I wanted to let you know about discussions going on in London about ‘linking museums’ (a catch-all phrase I’m using for semantic web, linked data, RDFa, microformats and whatever other machine-readable formats are out there) at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/July-2010-meetup and http://museum-api.pbworks.com/Linking+Museums+write-up

Helping people find their way back to the ‘authentic object’ from search engine results pages would be a really good test for any structured pages people manage to get online.

cheers, Mia

That said, “well-crafted” is very much in the eye of the beholder, and since wikis are by definition crowd-sourced, I would expect the more popular ones to be more of a hodgepodge than one would find from a heavily-moderated site with low visitation. I’d also agree with TS and Guenter that we should not limit consideration to wiki-models alone, but consider all forms of online collaboration, be they well-populated communities which are open to content-partner contribution, such as Thinkfinity (http://community.thinkfinity.org/index.jspa) , and the brand new multi-disciplinary/pan-institutional .

What about Liam Wyatt’s thoughts about our use of Wikipedia (http://conference.archimuse.com/forum/metrics_musums_wikipedia)? And finally, can we separate discussions of collaborating on development/deployment of a communal interface for accessing semantic data (say, by using Google Earth or Google Maps to focus our map-based content uploads in lieu of re-developing sites like Placeography (http://www.placeography.org/index.php/Main_Page) from our discussions about establishing standard protocols for recording and sharing data? Is it naive to consider the desire to collect and promulgate information (facts and expertise) to be shared by all, while allowing for continuing our respective unique interpretation and presentation?

With the challenges and models presented, what do you think the likelihood is of getting a national forum together to harness all of the efforts currently in play? There’re a lot of fantastic projects out there, each working on a different piece of the puzzle, but I haven’t come across anything unifying theory yet. The options you cite aren’t mutually exclusive, and it would be important to leverage all of them simultaneously (assuming the way people use web doesn’t drastically change in the immediate future).

P.S. With any luck, I’ll be in a position to attend the forum. I’d love to participate. If not, though, looking forward to reading proceedings.

Possibly, though, with open source solutions, it might be possible for us to build some plugins to add that necessary functionality.

1. Make the Search Engines our aggregator – that’s what SEO is all about. It’ll likely help you improve access to your stuff, but it won’t really raise all ships. You’re competing, not collaborating.
2. Use existing online hubs as our aggregator – that’s in essence what the Flickr Commons did. There are great outlets for certain types of materials, like Flickr for photographic materials, but not one outlet where all of it can come together.
3. Create our own cultural heritage hub that has proper SEO and discloses into existing online hubs as appropriate. I’m watching both http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/culturegrid (literally watch this video http://bit.ly/dpYimM) and Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/) to see how our colleagues in the UK and Europe fare with that sort of thing. You could also think of the emerging Smithsonian Commons (http://bit.ly/a1OIeF) as a model which could be scaled up nationally.

I’ve blogged about the challenges we face in the US in pulling this sort of thing off here http://bit.ly/adVLB2 and here http://bit.ly/arJKLH.

P.S.: In case you did follow the link to the great Collections Trust video, Nick Poole will speak at the Collaboration Forum at the Smithsonian about new ways to think about aggregating content. The agenda isn’t up yet, but the announcement is at http://www.oclc.org/research/events/2010-09-20.htm.

I’m not so fond of action by committee, but there are limits to what museums can do independently. It would appear that some serious, focused cooperation can get us much further down the digital pike than our independent resources would allow.