About Me

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Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger

Monday, December 18, 2006

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Stuff I've done lately (that's not dull as...)

OK starting with the most recent coz it's fresh in my head:

  • Got Google Analytics going on the CMS sites. It isn't included if you're in an authoring mode. Still have to do all the old legacy stuff AND Learning Online.
  • Embedded hCalendar data in the event details pages. Resolved the multi-occurrence event issue by just duplicating lots of data but it's no biggie. The main test for me is getting it working with Tails and it does.
  • Got the Google Calendar button working on these, too. The reason I never finished this before was issues with formatting time, but a coming at it with a fresh eye I nailed that one in the XSLT.
  • Learning Online CMS site is live. Pretty trauma-free, actually, despite the update to both .Net 2.0 and CMS2002 SP2 (that's the trickier one). Actually neither should be that fiddly but stuff can go wrong. Thankfully it didn't. Most time taken hooking up bits of the old site and trying to integrate it all nicely.
  • Upload of events data now handled through DTS (like the collections data I recently did this for, it happens in two stages: one pushing data to the web server and the other pulling this data over to the DB server, since the latter cannot be accessed directly for security reasons)

Monday, December 04, 2006

V&A images go free, sort of

There's a fair amount of chat about this story at the moment:

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=525

It would be interesting to see what our picture library/licensing people
thought about it. Remarks about the viability of making cash from
digitised assets generally seem to be along the lines of "don't aim to
make money from this, you'll be lucky to break even, so do it for other
reasons". Not that we can't make money, but perhaps we should be putting
more of our emphasis on the "dissemination of culture" part of our
mission than on the "supporting our financial stability" part, since at
least we might succeed in the former.