeology is pleased to announce the launch of the exciting new Community Archaeology Forum: CAF. For the first time, community groups across the UK have their own dedicated online resource, enabling them to share the results of their work online using innovative wiki technology.

      Users can create pages and upload material to gain a greater profile for their project, to share ideas with others and to start discussions about the interpretation of the material they have found. They may want to look at other projects to get ideas about how to tackle their own archaeological site, building or survey, or simply because they are interested in what others have found.

      Some may wish to create a page offering advice to others or disseminating new research on Community Archaeology.

      CAF is a developing resource and will, in time, contain advice and guidance pages helping Community Archaeology projects to achieve high standards of research, fieldwork and interpretation. Useful links, suggested reading and other resources can be added.

      In the full spirit of Community Archaeology, this is a shared resource to be built collectively by anyone involved in community-related archaeological work. It is not, however, meant as a formal and final repository of archaeological data – merely a forum for displaying and discussing work in progress.

      If you’d like to take a look at CAF go to www.britarch.ac.uk/caf. You can also follow the ‘Discussion List’ link to stay in touch with the latest events and opinion in Community Archaeology.

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