Inside the Museum of London

First of all, thank you very much for responding to the survey call

It is hard to overestimate the importance of what the users of LAARC web site really think. On a personal note, I was thrilled to learn that LAARC catalogue users exist! This means that the work that has been put in this web resource and will be put into it, is not attested to by some stillborn enterprise.

Summarizing your comments several interesting points have been raised

• provide more kinds of filtered searches, e.g. “Roman pottery filtered by presence of a digital archive”
• provide more kinds of filtered searches, e.g. “Roman pottery filtered by presence of a digital archive”
• make more data on site archives available on-line (in addition to downloadable zipped archive bundles)
• extend mapping and plotting of geographical data about sites
• semantic search, e.g. ‘monastery’ or ‘latrine’ rather then ‘THE07′

It would be good to collect more use cases on these points, e.g. examples of other possible filtered searches, examples of archive data that could be brought on-line etc. Perhaps, you could point us to the links to other web resources containing desirable features that could also be implemented within LAARC catalogue?

A few comments about the current state of LAARC on-line catalogue

The map images to accompany site records returned to the live site in early August, and data updates were fixed back in July. New data was pumped onto the live site weekly up until 3 weeks ago when the web server was brought down by various attacks. Although the server is now running again some problems remain and we cannot yet perform data uploads, so there have been no updates to the data visible on the web site since then. However, those of you who visit Mortimer Wheeler House have access to the MoL internal version of the LAARC web application (no maps though).

LAARC staff work very hard to prepare digital archives, the web team makes them available to the web users but is not involved in the actual preparation of the digital archives for distribution.

Our vision for LAARC catalogue

Our ultimate ambition is to make LAARC catalogue a kind of data aggregator that is able to mash up data from the Museum’s Mimsy XG collections database with other information resources, and at the same time expose LAARC data in the formats (mostly xml, but also plain text, csv and other formats) that will allow other web services use it and mash it up with their resources. That is, to integrate LAARC catalogue data with the wider cultural information grid.

Of course, we are well aware that even partially achieving these goals means a good year’s worth of work, and given our very limited web development resources may be even longer. The prototype that lays out the architecture should be ready in November and will be linked to from the current LAARC on-line catalogue. There won’t be much visual effect as most of the effort at this stage has gone into engineering the invisible parts of the software that lay the foundations for the diverse presentation formats. And as with all software development the first release (a so called “alpha” release) will be intended for testing bugs until the next version comes out, which will have more functionality and more features. And so it will go in an iterative way (we hope).

The current LAARC catalogue site will remain available online, but no more new features will be put into the existing site. This is because the technology it uses limits its extensibility. Instead the development effort will focus on the new version of LAARC catalogue for which we are in the process of designing a flexible and extendable architecture.

There is also a risk that LAARC catalogue development may be put on hold temporarily as the need for other development will shift the priorities. Nevertheless, we are determined to continue doing work on LAARC catalogue even though the progress may not be as speedy as we would like it to be.
We also think that this blog can be an effective means for updating the users on the progress of the project development, so watch this space if you are interested. You can even add it as an RSS feed to your RSS reader.
And naturally, it will be fantastic if we could engage you in a continuing dialogue in order to build a bank of ideas of what LAARC catalogue should be.

Julia Fernee, Museum of London Web Development