The working life of Museum of London

I started volunteering at LAARC back in 2003, was employed here in 2004 and have been here ever since. On a day to day basis I get to handle some of the world’s best objects. But forget all them at this time of year, as there’s one annual object that get’s me more excited than any other – the LAARC Gingerbread house!

The history of Gingerbread seems to go back over 500 years with Germanic/Swedish origins, arriving in Britain in the 1500’s and being widespread by the 1700’s. But I’m not here to write about the history of Gingerbread, but instead the Archaeological Archive’s tradition of making a Gingerbread House each Christmas.

Back in 2003, LAARC had a full time conservator, Jannicke who came from Norway. It was she who first introduced the Gingerbread house to the archive. Keeping with Scandinavian tradition, the house was decorated for Christmas and sat proudly as the centre piece at our Christmas party. Decorated with an abundance of sugary sweets, bonded together with icing sugar, it’s a dentist’s worst nightmare, but looks a dream. Its true moment of glory however, is when it gets smashed, revealing even more sweets and chocolates inside.

Ever since then, despite Jannicke leaving in 2005, we’ve kept up the tradition of decorating a house each year and along the way have watched it evolve into one of the highlights of each Christmas party.

The smashing of the house is now preceded by two events; the decorating and the competition to determine who gets to smash it. The decorating gets done by LAARC staff in a creative morning session, where we let our artistic skills flow. The competition’s vary and have previously included a Christmas caption competition, a Christmas catapult competition and a Christmas song quiz. This year, we were very lucky to have Jannicke join us at our party and as our guest of honour, she along with her 1 year old daughter and volunteer Chris (he volunteered the most this year)  got to be the smashers.

We may not be as grand as the recent Obama Gingerbread WhiteHouse, but it’s a nice little tradition we have and long may it continue!

In my previous blog article – Archaeology and the Digital World, I mentioned that archaeology often generates a wealth of digital records in addition to the traditional paper records you would expect to find in an archaeological archive such as context sheets, site notes and plans and sections.

More archaeologists than ever are using digital technologies to record on site. The most obvious example of this is the use of digital cameras, particularly during standing building recording investigations. As a result, we are finding that archives often now contain a significant proportion of ‘born-digital’ records, for which there is no paper equivalent. 

Despite significant advances in the field of digital preservation over the past 10 years, we still request that depositors provide selected key records in both digital and paper format. Our revised Standards for Deposition provide further detail about these requirements. We recognise however that this may need to change, even as soon as the next 12-18 months. 

One issue we are currently exploring here at the LAARC is whether or not to permit archaeological site plans to be provided in digital format only. Depositors are currently required to provide a hard copy plot of any site plans in addition to the digital version(s), which are generally produced in AutoCAD or ArcGIS software programmes. However, with the development of free software readers for AutoCAD DWG/ DXF files and ArcGIS shape files, and the ability to produce static versions of site plans in PDF or TIF format for researchers who simply want to see where a site is located (as opposed to undertaking more detailed site location analyses), is this really necessary?

We would be very interested to know your thoughts on this issue, and would welcome any comments. Do you think it is time to embrace digital only, or is it still too soon to forgo hard copy site plans altogether? What would you prefer to use if undertaking archaeological research at the LAARC?

So a few weeks ago we decided to sign up Museum of London on Twitter, feeling a bit sceptical about how many people would really be interested in finding out about us and following our tweets. I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised at the number of people who have decided to ‘follow’ us within such a short period of time.

So far our tweets have been about current and upcoming events taking place at our museums which we think may be of interest to our visitors, with a few general comments thrown in for added benefit.

But is this really what you want? What would you like as to tweet about?

You can find us on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/museumoflondon

Feel free to send your comments and suggestions either here on the blog, via email to webmanager@museumoflondon.org.uk, or off course, by tweeting on Twitter, adding the tag #museumoflondon to your comments so that we can follow what you are saying about the Museum of London.

Don’t forget we are also on Facebook!

• Museum of London Facebook fan page:
  www.facebook.com/pages/Museum-of-London/27560776046?ref=ts
• Museum of London Facebook ‘late’ page:
  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7856761651
• Museum of London Docklands Facebook ‘late’ page:
  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20481470787

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.

Some of you may remember from my last blog that I mentioned that the Museum of London websites were changing inline with our rebranding to bring together our  venues and values, with new names and logos. We have now completed phase one of redesigning and moving around content on our websites. You can check out our striking new logos and our redesigned websites at:

• www.museumoflondon.org.uk
• www.museumoflondon.org.uk/docklands
• www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archaeology

In phase two and three, we will be auditing all our websites, holding audience evaluations to find out what our visitors think, and planning and implementing the migration of all our websites into one single site. This will involve analysis of our current website structures and planning the future architecture and redesigning of all the templates within our websites, including our microsites.

We would love to find out what you think of the websites and how it might develop in the future. So tell us what you think of the sites and the new ‘tabs’ that combine all our three venues together by sending me your comments to: webmanager@museumoflondon.org.uk.

Please note that we are aware some things may not display properly or some links may be broken, but please bear with us while we go through this transition period.

Thank you for all your continued support.

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.

“There is a medieval mystery to solve, so let’s start digging.” So began the new BBC archaeological drama Bonekickers. Part Indiana Jones, part Da Vinci Code with a hint of Time Team, the programme is set in the style of most modern forensic crime series complete with sinister music and dark lighting.

If you missed it, the first episode this week portrayed a group of maverick archaeologists from the University of Wessex where “the excavation of 14th century medieval soldiers alongside Saracen coinage in Somerset leads to the hunt for the True Cross”. The show featured a fundamentalist Christian property developer with sword-wielding accomplices, scenes of faith healing, a beheading, and a dramatic conclusion that saw the team abseiling into a subterranean temple – and a fiery inferno that resulted in the destruction of perhaps one of the most significant finds discovered in the UK!!

So how does this compare to real life in an archaeological unit?

Real life archaeology is perhaps not fast paced enough to be compatible with the fictional world of television. We wait for developers and funding bodies to agree budgets, spend time agreeing sampling strategies, and await the results of radiocarbon dates sent to far-off laboratories rather than churning them straight out of a PC. We use our “archaeological imaginations” for the long drawn-out analyses of a site over time rather than for jumping to instant conclusions, a reality that may deter even the most detail-hungry script writer.

It was claimed at one point that “there is always something down there.” Having spent numerous occasions stood next to a machine digging holes only to find nothing, I can assure you that this is not always true. The next time I encounter a cavernous void, I shall remember to refrain from breaking out the mountaineering gear and lowering myself by rope into the abyss. It’s not unheard of to have random people walk across site, oblivious to signs warning of deep trenches, only to ask if treasure has been found. But the closest I have come to a fiery ending was when a machine driver, perhaps a little heavy-handed, decided to dig a little too close to a gas service.

As our heroes pieced together the evidence, ripping artefacts from the trench without a context sheet in sight and in immaculate attire without a hard hat or hi-vis jacket to be seen, I wondered if any of them were aware of the budget code or had filled out this week’s time sheet. The large expensive flat owned by one of the team, and the swanky laboratory, seemed a little far fetched but I look forward to brandishing my museum ID card in an authoritative FBI-style fashion to see what privileges it brings me.

The final scenes produced the declaration “please, please, for the love of Jehovah, may we go to the pub?” and with that came perhaps the most accurate portrayal of the archaeologist.

I’m really excited to be able to tell you about a new project that’s recently gone live – ‘Podcasts from the past‘. It’s a series of ten audio descriptions of objects in the London before London and Medieval galleries at the Museum of London.

You can find Podcasts from the Past on iTunes with this link (or search for “podcasts from the past” or for artist “museum of london”), or point your browser at the RSS feed. You can also find out more about the individual podcasts and download the files directly at Podcasts from the past.
This project is part of the Museum’s Community & Audience Development Inclusion programme, and is managed by Inclusion Officer Lucie Fitton. I’ll let Lucie, our Inclusion Officer, introduce it in her own words:

Here at the Museum of London we wanted to do two things through this projects. One, make a step towards providing more resources for our visually impaired visitors (existing and potential). Two, by working with a group of real Londoners (by that we mean normal people living in this city, and not museum staff or specialists) to create them, we would be offering an interpretation of the collections that would be relevant and interesting to more people. Yes, these podcasts aim to describe museum objects to people who may not be able to see them clearly, but by opening your ears everyone can understand London’s story in a new way.

It was a huge task for anyone, let alone a group of people who hadn’t met, hadn’t visited the Museum before, hadn’t created audio description and hadn’t used recording and editing technology. The 10 podcasts were created in eight weeks, with just one day of workshop time each week.

Luckily we had some fantastic help from the experts. A couple of our curators showed the group around the galleries and provided invaluable advice about the objects. We then had training with Vocaleyes who showed us the basics of describing for visually impaired people. We also got the chance to meet Kirin, who is visually impaired and helped dispel myths around what it is like. Once the scripts were written we then worked with podcast producers from SoundDelivery to record and edit the final podcast. It was lots of hard work, but great fun.

The seven participants of this project come from a wide variety of backgrounds and had many skills and talents to add to this project. We hope they walk away with many more. Thanks to Charles Clark, Ivan Bello, James Kelly, Keith Allen, Liam McAtamney, Simon Allen and Warren Thompson. Also a big thank you to Tony and Kirin from Vocaleyes, and Jude, Mark and Lee from SoundDelivery.

Lucie’s also previously written about her role as Inclusion Officer and Community projects at the Museum of London. You can also see photos from the podcast workshops, including photos of the objects, on our Flickr page.

I think it’s a lovely way to find out more about some objects you can visit in our galleries, so check them out and let us know what you think.

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!

Thanks to the wonders of acronyms, you can use something called ‘RSS’ to subscribe to a ‘feed’ from a blog and be notified when new posts are added. It’s much easier than remembering to check back for new posts, and you can often read the posts directly in your RSS application. It makes reading your favourite blogs as easy as reading email.

I use a website called bloglines so I can see my subscriptions from anywhere in the world, but you can also use software installed on your computer. If you use Gmail, MSN or Yahoo! for your email, you can add RSS feeds to your homepage on each site.

A bit confusing? This BBC article, News feeds from the BBC, explains what RSS feeds are and how you can get started.

Once you’ve got the hang of that, you could subscribe to our Events feed to find out when new events are added; or to some of our Flickr profiles, so you could see new photos as they’re uploaded.

If you prefer a direct link, try: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuseumOfLondon
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuseumofLondon/RomanGlass
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=14132510@N04?=en-us&format=atom