Day Two – Lunchtime Showcases

It isn’t all that easy to cover the very quick showcases done at lunchtime and breakfast. You may have noticed that there isn’t anything on those given on the first day, including ours (i.e from the Australian War Memorial).

There were two on the final day that I really must mention.

Firstly, Nick Thieberger from the University of Melbourne talked about the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Resources in Endangered Cultures PARADISEC. They’ve achieved some pretty substantial sound and other format digitisation with important ethnographic field recordings from the 1950s and beyond. It is research material, but also cultural and historical by nature, and as he said, they’ve done it because they could. They’ve not been constrained by the same strictures we operate within in our institutions.

The real gem in the showcase presentations for me and many other delegates was the one done by Seb Chan the manager of web development from the Powerhouse Museum and Dr Fiona Cameron from the University of Western Sydney. They took us through the recently launched Powerhouse OPAC 2.0 that truly engages visitors with the features we really should all be using from Web 2.0 if we are serious about interactivity: folksonomies, cloud tags; RSS; user recommendations (like Amazon); and the users are able to use and suggest their own key words to search and discover items. IT IS ALL FULLY OPEN TO GOOGLE! They’ve already experienced fantastic and meaningful use from this openness and acceptance of user input.

They also took us through Design Hub – an ARC project that involved the Powerhouse, and the UTS and UWS. It is like an online magazine that connects museum collections with news, interviews, opinions and ideas across the breadth of design.

My comment: Digitisation is only the start of the process. The Powerhouse have now inspired all of us with these exciting presentation and use concepts that use the unique and full features of the web. A new ‘benchmark’ is born (for those of you interested in that awful process). You could actually hear and feel the amazement and excitement in the room.