Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops

(or put your content where the users are, not where you are)

Alastair Dunning, @alastairdunningJISC Programme Manager

Presentation to JISC Content Advisory Group, 25th October 2011

boutiques may be lovely and give you

more control, but they can be out of

the way, and less people visit them

shopping malls – not so nice.

But a lot, a lot more people visit them

and you can still have your shop there

for digital content projects, we can’t

rely simply on building our own

boutiques

we need to put our content in the

shopping malls everyone visits.what are they?

obviously

Every content project must must must get their metadata / webpages on to Google. JSTOR c.20% (?) growth when full text indexed by Google

How to do it: Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness

Flickr Commons now used by 56 major cultural institutions.

“View statistics on the first batch of image uploads exceeded the entire previous year of views of the same images on the Powerhouse [Museum] website within five weeks”

Over 40 organisations signed up to give content on Wikimedia Commons

Not just about uploading digital objects. Derby Museum and Art Gallery worked with Wikipedia for one month’s activities (The Wright Challenge, QRCodes) and over 1,250 articles related to the museum’s collections were added.

Within the educational / cultural heritage centre, there

are plenty of other significant shopping

malls

Digital Public Space

but do shopping malls really have all the specialist

requirements that customers need?

sometimes shopping malls don’t have everything ...

but with digital content, how can we appeal to every single customer need ... ? E.g. of• undergraduates• historians• design postgraduates • interested public(s)• archaeologists • and plenty more ...

we can’t.

but we can allow them to build their own specialist shops which contain our content

Search Results for ‘Wooden Door’

The Victoria and Albert API allows queries to be

run over their museum collection

The ‘Wall of Images’ is an independent search interface over the V and A collections.

Using APIs allows you to expose your content on the web, without having to build an interface. Others can build.

Locating London’s Past uses API technology to ‘mash-up’ data on early Modern London

Plague deaths in London on 1665, mapped on to John Roque’s map of London 1746. Locating London’s Past (launches December 2011)

we also need to remember the various ways people travel to

these boutiques, malls and specialist

shops

users don’t just travel to content by desktop PC, but

via smartphones, tablets, apps, ebooks ... (and also via

OERs, lectures, presentations, bibliographies,

...)

A documentary cartoon for the iPad, Operation Ajax is about US / Iranian history and incorporates digitised historical documents from the CIA

The British Library's iPhone App Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination delivers 58 of it digitised manuscripts

The University of Manchester is creating an ‘augmented reality’ app that gives users extra information when the smartphone is held next to the original special collections object (in this case copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy)

Faber & Faber’s iPad version of The Waste Land includes readings, performances, notes , and the original digitised manuscript

For universities and cultural heritage bodies

with digital content, putting our content elsewhere requires

practices, policies and technical infrastructure

• Ensuring content is harvestable by Google – and

that technical infrastructure is amenable to that

• Exposing content via clear, well-documented APIs

• Clear licensing conditions

starting with ...

But for the content to be properly reused and

redisplayed then staff are needed to constantly recurate

the content and create the links with the shopping malls,

specialists and transporters

This is an ongoing process that requires commitment

from an institution, and also skills in communications,

licensing and business planning, amongst other

things

But if we want our content to travel in different ways and

users to visit own our boutiques, but also others’

shopping malls and specialist shops, such strategies are

essential to implement

... or else ...

References

Paris boutiques 19,11,08 011 - www.flickr.com/photos/aparis/3047260751/Bondi Junction Shopping Mall - http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliebrewer/67838081Signs.ArtsDistrict.Hyattsville.MD.12apr06 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/perspective/280434807The Psychic Piglet - http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicecupoftea/3048662972/Specialist Shop (Spank the Monkey) -http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonf/3485449181Specialist tobacconist (The Black Swan Shoppe) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/phillip/3323236821/Glasgow Tube - http://www.flickr.com/photos/julio_/26051929/Bicycle - http://www.flickr.com/photos/paukrus/4093835537/Bus - http://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=59564&sos=530 Years On (Car) - http://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=113826&sos=10Nostalgia's not what it used to be - http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcemarc/3556778601