Inside the Museum of London

This is just a quick note to say, if you have experienced any problems with our Ceramics and Glass or Clay Pipes websites recently, they should be fixed now. You may found that pages on those sites didn’t load completely, or have received warnings about a trojan of some sort, perhaps from your browser or from your firewall. You might also have seen a pop-up asking to download a chinese character set. This was all down to the fact that some code that had been injected into our databases which was loading with the pages and trying to access Chinese websites to insert their junk onto our pages.

We have cleaned out the databases now and have improved their security so that hopefully this “attack vector” is no longer open. Apologies for any problems you may have experienced – my embarassment is complete, because this is not the first time this year that some of our databases have been compromised in this way! Do let us know if you notice anything odd – such as pop-up dialog boxes, or pages only loading partially – so we can fix problems quickly. Otherwise please enjoy the sites.

Back in April I mentioned that we had very gently gone live with the
Database of 19th Century Photographers and Allied Trades in London 1841-1901 on the photoLondon website. It seems like a good time for an update for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the site has proved to be quite a success, at least compared with our modest expectations. Actual visits and pageviews have only crept up gradually since the launch, albeit with a few great flurries of activity. We get around 3000 visits a month and people tend to look at 7 or 8 pages per visit. But user reaction has been growing inexorably, with more people contacting us through the website every week as they find their ancestors or seek the photographer of a photo they own.  I think that Google is sending a lot more of our visits now, which means people with very specific interests and questions – which you should probably expect with a database of 10,000 people! Still I don’t think we were expecting quite so many inquiries, and it’s often hard to offer more than is already on the site. Tunjay, who is the administrator in our Later Department, does everything possible to give a helpful answer, but the fact is that we at the Museum of London aren’t the source of or experts about the data; that role belongs to David Webb, whose many years of research he generously contributed to the database.

The second reason for an update is that we were contacted while ago by the production team of a TV programme that’s due to air very shortly, and which just might feature the website, since it helped in researching the family history that the programme explores. I don’t know if it will actually be mentioned, but it would be nice validation of David Webb’s work if it was.

Both of these illustrate that family history and genealogy are a very important part of the reason that a site like this is interesting to a wide audience. Soon after the launch, as we started to get inquiries from family historians, I ventured onto their turf to ask in a couple of forums what we could do to make a site like this useful to them. The answer was basically “not a lot, it’s already what we need”; that’s gratifying, but I suspect there’s always more we could do. One thing might be to offer downloadable datasets; another (perhaps less for the benefit of genealogists) could be to integrate the biographies with related resources on photography, geography, social history, archive collections etc.

As well as inquries, there is another kind of contact we get through the site, where people write to add to or correct our information, and this is really exciting. Again, we pass the information on to David Webb for him to examine and process as he sees fit. So far, because of this roundabout flow of information, we have not re-integrated any information, but I would hope to do this in the future so if you have any amendments for us, please, please keep on sending them.

One final thing: I created a simple REST API for those geeks out there who want to play with the database. Sadly the quality of the address data isn’t that brilliant at present, which limits what we can do in terms of mashups until I get a chance to crunch it a bit, but if you want to play then please drop me a line and I’ll give you the keys.

So to wrap up, I would love to know your suggestions for how we might improve the site. Tell us things like

• what sort of information do you need that’s not obvious at present?
• would you like any tools to collect or download information?
• would it be useful to integrate a wiki with the site, so that each person can have a page that our site’s visitors can add to and edit?

Stick your ideas in the comments or drop us a line.

Hi, it’s the web-monkey again. Things have been pretty intense lately, due in large part to the end of the financial year and the need to wrap up all sorts of budgets.

My part in the various projects I work on ranges from major to peripheral – sometimes some serious programming, sometimes offering advice on commissioning, sometimes just doing a little tweaking ready for integrating someone else’s work. All the same I’ll flag up a couple of things I’ve been involved in lately, at least of those that have now launched, even if I didn’t do that much myself – after all, where else do we sing about some of this stuff? Too often it ends up sort of dribbling out because we’re all too busy or exhausted to make a song and dance about it. So, here we go:

• The Great Fire of London website, orientated at children of Key Stage 1 age (5-7) and their teachers. This is the result of a partnership between the Museum of London, National Portrait Gallery, The National Archives, London Metropolitan Archives, and London Fire Brigade Museum. It’s cool. Thanks to ON101 for building the game and designing the site, and our own Mariruth Leftwich for shepherding the whole thing. Also via Mariruth comes a game to complement our Digging Up the Romans learning resource.
• At last we have sort of launched “The Database of 19th Century Photographers and Allied Trades in London: 1841-1901“. This is the electronic representation of the amazing work done by David Webb in cataloguing thousands of people in that industry in Victorian times. I built the database, hmm, several years ago for another partnership we’re in, but it was never launched for reasons that even now seem obscure. Anyway, it’s now live and, though it needs an overhaul even now, it’s great to think it may at last start being useful. I want to open the data up for mash-ups….when I get some time.
• The Sainsbury Archive, a fantastic resource at Museum in Docklands, has a new site through the efforts of archivist Clare Wood
• I can’t tell you about the work I’ve been doing on republishing an archaeological reference text, because it’s not ready yet. If you can find the test URL, well, you’re very sneaky.
• Any day now we’ll see the launch of the “Family Favourites” pages on the Museum in Docklands website. Go and seek it out, there’s a fun game and an introduction to various highlights of the galleries there.
• It’s just a promo site until the exhibition itself happens, but have a look at the Jack the Ripper pages. That’s gonna be well worth a visit – get yourself some tickets!
• Geek stuff: some time ago I made a machine-friendly interface to look at the database of publications our archaeology service (MoLAS) produces. Whilst working towards the launch of www.museumoflondonarchaeology.org.uk I decided I wanted to change the architecture of the publications application, which for one thing makes it easy to drop little nuggets of info about our publications around the site, all fed from a database. The solution I went for also works for machine access by anyone, and I hope it will be just a start: we’d like to make our events available like this, and in time our collections. For the record, it’s basically REST/XML, drop us a line if you want to use it (though I imagine that it will be the collections and events that will have wider appeal – note that events already have an RSS feed, which is used on sites like docklands.co.uk).
• And check out our events programme, I’ve just uploaded the May to August programme.

Now, what have I forgotten to mention?

Of course, there’s more in the pipeline, keep your eyes on all our sites!

Hi. My name is Jeremy and I’m a museum web developer. There, I’ve said it. I’m a keyboard-jockey burdened (or as I see it blessed) by at least two sorts of geekdom: a late-born pleasure in ‘pooters; and a long-standing love of museums, and of the special sort of residue of our world that flocculates there (especially, it must be said, “real” things).

Seven-odd years ago I thought about setting up a museum-orientated web development company, to be called MuseioNet or some such nonsense. Thankfully it never got much beyond a cheesy name, because now I’m starting at least to get an idea of what I don’t know about the subject of building web-based resources for museums. I would have crashed and burned horribly if I’d tried to go it alone back then. I’ve been at the Museum of London about 6 years now, learning on the job. That’s pretty much inevitable anywhere, I suppose, and certainly in technology it’s a basic requirement owing to the speed of change – no matter how much you are on top of your chosen specialism today, tomorrow you’ll be slipping backwards.

Mia has already talked about her job, and although hers is more database-y and mine more webby, our roles have a fair degree of overlap so I’m not going to say much about what we do in a general sense; I want to talk instead about some current projects.

First thing to say is that roughly half of my time is spent on project-related work. Right now I’m really just wrapping up some odds and ends and catching up with some of the day-to-day stuff that’s piled up – bug fixes, data extractions, style-sheet changes. The odds and ends include a map interface for the London Sugar and Slavery website, which gives another way of exploring some of people and events that feature in the gallery of the same name. The map can be found in the gallery too. Things have been somewhat held up by our attempts to make the interface simpler and more intuitive for users, which often makes things dramatically more complex behind the scenes. I don’t know how many more
such applications we will build: we use ESRI products in-house, and their ArcIMS product powers the LSS map (and this one), but the power and flexibility of free mapping applications out there (Google and Yahoo! are amongst the most prominent) make them increasingly attractive. It would be a bit of a learning curve to learn to do all the things we want to do with these but ArcIMS is pretty complex too. We’ve already used Google Maps here and Yahoo! Maps to show our location map in context.

Another project that I dearly hope will soon be wrapped up is a very cool tool for creating quizzes and presentations, primarily for use within the context of our Learning Online site. The tool is complex and there have been problems with its development and implementation but you can see examples of what it has been used to create in the Black History section of that site. Teachers can use these interactives in a classroom situation on interactive whiteboards or regular desktop computers. The application is being developed by a Brighton company and my role has been as an advisor and in integrating it technically with our systems, as well as testing the darned thing when a fix is applied.

Mariruth Leftwich, who is overseeing the latter project, is also responsible for the recently launched poster maker, built by e-bloc to Mariruth’s brief. We can load up a bunch of images on a theme and visitors can put together a poster with them, print or submit it and finally see it in a gallery. It’s pretty cool. Again, my role was as advisor and in ensuring that it would work with our core systems and that we’d be able to live with it long-term without needing too much support. Mariruth is leading on another project I’m advising on too, which is a site for key Stage 1 kids about the Great Fire of London. This is a partnership with several other London organisations, which will fill a gaping hole of decent online resources on that subject for that age group.

The question of long-term sustainability is a key one to me, and has become so in large part because of another “project” on which I am working, namely my PhD on sustaining digital resources in museums. The museum gives me a great deal of support in this, and hopefully I am starting to return something to them as I develop as a practitioner. It’s not just me, I think that we’re all thinking a little more explicitly about the question of longevity now, bringing to the surface something that was always at least in the back of our minds. There’s a whole host of things going on in the MoL Group that tie into the question of digital sustainability: the projects I’ve mentioned and many others (not least Mia’s social software, including this blog); a review of records management; the evolving plans for IT in the Capital City Galleries that will open a couple of years hence.

Well, I’ve gone on enough for now. I should have said less about maps and more about Capital City but this is a week late already and I’d better get it online. It’ll wait till next time. Bye.